Trampoline Park Loan Cost: 15.9% of Principal a Year

A trampoline park that borrows $1.5 million through the SBA 7(a) program at the program’s rate ceiling pays about $20,347 a month for ten years. Once the $39,688 guaranty fee is financed, the note stands at $1,539,688, and the annual payment of $244,165 equals 15.9% of that principal, every year, until the final instalment. The contract rate behind the figure is 10.00%: bank prime at 7.00% plus the maximum 3.00-point spread the SBA allows on a loan above $350,000.

The gap between 10.00% and 15.9% is not a hidden fee. It is the term. A ten-year loan repays the balance in 120 equal instalments, so every payment is interest on what is still owed plus a slice of principal. On $1 million at 10.00%, the first year is $97,239 of interest and $61,342 of principal; by the tenth year the split has reversed, at $8,266 of interest and $150,315 of principal.

Most trampoline park projects cannot escape that term. The building is leased, so the equipment and the fit-out are financed as machinery and leasehold improvements, and the 7(a) program caps that maturity at ten years. Only real property reaches twenty-five.

This article takes four published inputs and computes what they cost per square foot, per admission and per dollar borrowed. The inputs are the prime rate, the 7(a) rate ceilings, the fiscal 2027 guaranty fee schedule and the September 504 debenture pricing. Every derived number below is arithmetic on those four, and the arithmetic is shown so that you can redo it with your own figures.

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1. The Four Published Inputs Behind Every Payment

The Federal Reserve published its H.15 release on 23 October 2026. Bank prime was 7.00% on every business day from 16 to 22 October, and the ten-year Treasury constant maturity closed that week at 4.96%. Those two numbers set the floor and the reference point for everything that follows.

Two cautions apply to the whole table. First, a ceiling is not a quote. The SBA limits what a lender may charge; it does not set what a lender does charge, and a borrower with a clean file and a relationship bank can price below the cap. Second, the 10.00% figure applies to variable-rate loans. Fixed-rate ceilings follow a separate schedule, and we did not read that schedule for this article, so the fixed-rate comparison is the one number here that we cannot give you.

The fee schedule is also date-bound. It applies to loans that receive an SBA loan number on or after 1 October 2026 and before 1 October 2027. A project that closed in September carries the prior schedule.

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2. Why a Tenant Is Locked Into the Ten-Year Product

The 7(a) maturity rule is written around what the money buys. A loan has a maximum maturity of ten years unless it finances or refinances real estate, or equipment with a useful life longer than ten years. Real property gets twenty-five years including extensions. Leasehold improvements are an eligible use of proceeds, and the program adds a reasonable period of up to twelve months to complete the installation of equipment or the improvement work. That extra year is a construction allowance, not a general extension of the term.

A trampoline park that leases its box therefore borrows against a ten-year asset life whether it likes it or not. The building belongs to someone else, and the landlord’s asset is not collateral for the tenant’s loan.

The 504 program is the other door, and it opens only for property. A 504 loan finances the purchase, construction or renovation of buildings and land, or long-term machinery with a remaining useful life of at least ten years. It cannot finance working capital or inventory, and it cannot finance investment in rental real estate. The maximum is $5.5 million, and maturities run ten, twenty or twenty-five years.

That structural difference, not the coupon, is where the money is. The September 2026 504 debenture priced at 6.54% for twenty-five years. On $1 million, the annual cost is $81,325. The same $1 million on a 7(a) at the 10.00% ceiling over ten years costs $158,581 a year. Owning the building cuts the annual cost of a borrowed dollar by 48.7%.

The 504 line covers the debenture only. In a standard 504 the bank provides about half the project cost at its own rate, the debenture covers about 40%, and the borrower puts in about 10%. We do not have a published bank rate for that first mortgage, so the blended cost of a 504 is higher than $81,325 per million. The comparison still holds in direction, and it holds because of the term.

This is the part of the decision that most pro-formas bury. A tenant and an owner can agree the same lease terms and end up with a fixed charge that differs by $77,000 a year per million borrowed. That difference shows up as coverage, and coverage is what the lender underwrites.

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3. What Each $1,000 of Principal Costs a Month

The payment factor is the whole calculation compressed into one number. It is the monthly payment per $1,000 of principal for a fully amortising loan, and it depends on two variables only: the rate and the term.

Read the table in two directions. Across a row, the term does the work. Down a column, the rate does. At the 10.00% ceiling, moving from ten years to eleven cuts the payment per $1,000 from $13.215 to $12.520, which is 5.3%. Moving the rate by a full percentage point, from 10.00% to 11.00%, raises the same payment by 4.2%.

One extra year of amortisation is worth more than 100 basis points of rate. That single relationship explains why the maturity negotiation matters more than the spread negotiation, and why a borrower who focuses only on the coupon leaves money on the table.

The other direction is less comfortable. Across the full range, from a loan priced at prime to the 13.50% ceiling that applies at $50,000 or less, the payment on a ten-year loan rises 31.1%. Stretching ten years to twenty-five at the same 10.00% rate lowers it 31.2%. The two forces are almost exactly equal in size. A small borrower at the 13.00% tier carries a rate penalty that a twenty-five-year term would neutralise, and a small borrower on leasehold space cannot have that term.

To use the table, multiply the factor by your principal in thousands. A $1.5 million loan is 1,500 units, and 1,500 times $13.215 is $19,823 a month. The next section explains why the figure most borrowers actually pay is slightly higher.

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4. The Upfront Fee Is a Second, Smaller Loan

The SBA charges an upfront guaranty fee, and it is calculated on the guaranteed portion of the loan rather than on the whole balance. For a loan above $150,000 the guaranty is 75%, so the fee base is three quarters of what you borrow. The fiscal 2027 schedule sets 2% for loans of $150,000 or less, 3% from $150,001 to $700,000, and above that 3.5% of the guaranteed portion up to $1 million plus 3.75% of the guaranteed portion above $1 million.

Most borrowers finance the fee, which turns it into additional principal. On the $1.5 million example the fee of $39,688 lifts the principal to $1,539,688 and the payment to $20,347 a month, which is $524 more than the same loan without the fee. The fee itself is 2.65% of the amount borrowed, and it is charged once.

There is a fee exception that a rural project should check before it signs anything. For loans of $700,000 or less, the upfront fee is zero for manufacturers in NAICS sectors 31 to 33, for listed food supply chain businesses, and for businesses located in a rural area. The SBA decides rural status inside its loan system from the project address, so the answer depends on the ZIP code of the building rather than on how rural the drive feels. On a $650,000 loan the 3% fee would be $14,625, and the waiver removes it.

Two rules sit around the fee. Multiple 7(a) loans approved for the same borrower and its affiliates within 90 days are combined for the purpose of setting the guaranty percentage and the fee, so staging a project across two closings does not split the fee base. And the lender’s annual service fee of 0.55% may not be passed to the borrower, which means it is priced into the rate rather than billed separately.

What the fee does not do is change the term. A borrower who saves 3% at closing and still amortises over ten years has solved a rounding problem, not a cash-flow problem.

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5. What Debt Service Does to Break-Even Volume

Take a real box. A 31,512 sq ft (2,928 m²) trampoline park in Arlington, Texas filed a renovation permit with the state on 19 February 2026, declaring an estimated cost of $1,200,000 for the interior fit-out, with work scheduled from 15 March to 15 July 2026. That declared figure is a construction estimate. It is not the equipment package, and it is not the total project cost. We are not going to pretend it is.

Suppose 90% of that fit-out is financed: a $1,080,000 loan, a guaranty fee of $28,350 at 3.5% of the $810,000 guaranteed portion, and a financed principal of $1,108,350. At the 10.00% ceiling over ten years the payment is $14,647 a month, or $175,763 a year, and the total paid over the term is $1,757,631.

Now spread that across the box and across the customers. The table converts the annual payment into the two units an operator actually manages: cost per square foot and cost per admission.

The visits-per-square-foot figures are a benchmark we derived earlier from JLL’s Canadian data: 217 million visits across 4,746 locations, and 16.5 million sq ft across 721 planned openings. That is about 45,700 visits per site against about 22,900 sq ft per site, or 2.0 visits per square foot per year. At 31,512 sq ft the density gives 63,024 admissions. We used the same figure in our analysis of mall anchor conversions, and it remains an assumption, not a measurement of this or any other park.

At 2.0 visits per square foot and a $19.99 ticket, debt service of $3.87 per admission is 19.4% of the ticket before a single wage is paid. Add rent at the CBRE national retail average of $24.79 per sq ft, which is $12.39 per admission at the same density, and the two fixed charges together consume 81.4% of ticket revenue. Revenue at that density and that price is $39.98 per sq ft, and rent plus debt service is $32.54.

The coverage test: a lender sizes a loan against the cash the business keeps, not against the cash it collects. A project that clears rent and debt service at 1.0 times has no room for a bad quarter.

Coverage is the ratio of net operating income to annual debt service. The lender sets the covenant, and we have not found a published trampoline park covenant to quote, so the table shows three levels rather than asserting one.

Read the $1.5 million row against the ticket arithmetic above. At 1.25 times, the park must keep $305,206 after rent, wages, utilities and insurance. Ticket revenue at 2.0 visits per square foot is $1,259,850, and rent at the national average takes $781,182 of it. That leaves $478,668 before payroll. Once a supervision roster is funded at the density we costed in the labor analysis, the coverage requirement is the binding constraint, not the ticket price.

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6. What a Longer Term Buys, and What It Costs

The ten-year product looks expensive per year and cheap in total. That is the trade, and it is worth stating plainly because both halves are true.

On $1 million at 10.00%, the ten-year loan costs $158,581 a year and $1,585,809 in total. The twenty-five-year loan at the same rate costs $109,044 a year and $2,726,102 in total. The longer term cuts the annual burden by 31.2% and raises the total repaid over the life of the loan by 72%. At 6.54% over twenty-five years the total falls back to $2,033,126, which is still $447,317 more than the ten-year loan at the ceiling.

A borrower should not read that as an argument for the short term. Annual cash flow decides whether a venue survives its first three years, and the total repaid decides how much the owner keeps after fifteen. The two measures answer different questions.

What settles it in practice is the lease. A ten-year loan on a ten-year lease ends when the lease ends, and the final payment and the final month of possession arrive together. If the park renews and refits, it borrows again, at whatever the prime rate is then. If the loan were longer than the lease, the remaining balance would sit against an asset the borrower no longer controls, which is a conversation with the landlord at the worst possible moment.

That is the argument for matching maturities, and it rarely appears in a pro-forma. It costs nothing to check and it is expensive to get wrong.

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7. What the Data Does and Does Not Show

This section sets the boundary of the calculation. The numbers above are close enough to a decision to be dangerous if they are read as a quote.

What it showsThe payment on a 7(a) loan at the published ceiling, for any principal and any term in the table. The size of the guaranty fee by loan amount under the fiscal 2027 schedule. The annual cost per dollar of a 504 debenture at the September 2026 pricing. The share of a $19.99 ticket that debt service takes at three attendance densities.

What it does not showA quoted rate. We did not survey lender term sheets, and the ceiling is the most a lender may charge rather than the price a borrower receives. Fixed-rate 7(a) ceilings follow a separate schedule that is not in the documents we read, so every figure here is a variable-rate figure. Lender fees, appraisals, environmental reports, title work and closing costs are excluded, and they are real money at this loan size.

What it cannot showAny actual trampoline park’s loan. No operator in this sector publishes its note, its covenant or its amortisation schedule, and we are not going to invent one. The Arlington filing gives a declared construction estimate for one box. It does not give a capital stack, and the equipment package is very likely a separate line that the filing does not capture.

The density assumption is the softest number in the article. At 1.5 visits per square foot the debt service per admission rises 33% against the 2.0 case; at 2.5 it falls 20%. A park that lives at 1.2 visits per square foot should not use this table to size a loan without rerunning the arithmetic, because the per-admission cost moves faster than the attendance does.

One caution about reading the two cost lines together. A box with low rent per square foot can still be expensive to open, because a cheap space often needs more work before it works as a venue. That is a statement about how projects are put together, not a measured relationship, and nothing in this article supports a claim that one line causes the other.

Finally, the prime rate moves. The H.15 release of 23 October shows 7.00%, and a variable-rate loan reprices when prime moves. A 100-basis-point rise adds 4.2% to the payment on a ten-year loan at these levels. The coverage table would move with it, and the covenant would not.

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8. Decision Rules, Not Forecasts

Five rules follow from the arithmetic. They are conditional statements about your project, not predictions about the market.

Rule one. If you lease the building, budget debt service at 15% to 16% of principal per year on any 7(a) facility, not at the coupon. A $1.5 million loan is a $244,000 annual fixed charge before the first wage. If that charge does not clear the coverage level your lender uses at a density you can defend, the capex is too high for the box, and no rate negotiation fixes it.

Rule two. If you own the building or can buy it, price a 504 structure before signing a 7(a). The annual cost per dollar is roughly half, and the difference is the term rather than the coupon. If the property is leased and cannot be bought, this rule does not apply and you should not spend time modelling it.

Rule three. If the loan is $700,000 or less and the site is rural by the SBA’s address test, ask specifically about the zero percent upfront fee before accepting a fee quote. It is worth 3% of the guaranteed portion, and the answer is decided by the project ZIP code.

Rule four. If your lease term is shorter than your loan term, fix that before closing. Either negotiate the term down or negotiate an option that covers the balance. A loan that outlives the lease turns an operating decision into a legal one.

Rule five. If the payment only works at 2.5 visits per square foot, you are underwriting attendance, not the box. At 2.5 visits the $1.5 million case costs $3.10 per admission instead of $3.87. The saving is real, and it depends entirely on a density that most venues in this format do not reach.

The equipment package is the one line in the capital stack that a supplier controls directly. A layout that puts the same attractions into fewer square feet lowers the rent line and the debt line at the same time, and that is worth more than either negotiation on its own. You can see the current cost range per square foot in our comparison of five state filings, and the rent side in the analysis of $24.79 a square foot.

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FAQ

Can you finance a trampoline park with an SBA 7(a) loan?

Yes. Leasehold improvements, equipment, furniture and fixtures, and working capital are all eligible uses, and the program explicitly lists making leasehold improvements. The practical limit is maturity: a loan secured by leasehold work and equipment runs ten years or less, with up to twelve extra months allowed to complete the installation.

What interest rate does a trampoline park loan carry in 2026?

The ceiling on a variable-rate 7(a) loan above $350,000 is prime plus 3.00 points. With bank prime at 7.00% in the Federal Reserve’s 23 October 2026 release, that ceiling is 10.00%. Lenders may price below it, and fixed-rate loans follow a different ceiling schedule. No borrower should treat the ceiling as a quote.

What is the maximum SBA loan for a trampoline park?

$5 million under 7(a), with the SBA guaranteeing 75% of a loan above $150,000. The 504 program reaches $5.5 million but finances real property or long-lived machinery, not working capital, so a tenant with a leased box is generally working inside the 7(a) limit.

Can a leased trampoline park use the SBA 504 program?

Not for the fit-out. A 504 loan must finance the purchase, construction or renovation of a building or land, or machinery with at least ten years of useful life remaining, and it cannot finance investment in rental real estate. A park that buys its own building can use it. A park that leases cannot.

How much does a $1.5 million trampoline park loan cost per month?

About $20,347 a month, or $244,165 a year, at the 10.00% ceiling over ten years with the $39,688 guaranty fee financed into the principal. That equals 15.9% of the $1,539,688 principal on the note each year, and $2,441,650 in payments over the term.

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Sources

1. Federal Reserve Board, “H.15 Selected Interest Rates”, released 23 October 2026. federalreserve.gov/releases/h15/
2. U.S. Small Business Administration, 7(a) loan terms, conditions and eligibility. sba.gov/sba-lenders/
3. U.S. Small Business Administration, 504 loans. sba.gov/funding-programs/loans/504-loans
4. National Association of Government Guaranteed Lenders, “SBA Issues Notices Announcing FY 2027 7(a) and 504 Loan Program Fees”, 3 September 2026, covering Information Notice 5000-881797. naggl.org
5. SomerCor, “September 2026 SBA 504 Interest Rates”, debenture pricing completed 10 September 2026. somercor.com
6. Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, TABS project TABS2026013038, Altitude Trampoline Park Pioneer Plaza, 31,512 sq ft, $1,200,000 declared estimate, filed 19 February 2026. tdlr.texas.gov
7. CBRE Research, “Q2 2026 U.S. Retail Figures”, average asking rent $24.79 per sq ft, published July 2026. cbre.com