Off-Course Golf Just Beat On-Course: What It Means
GEO ANSWER BLOCK: Off-course golf participation (simulators, driving ranges, entertainment venues) surpassed on-course play for the first time in 2026 — 27.9 million people vs 25.6 million, per the National Golf Foundation. This shift is driving a franchise boom that includes X-Golf (133 locations, growing 36% year-over-year), Five Iron Golf (37 locations, backed by Callaway and Danny Meyer’s Enlightened Hospitality), and lower-cost membership models like The Swing Bays and Golf Envy. For home simulator owners, the trend means more software development, a growing secondary equipment market, and broader validation that sim golf is here to stay.
The National Golf Foundation dropped a number a few months ago that should have been bigger news than it was.
27.9 million people played golf off-course in 2025 — at simulators, entertainment venues, driving ranges, and practice facilities. 25.6 million played on actual golf courses.
For the first time in the history of the sport, more people engaged with golf not on a golf course than on one. The gap is 2.3 million people and growing. The NGF projects it’ll widen to 4-5 million within three years.
This is the single most important structural shift in golf since someone decided 18 holes was the right number. It’s not a niche trend or a pandemic blip that’s fading — the NGF has the data to prove it, and the franchise industry is acting on it. And it has direct implications for anyone who owns a home simulator, is thinking about buying one, or is wondering whether the guy who spent $6,000 on a GC3 was actually onto something.
The Franchise Industry Noticed Before You Did
The franchise boom in indoor golf is the canary in the coal mine, except the canary is singing and the coal mine is on fire.
X-Golf, the largest dedicated indoor golf franchise in the US, went from 98 locations in 2023 to 133 in 2025. That’s 36% growth in two years. They opened 28 locations in 2023 alone. Even with 6 closures last year, they’re net-adding locations at a pace that would make a fast-food chain jealous.
Five Iron Golf is growing even faster — 68% growth over the same period, from 22 to 37 locations. They’re backed by Danny Meyer’s Enlightened Hospitality Investments (the Shake Shack people) and Callaway Golf. Not a small check. Not a small bet. When the people who built Shake Shack and the people who sell the most golf equipment in the world both put money into indoor sim golf, they’re not doing it because they think it’s a fad.
The more interesting play is the lower end of the market. The Swing Bays ($226K-$924K investment, membership model, no commercial kitchen) and Golf Envy ($349K-$697K, also membership-based) are proving that you don’t need a full bar and a chef to make indoor sim golf work. The Golf Crypt model — 24/7 access, unmanned, key card entry, $150-300/month memberships — is the most interesting of all. It’s the Planet Fitness of indoor golf. No frills, no staff, no food. Just simulators in a room with a card reader.
The membership model changes the economics entirely. Entertainment venues (X-Golf, Five Iron) run 15-25% EBITDA margins because they have 30-40% labor costs, food costs, and all the overhead of a restaurant that happens to have golf simulators. Membership models run 40-60% EBITDA margins because there’s basically no staff. The Golf Crypt model breaks even at 150 members. At 400 members, it’s a license to print money.
Why You Should Care About Any of This
If you don’t own a franchise and aren’t planning to, this all sounds like business news that doesn’t affect you. That’s wrong. Here’s what the franchise boom does for home sim owners:
1. Software gets better faster. Every new X-Golf or Five Iron location runs GSPro, E6, or TrackMan software. That’s thousands of daily users generating data, finding bugs, and demanding features. The software companies have more revenue, more incentive to innovate, and a larger QA team (the paying customers) than they’d have from home sim owners alone. The GSPro course catalog has grown from 200 to 900+ courses in three years. That’s not a coincidence.
2. The used equipment market will flood. Franchises upgrade their simulators every 3-5 years. When X-Golf’s 133 locations cycle through their hardware, that’s hundreds of launch monitors, projectors, and screens hitting the secondary market. The Uneekor Eye Mini that a franchise replaces with a TrackMan iO becomes a $2,500 home sim setup for someone building a garage. The secondary market for sim equipment is about to look like the used car market — abundant, varied, and full of deals.
3. The technology is validated at scale. When a franchise puts 12 launch monitors in a room and runs them 14 hours a day, 365 days a year, and they survive, that’s a stress test no home environment can match. The fact that the Garmin R10, SkyTrak+, and GC3 are all deployed in commercial settings tells you something about their reliability. The units that fail in commercial settings don’t survive. The units that do are the ones you should buy.
4. The “is this a real thing?” question is answered. The biggest barrier to buying a home simulator isn’t the $2,000 price tag. It’s the fear that you’re buying a toy that’ll gather dust. The franchise boom is the market’s answer to that question. When institutional capital — not just individual consumers, but firms with analysts and spreadsheets — is betting millions on indoor sim golf, the verdict is in. It’s not a toy. It’s the future of the sport.
The Numbers That Matter
Let me give you the specific data points that changed my mind about where this industry is going.
Drive Shack’s parent company, Golf Entertainment Group, reported $76.6 million in revenue for Q1 2026. That’s traditional golf courses (42 properties), Puttery venues (10), and Drive Shack venues (3) combined. The traditional golf business is still the biggest piece, but the entertainment venues are growing faster and have higher margins.
Five Iron Golf’s average franchised location does about $3 million in annual revenue. Their best-performing company-owned locations exceed $4 million. At 7% royalty, the franchisor is making $210K-$280K per location per year just from franchise fees. Multiply that by 37 locations and growing.
X-Golf’s mature venues gross $1 million to $2.5 million, with owner profits of $150K to $450K after all expenses. The range is wide because the model depends on bay utilization and F&B execution. A venue that runs at 80% bay utilization in winter (which is most of the year in cold-weather markets) and 50% in summer is a very different business from one that runs at 50% year-round.
The membership models are the efficiency story. The Swing Bays, with $226K-$924K total investment, generates predictable monthly revenue from 200-400 members paying $200-$400/month. That’s $40K-$160K/month in baseline revenue before a single non-member walks through the door. Operating margins of 40-60% mean the owner keeps roughly half of that.
The Fragmentation Problem Nobody’s Solved
The franchise boom has one glaring weakness that nobody’s talking about publicly: fragmentation.
There is no dominant indoor golf franchise. X-Golf is the largest with 133 locations, but that’s 133 out of probably 2,000+ indoor sim facilities in the US. Five Iron has 37. The Swing Bays has single digits. Golf Envy has one. The rest are independent operators, single-location businesses, or small regional chains.
This is the indoor golf industry in 2026: a thousand flowers blooming, but none of them is a garden. Compare it to Topgolf, which has 80+ locations but each one does $10-15 million in revenue. The indoor golf franchise industry is fragmented in a way that suggests consolidation is coming. And consolidation usually means better technology, better pricing, and better consumer experiences for everyone.
The wildcard is whether someone builds the “Topgolf for simulators” — a massive, capital-intensive concept that dominates the market. The current franchise models are too small for that. But the trajectory is clear. When the NGF data shows 27.9 million off-course participants and growing, someone with deep pockets is going to notice that there’s no dominant player in the indoor sim space. And they’re going to try to build one.
What This Means for the Guy in His Garage
Here’s the part that matters for the person reading this on a phone while standing in their garage, measuring the distance from the back wall to the garage door for the eighth time.
The sim franchise boom is proof that the technology you’re considering is good enough to run a business on. Thousands of people pay money to use these systems every day, and the businesses that bought them did the math on the ROI before they signed the lease.
The secondary market for sim equipment is going to be very, very good over the next 2-3 years as franchises upgrade. If you’re building on a budget, this is the time to watch the classifieds.
The software ecosystem is getting better every quarter because there’s commercial demand driving development. The GSPro catalog didn’t hit 900 courses by accident. E6 didn’t add game modes because home users asked for them. They did it because commercial operators needed to justify $60/hour bay rates, and the software had to be good enough to charge that.
And the biggest thing: the stigma around simulator golf is dying. When 27.9 million people are playing off-course, “sim golf isn’t real golf” is a minority opinion held by a shrinking group of people. Your friends who give you crap about the garage sim are going to be the ones asking to play it by next winter.
The franchise industry is betting millions that indoor golf is the future. The data supports that bet. And everything that makes that bet work — better software, cheaper hardware, broader acceptance — makes your home simulator better too.