Trampoline Park Tax: One $19.99 Ticket Pays $0 to $2.40

Altitude Trampoline Park in Arlington, Texas, lists a 90-minute jump pass at $19.99. A guest at that park pays $21.64 at the register. A guest jumping for the same 90 minutes at a hypothetical park inside Chicago city limits would pay $22.39 for the same listed price, and a guest in Bolingbrook, Illinois, would pay exactly $19.99.

The difference is not the operator. It is not the equipment. It is the tax line, and it ranges from zero to twelve percent on an identical sticker price, depending almost entirely on which jurisdiction draws its boundary around the car park.

Most investment guides for trampoline parks stop at rent, fit-out and labor. This article looks at the line nobody models before signing a lease: what governments take from every ticket, who levies it, where the classification traps sit, and how the arithmetic changes your pricing. Every rate below is a published figure, and every calculation is written out so you can substitute your own numbers.

One note before the tables. Sales tax is collected by the operator and remitted to the government. It is not operator income, and this article never treats it as revenue. But it changes what the guest actually pays, it changes what you keep when you advertise a tax-included price, and in one city it decides whether your membership product is taxed at all. That makes it a site-selection and pricing question, not just a compliance chore.

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1. The Sticker Price Is Not the Price

The United States and the United Kingdom quote admission prices under two opposite conventions, and anyone comparing a $19.99 pass in Texas with a £15.95 pass in Crawley is comparing a pre-tax price with a post-tax one.

In the US, the listed price excludes tax. The register adds it. In the UK, value added tax is already inside the listed price. Oxygen Activeplay charges £15.95 for a 60-minute session at its Crawley park. That figure includes 20 percent VAT. The VAT element is £15.95 × 20/120, which is £2.66, and the net amount the park keeps before VAT is £13.29.

This matters for benchmarking. In an earlier article we compared hourly ticket ladders across China, the US, the UK and Malaysia. Every UK price in that comparison was VAT-inclusive, every US price was tax-exclusive, and no headline rate comparison between the two markets is valid until you strip that out. That four-market price ladder is still worth reading for the hourly rates; just net out the VAT before drawing conclusions. A £13.29 net price converts to roughly $17.80 at recent exchange rates, which sits below the $19.99 US sticker in a way the raw figures do not suggest.

For an operator, the convention also shapes psychology. A UK guest sees one number and pays one number. A US guest sees $19.99 on the website and $21.64 on the receipt, and some fraction of them read the gap as a hidden charge. Nothing illegal, nothing avoidable, but worth knowing when you design the booking confirmation page.

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2. Six Sites, One Ticket: The Raw Rates

The table below holds the listed price constant at $19.99, the 90-minute pass published by Altitude Arlington, and asks what each jurisdiction adds to it. The six US sites were chosen because they are real trampoline park locations covered in earlier articles on this site, or cities whose rules illustrate the sharpest contrasts. The UK row uses the published Oxygen Crawley price for its standard session.

Three readings jump out of this table. First, the spread is enormous: the highest burden among the US rows is twelve percent, the lowest is zero, and both sit inside the same state. Second, the states with the highest general sales tax rates are not the states that tax tickets hardest, because Illinois taxes merchandise but not admissions, while the city of Chicago layers a separate amusement tax on top. Third, the UK row is not comparable to the others without unwinding the VAT, because £15.95 is a final price.

Where the rates came from: the Tax Foundation midyear 2026 rate tables, the Texas Comptroller, the New York Department of Taxation and Finance, the Chicago Department of Finance, the Minnesota Department of Revenue and the City of Pittsburgh. Each is listed in Sources with its date. Nothing here is quoted from a blog summary.

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3. Who Levies What: The Layer Problem

The raw table hides the more useful detail, which is who takes each percentage point. Two parks can carry the same combined rate for opposite reasons, and the reasons decide what happens when a rate changes.

Texas runs the simple model. The state takes 6.25 percent, the city adds up to 2 percent, and Arlington sits at the maximum, so a jump ticket is taxed like any other retail sale. The Texas Comptroller lists admission fees to amusement services as taxable, including administrative and processing fees, and the administrative rule 34 TAC 3.298 spells out when entry fees to contests escape the tax. Note what is inside the base: the Comptroller guidance covers admission fees, which means a cheaper junior session is taxed at the same rate as the full-price pass.

Illinois runs the opposite model. The state sales tax does not reach admissions, which is why Bolingbrook costs nothing. Inside Chicago, however, the Municipal Code chapter 4-156 imposes a 9 percent amusement tax on charges to view or participate in amusements, and the Civic Federation consumer tax guide puts the combined in-person amusement burden in the city at 12 percent once the county share is included. The same state, the same chain, and a two-dollar gap on one ticket.

Pennsylvania is the purest city-level case. Admissions to amusement parks are exempt from the 6 percent state sales tax. Pittsburgh then imposes its own 5 percent amusement tax on every admission to a place of entertainment, collected by the venue and remitted monthly. A park in the suburbs outside the city limits owes none of it. The boundary that decides the tax is the municipal boundary, not the state one.

New York taxes the ticket at full state and local rates, with one wrinkle covered in the next section. Minnesota taxes admissions to places of amusement and athletic facilities as a matter of state law; the 6.875 percent shown in the table is the state floor only, because Bloomington and Hennepin County add local sales taxes, and the city code authorizes an additional admissions tax of up to 1 percent plus 3 percent on food and beverage inside the special taxing district around the Mall of America. A venue next to Nickelodeon Universe sits inside that district; a venue across town does not.

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4. Classification: Amusement Service or Sporting Activity

The rate tables are the easy half. The hard half is whether your ticket is in the base at all, and that turns on classification. This is where a trampoline park can be taxed like a cinema in one state and treated like a gym in another, sometimes within the same city.

What it is New York taxes admission charges to places of amusement at state and local rates, and its bulletin explicitly lists play centers for children as taxable. But the same bulletin exempts sporting facilities or activities in which the patron is a participant, naming golf, bowling, swimming and skiing. A trampoline park is a place where patrons participate in physical activity, so it sits near that list without being clearly on either side of it.

What it decides The difference is the full 8.875 percent in New York City. The escape-room advisory opinion from September 2024 shows the Department will not accept participation alone as the exemption: the room operator argued its guests were active participants, and the Department still taxed the admission because the activity was amusement rather than sport. The conservative reading for a jump park in New York is that the ticket is taxable until a ruling says otherwise.

What to verify Chicago draws the line by product rather than by venue. Its amusement tax ruling exempts initiation fees and regular dues paid to a club operating on a membership basis for the recreation of its members, while drop-in fees, day passes and guest fees stay taxable at 9 percent. Minnesota takes the reverse position: its administrative rules make membership dues that grant the use of athletic facilities taxable, alongside admissions. The same $25 monthly membership that is exempt in Chicago is taxable in Bloomington.

The UK reached the same fork in the summer of 2026 and resolved it, for a few months, in an unexpected direction. The temporary reduced VAT rate excluded admission to sports events and sports facilities, which HMRC applied to bowling, laser quest, go-karting and climbing walls. But its guidance listed soft play centres, indoor bounce parks and indoor play facilities as eligible for the reduced rate, and the ICAEW commentary notes the irony that trampolining, an Olympic sport, qualified while bowling did not. The lesson generalizes: statutory categories, not the physical intensity of the activity, decide the rate.

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5. The Summer 2026 UK Experiment

Between 25 June and 1 September 2026, the UK ran a temporary cut that turned the classification question into a live pricing event. VAT on admission to qualifying family attractions, including indoor bounce parks and soft play centres, fell from 20 percent to 5 percent. HMRC listed AirHop Adventure and Trampoline Park among the participating businesses on its scheme website.

The arithmetic of that window is worth walking through, because it isolates how much of a UK ticket price is actually tax. At the standard 20 percent rate, the £15.95 Crawley ticket contains £2.66 of VAT and £13.29 of net price. At 5 percent, the same £15.95 ticket contains £0.76 of VAT and £15.19 of net price. The tax element fell by £1.90 per ticket, and the operator was free to keep every penny of it.

That last point is the part the ICAEW flagged, and it is the part most commentary missed. The legislation required businesses to account for VAT at the lower rate to HMRC. It imposed no obligation to cut the listed price. A park that repriced from £15.95 to £14.05 passed the full cut to families. A park that did nothing collected the difference. Guests who expected a cheaper day out had no legal claim to one, which made the summer a natural experiment in tax incidence: the statutory rate fell by three quarters, and the market decided who benefited.

For anyone planning a UK site, the permanent fact is the 20 percent rate, and the permanent lesson is that listed UK prices are VAT-inclusive, so your margin modelling must divide the shelf price by 1.2 before you compare it with anything American. The temporary window ended on 1 September 2026, and treating it as anything other than a one-off would be a planning error.

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6. What the Tax Line Costs an Operator

Tax is not revenue, but it is workload and exposure. The cleanest way to size it is to run one reference park through the rates. Take the Altitude Arlington box from earlier articles: 31,512 sq ft (2,928 m²), and assume the 2.0 visits per sq ft per year that we have used across this series. That is 63,024 admissions a year. Now apply the six rates.

Each column answers a different question. The remittance column is the trust-money scale: in Chicago the operator handles about $151,000 a year that belongs to the city and county, remitted monthly by the 15th. Pittsburgh runs the same rhythm on a smaller base. Arlington, under Texas rules, files on the Comptroller schedule. Failing to remit is not a margin problem, it is a personal-liability problem, because responsible parties can be held accountable for trust funds.

The absorb column answers a pricing question. Suppose you advertise tax-included jump passes, a common move on booking platforms where the guest should see one number. In Arlington, the $19.99 price nets the park $18.47 once the 8.25 percent is taken out. In Chicago the same advertised price nets $17.85. The gap between those two figures, $0.62 per ticket, is pure geography, and across 63,024 visits it is about $39,000 a year of difference in what the identical advertised price delivers.

The reverse calculation is the one to run before you set a price. If you want to net $18.00 per ticket, two paths exist. With tax added at the register, you list $18.00 in every jurisdiction, and the guest pays between $18.00 and $20.16 depending on the rate. With tax included in the list price, you multiply the target: $18.00 × 1.12 = $20.16 in Chicago, × 1.08875 = $19.60 in New York City, × 1.0825 = $19.49 in Arlington, × 1.05 = $18.90 in Pittsburgh. The same net revenue target produces a $1.26 spread in advertised price.

Memberships deserve their own paragraph, because the classification fork lands directly on them. Our earlier analysis of membership pricing and break-even visit counts used 569 active memberships generating $10,655 in one month at a suburban US park. Add a $25 monthly tier at the Altitude price point, and the taxability question covers 569 × $25 = $14,225 a month. In Minnesota, dues that grant use of athletic facilities are taxable, so that stream carries sales tax at the local combined rate. In Chicago, if the operation qualifies as a club on a membership basis, the dues escape the 9 percent amusement tax while every day pass pays it. Whether that tilts your product mix toward memberships depends on facts we cannot see from the outside, which is exactly why the classification question belongs in due diligence, not in a footnote after opening.

Party packages split the same way. Minnesota states plainly that a party package including admission, food, decorations and favors is taxable. Texas taxes the admission portion of an amusement service, and the rules explain when contest entry fees drop out of the base. Chicago taxes the amusement element unless a separately stated instruction fee qualifies for its own treatment. The pattern repeats: bundling does not remove the tax, it complicates the allocation.

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7. What the Data Does and Does Not Show

This article has deliberately narrow claims, and the boundaries matter more than usual because tax rules shift and classifications are fact-specific.

The rates shown are the published rates as of the dates in Sources. City and county rates change, Minnesota in particular has layered multiple local taxes across the Twin Cities in recent years, and the correct rate for any transaction is the one in force at that address on that date. The Minnesota row in the tables is the state minimum; the true Bloomington figure is higher by local additions whose exact combined level varies by source and by district, which is why we show the floor and flag the add-ons rather than print a precise city total we cannot reconcile.

The classification discussion is not tax advice. Whether a specific trampoline park is a place of amusement, a sporting facility where the patron participates, or a club on a membership basis is decided by each jurisdiction on the facts of the operation. The New York escape-room opinion shows a participant business being taxed; the Chicago ruling shows membership dues escaping a tax that day passes pay. Both are real, they point in opposite directions, and neither tells you where your park lands. Budget for a ruling request or an advisor before opening, not after the first audit.

What the tables do not show is tax incidence in practice. We computed what guests pay and what operators remit, but we did not measure who economically bears the tax, because no operator publishes enough pricing and volume data to estimate it. The UK summer window is the closest thing to an experiment, and even there the pass-through decisions were private.

Finally, none of this covers income tax, property tax, employment taxes or the several countries where VAT sits on top of rather than inside the ticket. Malaysia, China and the other markets in our earlier price comparison each run their own indirect tax systems, and mixing them into one table would produce exactly the false precision this site avoids.

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8. Decision Rules Before You Sign a Lease

The point of the arithmetic is a short list of rules that survive contact with a specific site.

Rule 1: map the tax boundary, not the metro boundary. The Chicago-versus-Bolingbrook gap is 12 points on admissions within one metropolitan area. Before shortlisting a box, ask the municipality three questions: does the state sales tax reach admissions, is there a municipal or county amusement tax, and is the site inside any special taxing district like the one around the Mall of America. Three answers, one phone call each, and the effective ticket tax is known to the dollar.

Rule 2: price for the convention you sell under. If your market quotes tax-inclusive prices, apply the formula below to every margin target before you celebrate it. The formula is one line: net = list ÷ (1 + rate). A £15.95 ticket is a £13.29 ticket. If your market adds tax at the register, remember that your advertised $19.99 becomes $21.64 in Arlington and $22.39 in Chicago, and decide deliberately whether the booking flow shows the total early.

Rule 3: classify the products before you launch them. Day pass, membership dues, party package and instruction each land in a different bucket, sometimes in the same city. Chicago exempts membership dues from the amusement tax but taxes day passes; Minnesota taxes both admissions and athletic-facility dues; New York exempts patron-participant sport but taxes play centers. Design the membership around the exemption where one exists, and get the separately stated invoicing right, because under several of these rules an undifferentiated bundle is taxed in full.

Rule 4: treat remittance as operations, not accounting. At the reference volume, Chicago parks handle $151,000 a year of other people’s money on a monthly cycle. The cash-flow habit, the filing calendar and the audit file belong in the operating plan from day one, alongside the staffing and cleaning schedules that this site treats as first-class planning items.

None of these rules requires a market forecast. They require one afternoon of phone calls per site. That asymmetry, a small research cost against a two-dollar-per-ticket swing, is why the tax line earns a place in site selection next to rent and fit-out.

If you are comparing sites and want the equipment side of the same discipline, the zone layouts and cost structures elsewhere on this site pair naturally with the rules above. See how a 22,000 sq ft trampoline park splits its floor, or how the investment cost breaks into four blocks. For a quote that reflects the venue size you are considering, talk to the design team through the design to delivery process.

Get a free design and quote →

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FAQ

Do trampoline park tickets have sales tax in the US?

Usually yes, but the rate and even the reach of the tax depend on the jurisdiction. Texas taxes admission to amusement services at the full combined state and local rate, 8.25 percent in Arlington. New York taxes admission to places of amusement, 8.875 percent combined in New York City. Illinois does not tax admissions at the state level, so a suburban park outside Chicago can charge no ticket tax at all, while Chicago adds a 9 percent city amusement tax plus a 3 percent county share. Pennsylvania exempts admissions from state sales tax but Pittsburgh imposes a 5 percent city amusement tax.

Is UK VAT included in trampoline park prices?

Yes. UK listed prices include VAT, and admission to trampoline parks is standard rated at 20 percent. A £15.95 session therefore contains £2.66 of VAT and £13.29 of net revenue for the park. Between 25 June and 1 September 2026 a temporary reduced rate of 5 percent applied to indoor bounce parks and soft play centres, after which the standard 20 percent rate returned. US listed prices work the opposite way: tax is added at the register on top of the advertised figure.

Are trampoline park memberships taxed differently from day passes?

In some jurisdictions, yes, and the direction is not consistent. Chicago exempts regular dues paid to a club operating on a membership basis from its 9 percent amusement tax while taxing day passes and guest fees. Minnesota takes the opposite position and taxes membership dues that grant the use of athletic facilities, along with admissions. Texas taxes amusement services including access to facilities, and New York separates sporting activities where the patron participates from taxable places of amusement. Confirm the treatment of each product line in your specific city before setting the price ladder.

How much sales tax does a trampoline park collect per year?

It scales with volume and rate. Using a 31,512 sq ft (2,928 m²) park at 2.0 visits per sq ft per year, about 63,024 admissions, the tax handled and remitted by the operator would be roughly $103,932 a year in Arlington at 8.25 percent, $111,806 in New York City at 8.875 percent, and $151,168 in Chicago at the combined 12 percent amusement burden, against zero in Bolingbrook, Illinois. These are remittance figures, not revenue, and the actual number depends on your attendance and price mix.

Why is the amusement tax higher in Chicago than in the rest of Illinois?

Because two local governments stack their own taxes on top of a state base that does not tax admissions. The Illinois state sales tax does not cover admission charges, which is why venues outside the city owe nothing on tickets. Chicago imposes a 9 percent amusement tax on charges to view or participate in amusements under its Municipal Code, and the county adds a 3 percent share, for a combined 12 percent on in-person amusements according to the Civic Federation consumer tax guide. A park one municipal boundary away can face no ticket tax at all.

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Sources

1. Tax Foundation, “State and Local Sales Tax Rates, Midyear 2026”, rates as of July 1, 2026 — taxfoundation.org/data/all/state/2026-sales-tax-rates-midyear/
2. Texas Comptroller of Public Accounts, Tax Policy News, “Collecting and Remitting Taxes” (admission fees to amusement services taxable; 6.25% state plus up to 2% local), accessed October 2026 — comptroller.texas.gov/taxes/tax-policy-news/2021-july.php
3. Texas Administrative Code Title 34, Section 3.298, Amusement Services (entry fees and admissions), via Legal Information Institute — law.cornell.edu/regulations/texas/34-Tex-Admin-Code-SS-3-298
4. New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, Tax Bulletin “Admission Charges to a Place of Amusement”, and Advisory Opinion TSB-A-24(36)S, September 2024 — tax.ny.gov, admission charges bulletin
5. City of Chicago Department of Finance, “Amusement Tax (7510, 7510W, 7510S)”, rates as of January 1, 2026 — chicago.gov, amusement tax page
6. The Civic Federation, “What Chicagoans Pay: A Guide to Consumer Taxes in 2026”, May 2026 (combined 12% in-person amusement burden) — civicfed.org, Chicago consumer tax report
7. Minnesota Department of Revenue, “Admissions and Amusement Devices”, updated August 9, 2023, with Minnesota Rules 8130.0900 — revenue.state.mn.us, admissions and amusement devices
8. Bloomington City Code 4.42, special area taxes around the Mall of America (admissions up to 1%, food and beverages up to 3%), summarized in the Bloomington tax rate guide, accessed October 2026 — legalclarity.org, Bloomington tax rates
9. City of Pittsburgh, Office of the City Treasurer, “Amusement Tax” (5% of gross admission charge, Section 241) — pittsburghpa.gov, taxes page
10. HM Revenue and Customs, “Great British Summer Savings” (5% window 25 June to 1 September 2026, AirHop listed), June 2026; with ICAEW, “Three things that may surprise you about the summer holiday VAT cut”, June 2026 — icaew.com, summer holiday VAT cut
11. Vertex Inc., “No Concert in the Park for Summer Taxes” (state-by-state admission taxability summary) — vertexinc.com, admission taxability