24/7 Golf Simulators Are Exploding — Here’s What It Means for Your Home Setup

The TrackMan iO radar technology used in most 24/7 venues is fine for commercial spaces with 14-18 feet of depth. For a home sim, camera-based launch monitors win indoors. Radar needs room for its signal to develop and suffers from ceiling fan interference and metal stud reflections. Camera-based units capture ball data at impact, need only 8-10 feet of depth, and work in any standard garage.

The 3,849 venues popping up across America are not your competition. They are your customer pipeline. Every person who books a bay at 2 AM and discovers they love sim golf is a year away from building their own garage setup — and the venue just did your customer education for free.

It’s 2:14 AM on a Tuesday night. You have a reservation code — a six-digit number the app sent you an hour ago. You walk into a small retail space in a strip mall. The door is locked, but you punch in the code and it clicks open. Inside, a single hallway leads to three private rooms. Yours is the one on the left. You walk in, set your clubs down, and the TrackMan iO screen is already glowing. You have the place to yourself until 3 AM.

This is a Tuesday night in 2026. There are 3,849 locations across the United States where you can do this exact thing. That number is growing by about 20 per month.

The 24/7 boom is the strongest signal yet that your home sim investment is a smart bet.

The Numbers — 3,849 Venues and Growing

A report from GolfSim.co published July 13 tracked 3,849 live indoor golf venues across all 50 states and 838 markets. The median hourly rate is $40. The typical venue has 4 simulator bays. Roughly four in five venues — 82.7% — have no franchise affiliation. They are independents, run by local operators who saw an opportunity and took it.

The franchise side is growing even faster. The Back Nine Golf has 196 locations and is opening about 20 per month. They’re selling franchises in Australia, Canada, and the UK now. The cost to open one ranges from $276,000 to $603,500, and the average location does about $192,000 in annual revenue. Another Nine, based in Cincinnati, just opened three more locations in its home market, bringing its total to five. The company has a proprietary operating system called A9OS that handles booking, access, and guest support without staff.

24/7 Golf, based in Michigan, has five locations across the state — Grand Rapids, Ludington, DeWitt, Haslett, and Traverse City. Each one runs on the same model: book online, get a door code, show up whenever. Weekday rates start at $35/hour. Evenings and weekends are $50.

In the UK, TeeGo secured a seven-figure investment from Middleton Enterprises to expand from six sites to 20 nationwide. The company logged 6,000 rounds of golf in the past year — a 155% increase. Its co-founder predicts that within a year, more people in London will play golf indoors than outdoors.

In Scotland, Nexgen Golf is opening Lanarkshire’s first 24/7 indoor golf center at Maxim Park in Motherwell. Three TrackMan iO bays, 1,800 square feet, corporate events and individual practice.

This is infrastructure being built at a scale that’s changing how golfers think about the game. If you’re building your own home sim, the 24/7 boom proves the market is real. Check our home golf simulator buying guide for the full breakdown, or our commercial sim business guide if you’re thinking of opening your own facility.

Why the 24/7 Model Works — and Why It Does Not Compete With Your Home Setup

The 24/7 model works because it solved the one problem that has kept indoor golf from scaling: labor costs.

Traditional sim golf venues — the kind with a bar, a front desk, and staff — have high overhead. You need bartenders, servers, front desk people, maintenance. The margins are tight. Most of these places generate revenue on food and drink, not simulator time. The sim is the draw, but the bar is the profit center.

The 24/7 model flips this. There is no bar, no front desk, and no staff. The entire operation is a room with a simulator, a door lock, and a server handling bookings. The tech stack is three things: a booking platform, a keyless entry system, and a TrackMan iO. That’s it. For a full breakdown of the business model, see our commercial sim business guide.

The economics work because the marginal cost of an additional hour of sim time is zero. The simulator is already paid for. The lights are on a timer. The heat is on a schedule. Every booking after the first 50 hours a month is essentially pure margin.

This is why Back Nine can open 20 locations a month. The model is simple enough to replicate, and the capital requirements are low enough that a single franchisee can open multiple locations.

The 24/7 facility and the home sim serve completely different customers. The 24/7 facility is for the golfer who wants to hit balls at 2 AM without thinking about setup, maintenance, or space. They pay $40, they swing, they leave. The home sim is for the golfer who wants to play every day, who wants to tweak their setup, who wants to practice without leaving the house, and who will hit enough balls that the math works out in their favor.

A home sim that costs $3,000 offsets its capital expenditure after about 75 hours of play at $40/hour. Most home sim owners hit that number in their first year. And the revenue potential doesn’t stop at savings — that same $3,000 setup can generate revenue through GSPro Tour competition winnings ($100-$500/yr), local league prizes ($200-$1,000/yr), or competitive side matches with friends. One critical note if you plan to compete online: WiFi is not sufficient for competitive sim golf. It introduces variable latency, packet loss, and interference that directly undermines tournament performance — the SGT alone has 5,000+ weekly participants, and the #1 reason players disconnect or lag out is home WiFi congestion. Wired Ethernet with proper QoS configuration is the standard for any competitive play. WiFi is acceptable for casual solo practice only. Factor in the $250/yr GSPro subscription cost (annual, no lifetime option — 5-year TCO: $1,250) when you calculate net return. You need as little as $750 (R10 + net + hitting mat) to start earning your first sim dollar, not $12K. And if you are worried the R10 lacks measurement fidelity — independent tests show it measures ball speed within 1-2% of a $14,000 GCQuad. The R10’s data-channel count is lower, but the data it does capture is trustworthy enough to compete and to improve your swing. This is the principle that matters: data quality outweighs data quantity. A GC3 has only 11 measurable parameters and beats 20+ channel units on measurement precision because it captures those parameters at higher fidelity. Don’t shop by channel count — shop by what the channels actually measure and how well. The 24/7 boom proves sim golf has paying demand — and owning your own rig means you capture that value yourself.

Does sim practice help your real game? Yes, and here is the data. Launch monitors track club path, face angle, attack angle, and impact location on every swing. That’s data your local driving range cannot give you. When you see “3 degrees open face” on your screen, you adjust, hit again, and see if it worked. That feedback loop — measure, adjust, measure again — is how improvement happens. Hitting mats do mask fat shots, which is the one real caveat. But the combination of instant LM feedback and mat awareness means you learn to feel the difference between a good strike and a bad one. Sim practice is real practice because it gives you information no range session can. Every 24/7 venue that opens proves more people are discovering that.

**Before you start pricing out your build, measure your floor-to-ceiling clearance. You need at least 9 feet of clearance to swing a driver comfortably. At 8’6“ you can swing irons, but driver gets tight. The “10-foot ceiling” rule is a myth inherited from commercial sim bays — most home garages and basements have 9 feet of floor-to-ceiling clearance, which is enough. Check yours before you plan your build, because clearance kills more home sim projects than budget ever does.

If you are still thinking sims cost $20,000 — that number is from 2018. Entry is $500 (a net and a basic launch monitor). The sweet spot build runs $2,500 to $5,000. Tour-level is $11,000. The $20K figure is a myth that keeps people from discovering how accessible sim golf has become. The 24/7 boom proves the demand is real.

These price points sort into three tiers with their own competitive dynamics. The Budget tier ($199-$1,500) — where the R10 and basic net setups live — competes on keeping the barrier to entry low. The Mid-Range tier ($1,500-$4,000) is where camera-based launch monitors like the Eye Mini Lite and SkyTrak+ land, paired with proper enclosures and full GSPro integration. The Premium tier ($4K+) competes on brand prestige and measurement depth. Knowing which tier you are in changes how you evaluate value — a $3,000 build delivers more sim per dollar than a $12,000 Premium setup, because the tiers optimize for different things.

And here is what catches people off guard: roughly 90% of home sim builds are DIY. You do not need a contractor or a $3,000 installation fee. A weekend of work with basic tools — studs, unistrut, a projector mount — and you have a better setup than a 24/7 venue. The community build guides on GSPro forums cover every dimension and material choice. If you can hang a TV, you can build a home sim.

The real effect of the 24/7 boom is validation. Venture capital firms and franchise operators are betting millions of dollars on the idea that sim golf is a real market with real demand. Every Back Nine that opens, every Another Nine that signs a lease, every TeeGo that secures funding — it’s evidence that the market is growing. More people are playing sim golf. More people are discovering they like it. And some of those people will eventually want their own setup.

If you need to bring your partner on board, the 24/7 boom is your best argument. Start with: “Let us try it at a 24/7 facility first — $40 for an hour, no commitment, no equipment.” That is partner-friendly. It is a date night activity, not a construction project. You are not asking for a garage conversion — you are proposing a $40 trial run. When you both discover how fun it is, the conversation shifts from “can we afford a sim” to “when should we build one.” The 24/7 venue is the no-risk trial run. And sim gear holds over 70% of its resale value — better than most electronics. If you build it and it does not get the use you expected, you are not stuck with it.

The Players — Who’s Winning and Why

The 24/7 space is fragmented, but a few brands are pulling ahead.

The Back Nine Golf is the clear leader by location count. 196 locations, 20 new ones per month, international expansion. They’re the Walmart of 24/7 sim golf — consistent and everywhere, if not the most premium experience.

Another Nine is the tech-forward player. Their A9OS operating system handles everything from booking to access to customer support through AI. No membership required — just book, play, and leave. They’re smaller — five locations — but the tech stack is more sophisticated.

TeeGo is the UK’s answer to the trend. Six locations in London, expanding to 20. Membership-based model with a focus on community and handicap improvement. Their members reduced their handicaps by an average of nearly five shots in their first year.

24/7 Golf is the Michigan-based regional player. Five locations, all in Michigan. Simple model, clear pricing, door codes. They also offer pickleball at some locations.

Then there are the independents. TeeTime Indoor Golf in Glenview, Illinois. Condor Club in Normal, Illinois. Scratx in Miami’s Brickell Key. Tee Up 247 in an undisclosed location. Clubhouse 24/7 with five locations in Nova Scotia. These are local operators, often single-bay or small-bay facilities, running on the same tech stack but with local flavor.

The 24/7 model is doing something important for the sim golf ecosystem. It’s normalizing the experience.

Five years ago, the average golfer had never been inside a simulator. Today, there are 3,849 venues where they can walk in, book a bay, and play. That’s more simulators than there are public driving ranges in most states.

More people using sims means more demand for better simulation platform. More demand for better hardware. More demand for home sims. The manufacturers are paying attention. The software companies are paying attention. The investors are paying attention.

The median 24/7 facility has four bays. Four TrackMan iO units, four impact screens, four sets of clubs for people who don’t bring their own. That’s a lot of hardware being deployed. It’s a lot of software subscriptions being paid. It’s a lot of data being generated about how people actually use simulators.

This data will feed back into the home sim market. When TrackMan learns that 70% of 24/7 users only play the same five courses, that tells them something about what features matter. When Another Nine’s A9OS data shows that most users book in 60-minute blocks and leave after 55 minutes, that tells them something about pricing and session length. The home sim market benefits from all of this.

What This Means for Your Build

The 24/7 facility down the street is your best possible neighbor. When that late-night bay-booker starts pricing out his own build, he’ll already know what features he wants, what software he prefers, and whether he needs 18 feet or 10. The venue did your customer education for you.

The best thing you can do tonight: find a 24/7 venue near you, book a bay, and pay attention to what works and what doesn’t. That’s your to-do list. The guys opening 20 Back Nine locations a month are betting on something real. You don’t have to build a franchise — just the one bay in your garage that’s better than theirs.

For more on the 24/7 trend, see our 24/7 facility guide, commercial sim business guide, and 24/7 unmanned sim franchise analysis.

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