24/7 Golf Sim Franchise Gold Rush: Back Nine and Beyond
What is the 24/7 golf simulator franchise boom and why is it happening? A new wave of fully automated, unmanned golf simulator franchises is expanding faster than any segment in the indoor golf industry. Back Nine Golf has 150+ locations and opens 20 per month. Another Nine, The Golf Crypt, and Birdies Golf Lounge are all franchising the same basic model: private simulator suites, smart-lock access, no staff on site, and membership-based recurring revenue. The economics work because the marginal cost of staying open 24 hours is near zero, and the model lets owners run the business in 5-10 hours per week. For home sim buyers, every new franchise is another place to try before you buy — and another signal that the industry is scaling.
There are 3,849 indoor golf venues in the United States as of July 2026. That’s according to the first State of Indoor Golf report from GolfSim.co, which tracks this stuff so the rest of us don’t have to. The median price for an hour in a simulator bay is $40. Most of those venues — 82.7% — are independents, not franchises.
But the 17% that are franchises? They’re the ones growing at a pace that’s hard to wrap your head around.
Back Nine Golf has 150 locations. They’re opening 20 per month. Twenty. A month. That’s a new location every 36 hours. They’re selling franchises in Australia, Canada, and the UK now. The company started with one guy in Utah who had 100 people paying $200 a month for access to his sims, and now it’s a 190-unit franchise system that’s on track to be the McDonald’s of indoor golf.
This is the biggest structural change happening in the indoor golf industry right now. It’s not driven by a new launch monitor, a software update, or a TGL ratings number. The actual business model of how people access golf simulators is being rewritten, and most of the coverage treats it as a real estate story instead of a business model story.
Let me fix that.
The Three Models
The sim franchise space has split into three distinct approaches. They’re all selling the same basic thing — access to a simulator — but the economics, the target customer, and the growth trajectory are completely different. If you are evaluating which franchise model fits your goals, our golf simulator franchise cost guide breaks down the upfront investment and royalty structures.
The first model is Back Nine Golf. It is the volume play. Entry cost is $276K for a single bay.
This is the explosive growth segment. The model is simple: private suites, Trackman or comparable sim tech, smart locks, and a booking system that handles everything. No staff. No food. No beer. No nothing. Just a bay, a screen, and a door that unlocks when your booking starts.
Back Nine is the clear leader. They have the most locations, the fastest growth, and the best data. Their FDD shows average unit revenue of $192K-$239K per year. Investment to open runs $276K-$604K, and they charge an 8% royalty. The facilities are 2,000-4,000 square feet with 3-6 simulators. Most owners run the business as a side gig alongside a full-time job.
The key metric: $239K average revenue on a $500K-ish investment. That’s roughly a 2-year payback if you’re hitting 30% margins, which is aggressive but not impossible in a no-staff model. The rent is the killer. In a 2,000 square foot space at $25/sq ft, you’re paying $50K a year before you make a dollar. That’s 20% of revenue gone before you turn on the lights.
Another Nine is the smaller, premium competitor. Higher investment ($310K-$797K), higher reported revenue ($288K average), but the sample size is 2 locations. That’s not a data set. It’s a rounding error. The model uses Trackman iO, has private suites that fit 4-5 people, and is BYOB (which means no liquor license, no liability, no inventory). Owner time commitment is 5-10 hours per week.
The interesting thing about Another Nine is their proprietary operating system, A9OS. It handles booking, payments, membership management, door access, and remote monitoring from one platform. If they can actually deliver on that promise, it’s a real moat. The franchise software layer is where most of these systems fail — the booking platform is clunky, the payment integration breaks, the door locks don’t talk to the schedule. Another Nine is building their own stack instead of patching together third-party tools.
The Golf Crypt and Birdies Golf Lounge are playing in the same space. Golf Crypt positions itself as a premium option with Trackman, 24/7 access, and a claimed 30 minutes to 2 hours of daily management time. Birdies targets smaller markets with a 2,000 sq ft minimum and a similar unmanned model.
The Entertainment Venues (Five Iron, X-Golf)
This is a different business entirely. Five Iron Golf costs $1.5M to $4M to open. They have full bars, food service, corporate event space, and staff. Lots of staff. The model works in dense urban markets where you can charge $100+ per hour and run corporate events at $5K-$20K per booking.
Five Iron’s FDD shows mature venues grossing $1.2M to $3M annually. But the investment is 5-10x higher than the unmanned model, and the complexity is exponentially higher. You’re running a restaurant, a bar, an event space, and a golf facility simultaneously. The margin in the food business is razor-thin. The margin in the event business is great, but it requires a sales team.
X-Golf is somewhere in the middle. 100+ locations, entertainment-focused, but lower investment than Five Iron. They’re the mid-tier option.
The Independents
82.7% of the market is independent. Single-bay studios in strip malls, four-bay facilities in suburban office parks, and the guy-who-loves-golf-and-had-a-spare-building operations. The GolfSim.co report is clear: this is still a Main Street business, not a corporate one. The typical facility runs four bays and charges $40/hour.
The independents are the ones I worry about. When Back Nine opens a location 2 miles from your independent four-bay, you’re competing against a brand with national marketing, a booking app that works, and lower pricing because their franchisee has lower expectations for profit. The independent model works when you’re the only game in town. It gets harder when the franchises show up.
The Numbers That Matter
Run the unit economics on a Back Nine location and the model starts to reveal itself.
Back Nine’s average unit does $239K in revenue. The investment is $400K-$500K midpoint. Let’s run the rough math:
- Revenue: $239K
- Royalty (8%): -$19K
- Rent ($25/sq ft x 3,000 sq ft): -$75K
- Utilities/insurance/tech: -$15K
- Cleaning/maintenance: -$10K
- Credit card processing (3%): -$7K
That leaves $113K before the owner takes a dollar. And that’s before you account for the fact that the average Back Nine location might be doing $239K, but the median is lower because the 150 locations include a lot of new ones that haven’t ramped yet.
The pitch is that you can run this in 5-10 hours per week. At $113K net, that’s $200-$400 per hour for your time. That’s a great side hustle. But it’s not a business you’re going to retire on with one location.
The real money is in owning multiple units. Back Nine signs multi-unit deals that require franchisees to open within two years. The guy with 5 locations doing $1M+ in total revenue and $500K+ in net is the real target. The single-unit owner is paying the bills and getting a nice return, but they’re not getting rich.
The Saturation Question
Back Nine is opening 20 locations per month. If they sustain that pace for a year, they add 240 locations. There are currently 3,849 venues in the US. At that rate, Back Nine alone adds 6% to the total venue count every year.
The question nobody is asking: what happens when there are 10,000 indoor golf venues in the US?
The GolfSim.co report already calls out that the median venue charges $40/hour. When supply doubles, what happens to price? In most markets, price drops. The marginal cost of an empty bay is zero — the sim is already paid for, the lights are already on, the rent is already due. So operators discount. $40 becomes $35. $35 becomes $30. Memberships get cheaper. The CRE deal gets harder to justify.
The consolidation wave hasn’t started yet, but it will. The independent operators without brand recognition, without a booking app, without a national marketing presence — they’re the ones who’ll feel the squeeze first. The franchises will compete with each other in the dense markets. The markets that can support 5 sim venues will have 10, and 3 of them will close within 18 months.
This is not a prediction of doom. It’s what happens in every franchise boom. Coffee shops, fitness studios, frozen yogurt — they all go through the same cycle. The brands that survive are the ones with the best unit economics, the best real estate discipline, and the most patient capital. The brands that don’t are the ones that opened 20 locations in markets that could support 5.
What This Means for Home Sim Owners
If you’re reading this site, you probably own a home sim or you’re thinking about building one. The franchise boom matters to you for three reasons.
First, try before you buy. Every Back Nine or Another Nine location is a place where you can book an hour on a Trackman, play 18 holes, and decide whether sim golf is something you want in your garage. At $40-$55/hour, it’s the cheapest market research you’ll ever do.
Second, market validation. The fact that investors are putting $300K-$800K into sim franchise locations is a signal that the industry is real. These are not hobbyists. These are people who ran the numbers, signed a lease, and committed to 10 years of royalty payments. They believe the market is growing. They’re right.
Third, community. The best thing about the franchise boom is that it creates a network of sim golf players. Leagues, tournaments, leaderboards, social play. The home sim is a solitary experience. The franchise sim is a social one. You can have both, and the existence of the franchise network makes the home sim more valuable because there’s a broader ecosystem to plug into.
The Takeaway
The unmanned golf sim franchise model is the most important business development in indoor golf right now. Back Nine is growing at a pace that’s unprecedented in the golf industry. Another Nine is building a tech stack that could be the operating system for the whole category. The independents are the backbone of the industry but face increasing pressure.
The market is going to consolidate. The franchisors with the best unit economics, the strongest tech platforms, and the most disciplined real estate strategies will win. The ones that opened too fast in markets that couldn’t support them will get bought out or close.
And for the rest of us? We get to watch it happen from our garages, hitting balls into a screen at 10 PM, knowing that what we’re doing is part of something that’s growing faster than anyone expected.
The industry is not a niche anymore. 3,849 venues, $40/hour, 20 new franchises per month. That’s a real market. And it’s going to get a lot bigger before it gets stable.