America Now Has 3,849 Indoor Golf Venues — And That Number Is Moving Fast

Every few months, someone in the golf industry declares that indoor golf is “exploding.” They say it with the same breathless energy they use for every trend — pickleball, bourbon, the 15th iteration of the Air Jordan. It’s the kind of thing you hear at industry conferences and nod along to without really knowing if it’s true.

Now we have actual numbers.

On July 13, GolfSim.co — a free directory and data platform run by Steven Shen — dropped the inaugural State of Indoor Golf in America report. It’s the first time anyone has taken a real, data-backed swing at answering the question: how big is indoor golf, actually?

The answer is 3,849 venues across all 50 states and 838 markets. And the story behind that number tells you everything you need to know about where this industry is going.

This Is Not a Franchise Story

The conventional narrative around indoor golf goes something like this: Big chains are gobbling up market share. Five Iron Golf is opening in every major city. The Back Nine is franchising like crazy. X-Golf is everywhere. It’s the Topgolf model applied to simulators.

That narrative is not wrong. But it’s not the whole story either.

The report found that 82.7% of America’s indoor golf venues have no franchise affiliation. That’s 3,184 independent operations versus 665 chain-affiliated locations. The largest chains — The Back Nine Golf (196 locations), GOLFTEC (132), and X-Golf (102) — are growing fast, but they’re still the tail on a very long dog.

This matters because it changes how you think about the market. The franchise brands get the headlines. They get the press releases. But the real story is happening in strip malls and repurposed retail spaces across middle America, where someone with a passion for golf and a few hundred thousand dollars is opening a four-bay simulator studio.

Steven Shen, who built the report, summed it up better than I could: “Indoor golf is scaling the way coffee shops did, one small operator at a time.”

The $40 Hour

The national median price for an hour in a simulator bay is $40. That number comes from 794 venues that publish their hourly rate publicly, and it passes the sniff test for anyone who’s actually been to a sim facility recently.

But the range is wild.

The middle 50% of venues charge between $25 and $55 per hour. That’s a reasonable spread — you’d expect a TrackMan-equipped facility in Manhattan to cost more than a Garmin R10 setup in rural Ohio. But then there’s the long tail: 44 venues that charge $150 or more per hour. That pulls the national average up to $51, but the median tells you what most people are actually paying.

Most expensive states:

• South Carolina: $90/hr (median)
• Nevada: $63/hr
• Oklahoma: $58/hr

Least expensive:

• Maryland and Vermont: $25/hr (tie)

Most expensive metro:

• Henderson, Nevada: $87/hr median

South Carolina being the most expensive state is the kind of data point that makes you go “huh.” My theory? The Myrtle Beach corridor is a golf tourism destination, and indoor simulators there are charging what the market will bear from vacationers who want to keep swinging when the sun goes down. I don’t have evidence for that. It’s a hunch. But it’s the kind of hunch the data makes you want to test.

The Tech Stack: TrackMan’s Kingdom

If you’re building an indoor golf facility and wondering what technology to buy, the market has already spoken.

TrackMan appears in 63.2% of venues that disclose their simulator technology. That’s not close. Full Swing sits at 17.6%, which makes sense given its commercial footprint and the TGL halo effect. Everything else is in the low single digits.

This is interesting because it contradicts what the home market looks like. In the residential space, Uneekor, Foresight, SkyTrak, and Garmin are the names you hear most. But commercial operators overwhelmingly choose TrackMan. The reasons aren’t mysterious: TrackMan has the longest track record in coaching and fitting, the data is trusted by tour players, and the commercial support infrastructure is mature.

If you’re opening a facility and wondering what customers expect to see, the answer is TrackMan. Period.

Small Boxes

The typical indoor golf venue is smaller than you think.

Among the 255 venues that publicly list their bay count, the average is 5.9 bays. The median is just 4. That’s not a big-box entertainment destination. That’s a boutique studio.

This is important because it changes the economics model. Four bays at $40/hour with 50% utilization is about $7,000 a week in gross revenue. That’s not a fortune, but it pencils out differently in a low-rent strip mall than it does in a downtown entertainment district. The small-bay model is capital-light, flexible, and — critically — replicable. You can open one, prove the concept, and open another.

This is exactly how The Back Nine Golf has gotten to 196 locations. They’re not building palaces. They’re building 3,000-square-foot studios with four TrackMan bays, 24/7 keycard access, and a sensible business model.

By the Numbers

Let me just dump the rest of the notable data points because they’re worth having in one place:

• Total venues: 3,849 across all 50 states and 838 markets
• Average hourly rate: $51 (pulled up by $150+ outliers)
• Median hourly rate: $40
• Independent vs. franchise: 82.7% / 17.3%
• Average bays per venue: 5.9 (median: 4)
• Dominant technology: TrackMan (63.2%), Full Swing (17.6%)
• Largest chains: The Back Nine (196), GOLFTEC (132), X-Golf (102)
• Densest market: Katy, Texas (22.76 venues per 100K residents)
• Median household income in sim markets: $76,953
• Bachelor’s degree attainment in sim markets: 34.3%
• Franchise investment range: $125K (GOLFTEC) to $4.33M (Five Iron Golf)

What This Tells Us

The indoor golf industry is real. It’s not a fad, it’s not a niche, and it’s not just a rich-guy hobby. Three thousand eight hundred forty-nine venues is a real industry. For comparison, that’s more locations than Subway has in California. It’s roughly the same footprint as the entire U.S. craft brewing industry had in 2015, right before that market went vertical.

But the shape of the industry matters. The franchise-versus-independent split tells you this is still an early-stage market where individual operators are making bets. The pricing data tells you it’s accessible to normal people, not just expense-account golfers. The technology data tells you TrackMan has a commercial moat that’s going to be hard to cross.

The most interesting question to me is: what happens next? If indoor golf follows the coffee shop model — and the data strongly suggests it is — then we’re in the expansion phase right now. There are markets that could support simulators that don’t have them yet. There are pricing models that haven’t been tested. There are technology combinations (TrackMan hardware + GSPro software, for example) that commercial operators haven’t fully figured out.

The report doesn’t answer those questions. But it gives us a foundation to ask them from. That’s more than we had yesterday.

Where to Find the Full Data

All three reports are free to access at golfsim.co/research:

• State of Indoor Golf in America
• Golf Simulator Pricing — Hourly Rates by State
• Indoor Golf Franchise Landscape

Steven Shen and the GolfSim.co team have done the industry a real service here. If you’re thinking about opening a facility, investing in one, or just wondering whether the indoor golf hype is real, start with this data. It’s the closest thing we have to a ground truth.

And if you’re an independent operator running a four-bay TrackMan facility in a strip mall somewhere: you’re not the exception. You’re the rule. You’re what 82.7% of this industry looks like. Keep going.