24/7 Golf Simulator Revolution: Unstaffed Facilities
What is a 24/7 golf simulator facility? A 24/7 golf simulator facility is an unmanned indoor golf venue that operates around the clock. Members book bays online, receive a PIN code, and access the facility through smart locks — no staff, no front desk, no set hours. The model eliminates labor costs and lets owners run multiple locations as a side business.
Here’s the number that stopped me: TrackMan predicts 80% of all golf rounds will be played indoors by 2028.
That’s not a typo. Eighty percent. Outdoors, we’re still at peak participation — 48.1 million golfers in the US in 2025, per the NGF. But the growth is off-course. Nineteen million of those 48 million only play off-course. And the infrastructure to serve them is being built right now, at a pace that’s hard to overstate.
The Back Nine Golf has 150 locations in various stages of development. They’re opening 20 per month. Twenty. Per month. Their franchisees operate these locations in about 30 minutes to 2 hours per day — checking security footage, restocking, handling maintenance. The rest of the time, the venue runs itself.
This is not normal. This is a structural shift in how golf is consumed, and it’s happening fast enough that most people haven’t noticed what’s actually different about this wave.
The Model, Explained From First Principles
A traditional indoor golf facility needs:
- A front desk staffed during operating hours
- A manager to schedule staff, handle payroll, deal with no-shows
- Someone to clean bays between sessions
- Someone to handle walk-in customers
- Enough revenue to cover all those labor costs plus rent plus sim financing
The unit economics are workable but tight. The NGF puts average construction cost per bay at $45,000, and that’s before you factor in leasehold improvements, furniture, signage, and the 3-6 month ramp before you hit breakeven. Most operators need at least 8-12 bays to make the math work.
The 24/7 unmanned model inverts almost every assumption.
No labor costs. The biggest operating expense in any service business is people. Eliminate that and your breakeven drops dramatically. The Golf Crypt franchise pitches its model as “manageable with 30 minutes to 2 hours daily.” Not weekly. Daily. You could run a Golf Crypt location while keeping your day job.
Smaller footprint. Back Nine locations are 2,000 to 4,000 square feet. That’s a fraction of what a Topgolf or even a Five Iron requires. Smaller space means cheaper rent, more location options, and the ability to cluster multiple locations in a single metro area.
Membership revenue that’s predictable. 24 Golf Club in Lynnwood, WA charges $169/month for individual 24/7 access. The Back Nine charges $200/month. That recurring revenue is the holy grail of any business — you know what you’re making before the month starts.
Higher utilization. Traditional facilities are busy 6 PM to 10 PM on weekdays and all day weekends. The rest of the time, the bays are empty and the staff is getting paid anyway. 24/7 facilities capture the 2 AM shift workers, the early morning range rats, the people who want to hit balls at midnight because they can’t sleep. That’s not a niche — that’s incremental revenue on infrastructure that’s already paid for.
The Players Building This Thing
There are at least five major networks operating right now, and more appear every week.
The Back Nine Golf is the 800-pound gorilla. 150 locations, opening 20/month, franchising internationally in Australia, Canada, and the UK. Their model is pure automation — no staff, small footprint, membership access. The franchise cost runs $276,000 to $603,000 depending on buildout. For a single-bay operation that can be run as a side gig, that’s a compelling ROI. Average monthly revenue per location reported in their 2025 FDD: $16,238.
GolfCave is building in the Northeast — New Jersey, Staten Island, White Plains. TrackMan bays, 24/7 access, and they’re franchising too. Their pitch is more premium than Back Nine — they lean into the “private cave” experience.
The Golf Crypt is the newest entrant and the most aggressive on the automation pitch. Their marketing claims “zero employee requirements.” They use TrackMan technology, pitch the $983 million market growing to $2.14 billion by 2032, and target franchisees who want a semi-passive investment.
Another Nine just opened in Cornelius, North Carolina — their seventh location nationally. $35/hour pay-per-play or $200/month for a Pro membership with 9 hours of play. Standard TrackMan bays, standard format. They started in Cincinnati and are expanding methodically.
Tempo Golf in Mississauga, Ontario is the Canadian entry, and it’s notable because they’re powered by GOLFJOY’s overhead simulators — the Rigel Lite with auto tee-up and intelligent putting platform. This is GOLFJOY’s first fully unattended North American installation, and it signals that the hardware providers are building for this model specifically.
24/7 Golf has five Michigan locations and a simpler pricing model: $35/hour off-peak, $50/hour peak. No membership required. Just book and show up.
And those are just the chains. The local independents are even harder to count. The NGF tracks at least 1,500 simulator businesses nationwide, and that number has nearly tripled since 2022.
What This Means for the Home Buyer
Here’s the tension I keep coming back to.
If you can get 24/7 access to a TrackMan-equipped facility for $169-200/month, why would you spend $2,500-8,500 on a home setup?
The honest answer: for some people, you shouldn’t. If your goal is just to swing a club indoors and the nearest 24/7 facility is 10 minutes from your house, a membership is cheaper than even the most budget home sim. No maintenance. No broken projectors. No explaining to your spouse why the garage is now a golf cave.
But here’s what a membership can’t do.
It can’t let you hit balls at 6 AM in your boxers. It can’t let you leave a session running while you grab a beer from your own fridge. It can’t give you the same kind of obsessive tuning and tweaking that a home setup rewards. The 24/7 facility is a gym membership. The home sim is a home gym. One is convenient and social. The other is yours.
The real effect of the 24/7 boom is making home sims a luxury upgrade rather than the only option. Three years ago, if you wanted indoor golf, you either built a sim or you drove to a Topgolf 45 minutes away. Today in any mid-sized city, you probably have a 24/7 facility within 15 minutes. The entry barrier for indoor golf has dropped to $169/month and a phone number to book a bay.
That’s good for the ecosystem. More people playing indoors means more demand for software development, more course licenses, more competition in hardware. The same flywheel that drove the home sim boom is now driving the commercial boom, and they reinforce each other.
The Absurd Part
A business model where you leave $45,000 worth of TrackMan equipment in an unlocked building, unsupervised, at 3 AM, and trust that paying customers will show up, enter their PIN, hit balls, and leave without stealing anything — that model is working.
The Golf O’Clock software platform, which powers many of these venues, reports that unmanned venues have lower complaint rates than staffed ones. The customer journey is self-directed, which apparently means fewer opportunities for things to go wrong. No confused front desk person. No wait to check in. You book, you get a PIN, you play, you leave. The transaction is frictionless because it’s entirely digital.
South Korea already figured this out. They have nearly 9,700 screen golf locations for a population a sixth the size of the US. Eighty-seven percent of Korean golfers prefer the indoor experience. More than 100 million rounds were played on Golfzon technology alone in 2024. The US is not inventing this model — it’s importing it, and the economics are even better here because real estate is cheaper and golf participation is higher.
The question nobody has answered yet: what happens when these 1,500 facilities become 5,000, and each one needs to fill its bays? The Back Nine alone is on pace for 500+ locations by end of 2027. Five Iron, GolfCave, X-Golf, and the independents are all scaling simultaneously. At some point, the market hits saturation for pure-play sim facilities. The survivors will be the ones with better software, better member experiences, or better real estate choices.
For now though, the boom is still in its early innings. The PGA Tour is running TGL. The Open Championship just finished with Toptracer activations at Birkdale. The sport is converging toward indoor formats faster than anyone predicted. And a guy in Cedar Rapids who works 9-5 can now own three TrackMan-equipped sim facilities that run themselves while he sleeps.
That’s the absurd part. It’s also the part that makes this not a trend but a permanent shift.