America has 3,849 indoor golf venues. The median cost to hit a bay for an hour is $40. TrackMan is in nearly two-thirds of them. And more than 80% of these places are owned by some guy who just decided to open a sim lounge, not a corporate franchise machine.
Those are the headlines from the inaugural State of Indoor Golf in America report, released last week by GolfSim.co, a free directory that’s been quietly tracking the entire US indoor golf market. The report is a cold data dump on one of the fastest-growing segments in golf, and it tells a different story than the breathless franchise-press-release coverage you’ve been reading.
Let me walk through what the numbers actually say.
The Big Number: 3,849 Venues
That’s the live count as of July 12, spanning all 50 states and 838 markets. For context, that’s more indoor golf venues than there are Starbucks in the state of Texas. It’s a number that would have been unthinkable five years ago, when indoor golf mostly meant a dusty Trackman in the back of a Golf Galaxy or a private club’s “sim room” that nobody used.
The report tracks venues continuously, so the number is already higher by the time you read this. New places open every week. The sim venue boom we’ve been tracking at HGH — the one where we’ve covered everything from Birdies Golf Lounge in Texas to Back Nine franchises in Pennsylvania — is not slowing down.
$40 an Hour Is the Sweet Spot
The median price for an hour in a simulator bay is $40, based on 794 venues that actually publish their rates. The middle 50% of venues charge between $25 and $55. That’s a remarkably accessible price point for a category that’s still positioning itself as premium entertainment.
But here’s where it gets weird. Forty-four venues charge $150 or more per hour, which pulls the national average up to $51. So there’s a long tail of premium experiences — the “Rolls-Royce of simulators” places with full bars, service, and climate control — that are charging like they’re competing with a nice dinner out rather than a bucket of range balls.
South Carolina is the most expensive state for simulator golf at a median of $90 per hour. Nevada is second at $63. Oklahoma third at $58. If you’re wondering why South Carolina, the answer is probably Hilton Head and Myrtle Beach — tourist-heavy markets where the price point matches the vacation economy.
The cheapest states? Maryland and Vermont, both at $25 median. The metro outlier is Henderson, Nevada, at $87 an hour — a Vegas suburb where the pricing reflects the entertainment district more than the local golf culture.
The Most Important Number: 82.7%
That’s the percentage of venues with no known franchise affiliation.
Think about that for a second. Every time you read about Five Iron Golf raising another round or The Back Nine hitting 200 locations, it sounds like corporate indoor golf is taking over. The data says otherwise. Roughly four out of five indoor golf venues in America are small businesses — a guy with a lease, a Trackman, and a dream.
The largest chains by live directory listings: The Back Nine Golf (196), GOLFTEC (132), and X-Golf (102). Those are big numbers for franchises, but they’re still a drop in the bucket compared to the 3,184 independents.
As Steven Shen, the founder of GolfSim.co, put it: “Indoor golf is scaling the way coffee shops did, one small operator at a time.”
TrackMan’s Dominance Is Real
Among venues that disclose their simulator technology, TrackMan appears in 63.2%. Full Swing is second at 17.6%. Nobody else is in double digits.
This is the data behind a pattern we’ve noticed for a while. TrackMan has become the Kleenex of indoor golf simulators. When someone opens a sim venue, they buy a Trackman. When they don’t buy a TrackMan, they buy a Full Swing. The rest of the market — Uneekor, Foresight, Golfzon, the various Korean brands — is fighting over the remaining 19%.
The practical implication: if you’re building a home sim and wondering what software to learn, TrackMan’s ecosystem is the safe bet for compatibility with commercial venues. If you ever want to practice at a sim lounge and have your data feel familiar, TrackMan is the language most places speak.
The Boutique Footprint
The typical indoor golf venue is smaller than you’d think. Among the 255 venues that publicly list a bay count, the average is 5.9 bays and the median is just 4.
That’s a four-bay shop. A strip-mall unit. A space that fits maybe two foursomes at a time. This is not a big-box entertainment center. It’s a neighborhood spot.
The data reinforces what we’ve been saying about the 24/7 unmanned model: you don’t need 20 bays and a restaurant to make indoor golf work. You need four bays, a decent putting mat, a keycard system, and a membership model. The economics work at a much smaller scale than the Five Iron mega-venues would suggest.
Where Sim Golf Clusters
Katy, Texas is America’s densest indoor golf market with 22.76 venues per 100,000 residents. That’s a suburb of Houston where the combination of golf culture, disposable income, and summer heat makes indoor sims a natural fit.
Mequon, Wisconsin (15.69 per 100K) and Duluth, Georgia (15.46) round out the top three. The common thread: educated, middle-to-upper-income suburbs. The median market across the 1,778 covered cities has a household income of $76,953 and 34.3% of residents holding a bachelor’s degree or higher.
Simulators cluster where people have money and want to play golf year-round. That’s not a surprise. But the density data is useful if you’re thinking about opening a venue — or just wondering why there are suddenly three sim lounges within a mile of your house.
What This Report Actually Tells Us
The State of Indoor Golf in America report is useful because it kills a few narratives that were getting too much oxygen.
The “franchises are taking over” narrative? Dead. Eighty percent of venues are independents. The franchise story is real but it’s a minority of the market.
The “indoor golf is expensive” narrative? Complicated. Yes, there are $150/hour venues. But the median is $40, which is cheaper than a round at most municipal courses.
The “it’s all big-box entertainment centers” narrative? Dead. The median venue has four bays. This is a boutique industry.
The report is free to access at golfsim.co, along with companion studies on pricing by state and the franchise landscape. The data updates continuously, so it’s a living document rather than a one-time snapshot.
If you’re building a home sim, this report matters because it shows you what the commercial side of the industry looks like. The technology choices, the pricing models, the venue sizes — these are the same decisions you’re making for your garage, just at a different scale.
And if you’re just a fan of the sim golf boom, the data confirms what we’ve been feeling: this thing is real, it’s growing fast, and it’s being built by regular people, not just corporations.
The guy with four bays in a strip mall is the story of indoor golf in 2026. Everything else is just the headline.
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