Trampoline Park Break-Even: 151 Visits a Day to Cover Costs

A 31,512 sq ft (2,928 m²) trampoline park in Arlington, Texas, filed a declared construction cost of $1,200,000 with the state regulator in February 2026. That number is public. Its rent is not. Its attendance is not. Its ticket revenue is not.

So the useful question is not what the box cost to build. It is how many people have to walk through the door before the box stops consuming money.

Three of the lines that answer that question can be built from public averages: rent, supervision labor and electricity. Stacked for this floor area, they come to $1,053,414 a year, and the park pays that whether or not anyone jumps.

Divide the stack by what a single visitor leaves behind after variable costs, and a floor appears: 123 admissions a day with no debt, 151 a day if the fit-out was financed with a $1.5 million loan priced at the SBA ceiling.

The rest of this article is the arithmetic, the inputs behind each line, the cost lines it deliberately leaves out, and the rules that follow from the result.

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1. The box, and the four numbers that fix everything else

The project record is a good anchor because it is a filing, not a press release. The Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation lists a 31,512 sq ft indoor trampoline facility with a declared construction cost of $1,200,000, registered on 19 February 2026 and declaring completion on 15 July 2026. That works out to $38.08 of declared fit-out per sq ft.

The filing says nothing about rent, staffing, ticket price or attendance. Those have to come from somewhere else, which is why the model needs four inputs and no more.

• Floor area. 31,512 sq ft sets rent and the electricity baseline. It also sets the ceiling on how many people can be inside at once, which turns out to be far less interesting than it sounds.
• Open hours. 72 hours a week, or 3,744 a year, taken from a comparable park’s posted schedule. Hours drive labor and almost nothing else.
• Supervision posts. Three concurrent staffed positions, or one per 10,504 sq ft. This is a lean reading of the staffing density used in our analysis of labor cost per square foot.
• Revenue per check-in. $29.08, the only revenue figure here that comes from an operator’s own disclosure rather than an assumption.

The 72-hour schedule is not a detail. A park that opens 60 hours a week instead of 72 saves $36,176 in wages and still pays the same rent. That asymmetry runs through everything below.

Why this floor area: 31,512 sq ft is not a typical size, it is a documented one. Every dollar figure here scales with area, so a 45,000 sq ft box should be recalculated rather than extrapolated, and a 22,000 sq ft box likewise. The equipment layout breakdown for a 22,000 sq ft park shows how differently the same budget spreads across zones.

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2. The fixed stack: $1.05 million before the first ticket

2.1 Rent at the national average, not at this park’s lease

What it is CBRE’s second-quarter 2026 retail figures put the United States average asking rent at $24.79 per sq ft a year. Multiplied by 31,512 sq ft, that is $781,182 a year, or $208.65 for every hour the doors are open.

What it decides Rent is 74% of the fixed stack in this model, which is why the same building program produces a workable park in one market and an impossible one in another. The mechanics of that gap are worked through in our rent cost comparison.

What to verify An asking rent is not a signed rent. Concessions, tenant improvement allowances and free-rent months all change year one, and none of them appear in an average.

2.2 Supervision labor: 3,744 hours times three posts

What it is The Bureau of Labor Statistics puts the May 2025 median wage for recreation workers (SOC 39-3091) at $15.46 an hour. The June 2026 Employer Costs for Employee Compensation release puts part-time benefits at a 1.25 load. A staffed hour therefore costs $19.33, and three posts across 3,744 open hours cost $217,058.

What it decides Labor is the only line in the stack that moves with the clock, and it is 21% of the total. It is also the line most often understated at the planning stage, because three posts sounds like a small team until it is multiplied by the hours.

What to verify State wage medians vary by a factor of 1.4, from $12.78 in Texas to $17.79 in California in the same release. Substituting a state median changes the stack by tens of thousands.

2.3 Electricity: 381,295 kWh at the national average

What it is The 2018 Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey puts mean electricity intensity for public assembly buildings at 12.1 kWh per sq ft a year. Applied to 31,512 sq ft that is 381,295 kWh. The August 2026 Electric Power Monthly average commercial price of 14.47 cents gives $55,173.

What it decides Energy is only 5% of the fixed stack, but the state you build in moves it by a factor of three: $34,164 in Texas at 8.96 cents, $114,465 in California at 30.02 cents. The full derivation, including demand charges, is in our electricity intensity analysis.

What to verify CBECS is a building-stock survey, not a park survey. It includes libraries and places of worship. A jumping floor with mechanical cooling will run above the public assembly mean, because the cooling load is large enough to deserve its own calculation.

Converted to a single year, the three lines read as follows. The per-hour column is the one worth internalising, because it is what an empty Tuesday morning costs.

Two hundred eighty-one dollars an hour is the number to hold on to. It is not the break-even figure, because it ignores what a visitor costs to serve, but it is the rate at which the building drains money while the parking lot is empty.

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3. What a visit leaves behind

Revenue per check-in has to come from a disclosed figure, not a guess. The McAlester, Oklahoma park operated by Lelantos Holdings reported $243,079.27 in total revenue across 8,360 check-ins in July 2026. That is $29.08 of revenue per entry, measured at a real front desk.

Revenue is not contribution. Three costs move with each visitor and have to come out before the money can be applied to rent.

Card processing is the first. At the published Stripe rate of 2.9% plus 30 cents, a $29.08 transaction costs $1.14, which is 3.93% of the sale. That is a small line per visit and a five-figure line per year; the fixed-fee alternative is costed in our card fee breakdown.

Food and beverage is the second, and it is larger than most first-time operators expect. Food and beverage accounted for 34.1% of McAlester’s revenue in the same disclosure. If cost of goods on that line is 30%, the goods cost is 10.2% of total revenue. That 30% is an assumption about margin, not a disclosed figure.

Consumables and other variable items add roughly 0.9%. Sales tax is deliberately excluded, because a tax collected on behalf of a state is not revenue; at the rates charged in some US cities it can exceed $2 on a single ticket, as the per-ticket tax comparison shows.

That gives a variable cost ratio of 15.1% and a contribution of $24.72 per check-in. Insurance is then charged per admission rather than per year, using the $0.32 to $1.59 range that broker guidance implies for a park of this type. At the $0.95 midpoint, contribution net of insurance is $23.77.

The one-line version: a $29.08 check-in contributes $23.77. Everything below divides a fixed stack by that number.

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4. The attendance floor, and what debt does to it

Break-even attendance is the fixed stack divided by contribution per visit. On an all-equity build, that is $1,053,414 divided by $23.77, or 44,321 admissions a year. Spread across 360 trading days, that is 123 a day.

Almost no trampoline park of this size is built all-equity. A $1.5 million SBA 7(a) loan over ten years, the maximum maturity for leasehold improvements and equipment, costs $237,871 a year at the program ceiling of prime plus three points, which is 10.00% with prime at 7.00%. A lender pricing at prime plus one, 8.00%, would charge $218,390. Those two cases lift the floor to 149 and 151 admissions a day. Why the rate matters less than the term is set out in the annual cost of a park loan.

The leveraged park has to turn $50.14 of revenue per sq ft before it has paid rent, wages, power and the bank. At a reference rate of 2.0 visits per sq ft a year, which is an assumption rather than a measurement and produces 63,024 visits, the floor is 86% of the reference volume.

That is the finding worth arguing with. A financed 31,512 sq ft park does not break even at a comfortable fraction of a normal trading year. It breaks even near the top of one, before maintenance, marketing, royalties or property tax have been charged.

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5. What the data does and does not show

The model shows three things with reasonable confidence. It shows the size of the fixed commitment per open hour. It shows how much of the stack is rent. It also shows the arithmetic that converts those two facts into a daily headcount.

It does not show this park’s economics. The TDLR filing does not disclose rent, attendance, pricing, staffing levels or capital structure, and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Every figure above is a national average applied to a documented floor area, which makes it a template rather than a case study.

Four cost lines are missing entirely, and each one raises the floor.

• Maintenance and spare parts. No public dataset reports what a trampoline park spends on bed replacement, padding, springs or airbags per year. We are not going to invent a percentage.
• Marketing. Franchise disclosure documents carry advertising fund percentages, but those apply to franchisees and are not verified here, so they are excluded rather than estimated.
• Royalties. A franchised park pays a continuing fee on gross revenue. An independent park does not. The two should never be compared on the same floor.
• Property tax and business personal property tax. These are assessed locally, and the treatment of equipment as taxable personal property varies by state.

Three assumptions also carry more weight than the rest. The 2.0 visits per sq ft reference rate is not measured anywhere. The 30% food and beverage cost of goods is a planning assumption. The three-post staffing level is a reading of a density range rather than a compliance requirement, and a park with a large under-five zone would staff differently.

There is no causal claim in this article. Parks with high attendance do not succeed because of attendance; they succeed because a location, a price and a cost base line up. The model prices the cost base and leaves the other two to the operator.

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6. Capacity is not the constraint

Run the floor backward and the physical requirement looks small. At 151 admissions a day over 12 open hours, the park needs 12.6 entries an hour. At 90-minute sessions that is eight sessions a day and roughly 19 jumpers per session.

Nineteen people spread across 31,512 sq ft works out to one jumper per 1,660 sq ft. Any commercial trampoline court will hold that. A single supervision post covers it at the one-monitor-per-20-jumpers ratio used in industry guidance, which means the three-post assumption in this model is already generous.

This matters for the build decision more than any other finding. If the constraint were capacity, the answer would be more floor. Since the constraint is demand at a given price, the answer is often less floor: a 22,000 sq ft box at the same rent per sq ft carries 24% less fixed cost and breaks even at 94 admissions a day instead of 123.

The equipment plan should follow that logic rather than lead it. Zones that raise revenue per check-in, such as party rooms and a food line, earn their space. Zones that only add capacity earn nothing until the queue exists.

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7. Where the floor moves, and where it does not

7.1 Rent moves it most

Keeping every other input constant, the same park at $15 per sq ft needs 87 visits a day to break even without debt, and at $7.65 per sq ft, an industrial rent CBRE reported for the same quarter, it needs 60. The gap between the retail average and an industrial box is 22,724 visits a year. Industrial space is often not zoned for assembly use, so the comparison is a ceiling on the saving rather than a recommendation.

7.2 Hours barely move it

Cutting the schedule from 72 hours to 60 saves $36,176 in wages and lowers the floor from 44,321 visits to 42,799, a change of 3.4%. Extending to 84 hours adds $36,177 and raises the floor to 45,843. Rent, which is 74% of the stack, does not care what time it is.

7.3 Price moves it in a straight line

At a lower revenue per check-in the floor climbs steeply, because the fixed stack does not shrink with the price. The grid below holds rent at the retail average and varies the two inputs an operator controls: what a visit is worth and how much of it is consumed by variable cost.

7.4 The average hour and the marginal hour are different prices

This is the part that changes behavior. The average open hour carries $281.36 of fixed cost, because rent is spread across all of them. The marginal open hour does not. Adding one hour on a quiet weekday costs one supervision post at $19.33 plus about $1.17 of incremental electricity, or $20.50 in total.

At $23.77 of contribution per visit, that hour pays for itself at 0.86 admissions. A single family of three at full price covers it with room to spare. The same arithmetic explains why a discount on a slot that would otherwise be empty is rational and a discount on a Saturday afternoon is not: the Saturday hour is already being paid for by someone else’s admission, and the discount simply moves that admission to a lower price.

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8. Decision rules you can apply before you sign

The model does not produce a forecast, and it should not. It produces four thresholds that a business plan can be tested against.

First, size the marketing budget against the floor, not against the fit-out. A park that needs 54,329 visits to cover rent, wages, power and debt needs 151 a day from the day it opens. Pre-opening spend is the only lever that moves opening-month attendance, and it is usually the first line cut when the equipment quote comes in high.

Second, price the rent before the equipment. Above $24.79 per sq ft the box needs roughly 150 visits a day once financed. At $15 per sq ft it needs 115. That single line is worth more than any equipment choice in the building.

Third, discount hours, never the week. The marginal hour costs $20.50. The average hour costs $281.36. Any promotion should be able to name which of the two it is buying.

Fourth, check the area requirement last. At the break-even volume the park needs 19 jumpers per session. If a smaller box can hold that, the smaller box is the better business, and the layout question becomes how to fit the revenue zones rather than how to fill the floor.

None of this decides whether a specific site works. It decides which questions the site has to answer, and in what order.

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If you are at the stage where the rent is known and the layout is not, the design-to-delivery process starts with floor area and open hours rather than with an equipment list. The trampoline systems are quoted against that brief.

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FAQ

How many visitors a day does a trampoline park need to break even?

For a 31,512 sq ft park at the US average retail rent, about 123 a day covers rent, supervision labor and electricity with no debt. With a $1.5 million ten-year loan at 10%, the figure is about 151 a day. Both numbers exclude maintenance, marketing, royalties and property tax, so a real park needs more.

What revenue per visitor should I use in my own model?

Use a disclosed figure rather than a ticket price. The McAlester park operated by Lelantos Holdings reported $29.08 of revenue per check-in for July 2026, which includes food, parties and retail. A ticket price on its own misses food, parties and retail, which together were 34.1% of revenue in the same disclosure.

Does a trampoline park make its money on tickets or on food and parties?

Both matter, but they matter differently. Tickets carry the fixed cost and food and parties raise revenue per entry. In the McAlester disclosure, food and beverage were 34.1% of revenue, which is why the variable cost ratio in this model is 15% rather than the 4% that card fees alone would suggest.

How much does it cost to open a 30,000 sq ft trampoline park?

The Arlington filing declares $1.2 million of construction for 31,512 sq ft, or $38.08 per sq ft. That is the declared fit-out, not the total project: equipment, design, freight, installation, deposits, working capital and pre-opening marketing sit around it. A plan should carry all of them, and the total will sit well above the construction figure.

Why is rent treated as fixed when some leases charge percentage rent?

Because base rent is what the lease guarantees. Percentage rent, if the lease has it, behaves like a variable cost above a breakpoint and would raise the effective cost per visit rather than the fixed stack. This model uses base rent only, and a lease with percentage rent should be modeled separately.

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Sources

1. Texas Department of Licensing and Regulation, project filing TABS2026013038, registered 19 February 2026, 31,512 sq ft and $1,200,000 declared cost. tdlr.texas.gov
2. CBRE, “U.S. Retail Figures Q2 2026”, average asking rent $24.79 per sq ft, published July 2026. cbre.com
3. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics, May 2025, SOC 39-3091 recreation workers, median $15.46. bls.gov
4. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Employer Costs for Employee Compensation, June 2026, released 9 September 2026, part-time benefit load 1.25. bls.gov
5. U.S. Energy Information Administration, Commercial Buildings Energy Consumption Survey 2018, Table C22, public assembly mean 12.1 kWh per sq ft, released December 2022. eia.gov
6. U.S. Energy Information Administration, Electric Power Monthly Table 5.6.A, August 2026 data released 23 October 2026, US average 14.47 cents per kWh. eia.gov
7. Lelantos Holdings, “Reports $243,079 in unaudited revenue for McAlester’s first full month of operations”, July 2026 disclosure, 8,360 check-ins. lelantosholdings.io
8. Stripe, United States pricing, 2.9% plus 30 cents per online transaction, accessed October 2026. stripe.com
9. U.S. Small Business Administration, 7(a) loan terms, ten-year maximum maturity for leasehold improvements and equipment, rate ceiling of prime plus three points; Federal Reserve H.15 prime rate 7.00% for 23 October 2026. sba.gov