Trampoline Park Liability: One Missing Barrier, 70% Fault
On 28 October 2026 the Legal Daily, the newspaper published by China’s Ministry of Justice, printed three case summaries from the Beijing Shunyi District Court. All three involve children injured at paid leisure venues. The court allocated fault three ways: 100% to the venue, 70%, and 40%.
The middle case is the one worth reading twice. A 14-year-old boy was jumping in what the court calls a trampoline basketball area when a basketball rolled in from the neighbouring zone and he fell. He fractured the proximal tibia of his right leg and was assessed at grade 9 on China’s ten-grade disability scale, where grade 1 is the most severe. The court ordered the operator to pay 70% of ¥301,806.42.
The operator had argued for 20% to 25%. It pointed to signs at the front desk and around the floor, and to safety coaches on patrol. Nobody pushed the boy. He fell on his own.
None of that decided the case. A single finding about the building did: the operator had combined trampoline and basketball in one space and had installed no internal barrier to keep the basketballs from rolling, which meant, in the court’s words, that the facility’s configuration did not meet safety standards.
Two things need stating before we go further. The three judgments were issued in June 2025, December 2025 and February 2026, and the paper obtained them from the court in September 2026. The publication on 28 October is what is new, not the rulings. And the amounts are the court’s, in renminbi, which we have not converted, because the ratio is the transferable part and the currency is not.
This matters to an owner in Texas or Manchester for a reason that has nothing to do with Chinese law. Almost every new indoor venue now sells one wristband across four or five activities, and the question the Shunyi court asked has no border: what physically stops the object from crossing into the jumping area?
1. The three judgments, side by side
The court released the cases as a set, which makes them more useful than a single verdict. Same court, three judgments inside nine months, three different apportionments. Read the last column first: the smallest award is roughly 75 times smaller than the largest, and the gap is not explained by how badly the children were hurt.
| Venue and incident | Who was injured | Judgment | Fault split | Award |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hotel spa pool. A tile in the pool cut a foot; the wound needed eight stitches and a follow-up at a plastic surgery clinic. March 2025. | A minor, with family present | June 2025 | Venue 100% | ¥12,048.22 |
| Trampoline park. A basketball rolled in from the adjacent activity; the jumper fell in the trampoline basketball area. March 2024. | A 14-year-old, with two classmates and no adult | December 2025 | Operator 70% / injured party 30% | ¥301,806.42 |
| Soft play area inside a commercial building. A child running fast fell; fractured radial neck. No grip socks, mother watching from outside the enclosure. August 2025. | A 6-year-old, mother on site | February 2026 | Venue 40% / family 60% | ¥4,009.41 |
The spa case is the simplest and therefore the most instructive about where courts put the line. The hotel argued that part of the child’s medical costs had already been reimbursed by social insurance and a commercial policy, so those sums were not a real loss. The court rejected that in one line of reasoning: insurance reimbursement and tort damages are different legal relationships. Full liability, ¥12,048.22.
Translation for operators: the bill you pay is not reduced by whatever the family’s own insurance already covered. If your model of risk is that the health system absorbs most of it, the model is wrong.
The trampoline case also shows how the court graded the venues themselves. A hotel spa, a trampoline park and a soft play enclosure are all public places with a duty of safety care, but the court treated the mixed activity park as the one with the heaviest obligation, because the activities inside it produce risks that overlap. Same statute, different weight.
What is not in these judgments: the operator in the trampoline case is not named, the floor area is not given, and no layout, net height or zone drawing is published. We are not going to reconstruct one. Everything below is built from what the court actually wrote, not from an imagined floor plan.
2. The 70% case: what the operator argued, and why it lost
The defence was, on its face, reasonable. Notices at the front desk and at several points on the floor stated that minors must be accompanied by an adult. Safety coaches were on the floor. The plaintiff had been jumping on his own, with no external force and no other person involved. On that basis the company offered to accept 20% to 25% of the damages.
The boy’s account was the mirror image. He had visited the same park before and had never been required to bring an adult. On the day of the incident nobody told him anything. The floor was chaotic and he saw no staff keeping order or giving instructions.
The court divided responsibility in the direction that surprises operators. It accepted that a 14-year-old has limited capacity for civil conduct, had entered a risky area on his own initiative, and had failed to notice and avoid what was happening around him. That is the 30%. Then it gave the operator the other 70%, and the reasons were structural rather than behavioural.
Two findings carried the weight. The first is about the building: combining trampoline and basketball in one space without an internal barrier to stop balls rolling around. The second is about execution: safety briefing and on-floor instruction were, in the court’s phrase, a formality.
Note the order. The court did not begin with the staff and work backwards to the floor. It began with the floor, then treated the staff as evidence about whether the floor’s intended controls were actually running. That sequence is the argument of this article, and it is not a Chinese peculiarity.
2.1 The sentence to put in a design brief
The judge’s closing comment is the part to copy. Operators who place trampolining, basketball and climbing in one space, the judge said, create overlapping risks, and their safety obligation is therefore far higher than that of an ordinary entertainment venue. Their fault consequently weighs more than an ordinary lapse of attention by the injured party. The remedy the judge named runs in a specific order: facility design, zonal separation, active monitoring. Design first.
Read that as a cost statement rather than a moral one. Every activity you add behind the same ticket raises the standard you will be measured against, and the measurement starts with the drawing. The revenue per square metre goes up. So does the exposure per seam.
2.2 What the defence did not include
The reported defence rests on notices and coaches. A signed waiver does not appear in it. That absence is worth noticing, because in several markets the waiver is the first thing an operator reaches for after an incident, and it is the weakest document in the file when the complaint is about how the building was arranged. A waiver records that a guest accepted a known risk. It does not answer the question of whether the layout created a risk the guest could not see.
3. How a floor plan becomes evidence
Most injury litigation is about acts: who was watching, who ran, who blew the whistle. This judgment is about a static property of the building. There was no barrier. That is a fact you can photograph, and it exists whether or not anybody was on shift.
That is why the case should worry owners who have never set foot in China. A plaintiff does not need to prove that a member of staff did something wrong if the layout itself can be described as unsafe. In the Shunyi case the description was one clause long: no internal barrier against rolling balls. An expert, an insurer or a lawyer can produce the same clause from a floor plan in any country.
There is a second reason the case travels. Mixed tickets are now the default commercial model. A slide park sells slides plus a ninja course plus an arcade plus a trampoline court on one admission. Each addition improves revenue per m² of floor and each one adds a seam where a moving object or a moving body crosses from one risk regime into another. The exposure does not come from the number of attractions. It comes from the seams between them.
Put bluntly: if you stack activities, the drawing is the argument. Not the staffing roster, not the signage package, not the waiver. Those are read afterwards, and they are read as evidence about whether the drawing was meant to work.
For a worked example of how much a layout decision costs before anything is built, the 22,000 sq ft layout breakdown shows the same venue size allocated two different ways and what each allocation does to circulation.
4. What a warning sign is actually worth
The third case answers this with unusual clarity. A 6-year-old entered a soft play area without the grip socks the venue required. His mother stayed outside the enclosure and shared supervision with friends. He ran, fell and fractured the radial neck. The venue pointed to signs reading “wet floor” and “children must be accompanied”.
The court still put 40% on the venue. The reasoning turned on two omissions that had nothing to do with the signs: staff did not stop a child from entering without socks, and there was no staff presence on the floor keeping order. The signs had discharged the duty to inform. They had not discharged the duty to enforce.
The judge added a point that cuts the other way, and it should be quoted to any owner who assumes the operator always pays: a child being hurt on the premises does not automatically mean compensation, and the guardian’s statutory duty does not transfer to the venue. Here the family carried 60%.
What survives is a test you can apply to your own operation. For every rule you publish, ask what physical or recorded action enforces it at the point where it can still change the outcome.
- Grip socks: enforced at the gate, in one motion, by a person. Not on a poster inside.
- Adult accompaniment: checked when the wristband is issued, with the age band recorded against the ticket.
- One jumper per bed, no double bouncing: enforced from a post that can see the bed, and written into a log that records what was stopped rather than how many rounds were walked.
That last distinction is the one that decides cases. A patrol sheet with hourly ticks proves somebody walked. A sheet that says two children were stopped from double bouncing on bed 6 at 14:20 proves a control was running. The second is evidence; the first is decoration. The record-keeping requirements that inspectors now ask for in several US states follow the same logic, which is why the two problems are usually solved in one pass.
5. Where this reasoning travels, and where it stops
Now the boundary, because it would be dishonest to present a Beijing district court judgment as a rule for your market.
The court applied the Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China. Article 1198 places a duty of safety care on the operator or manager of business premises and public venues, with liability where that duty is not met. Article 1173 reduces the operator’s liability where the injured party’s own fault contributed to the harm. That is Chinese law, applied by a Chinese court, and it binds nobody outside China.
Other jurisdictions reach the same arithmetic by different routes. In New York, the comparative fault statute provides that a claimant’s culpable conduct, where it was a substantial factor in causing the harm, reduces the claim in proportion rather than barring it outright. Most US states and the UK work through some version of the same mechanism. The percentages will differ; the existence of a percentage split will not.
The technical standards do something narrower, and it is important not to ask them for more than they do. ASTM F2970 covers commercial trampoline courts. EN ISO 23659 covers trampoline parks. ASTM F1918 covers soft contained play equipment. Each defines scope, terms and requirements inside its own remit, and each is written for the equipment and the court rather than for the question of what sits beside it.
No clause in any of those documents will tell you where to place a basketball hoop relative to a trampoline bed. That decision belongs to a designer, and it is precisely the kind of decision that gets reconstructed after an incident by somebody who was not in the room. Nor do the standards substitute for one another: a court built and tested to an ASTM standard is not thereby compliant with a European standard, and an operator who mixes the two in a tender document is telling every supplier that nobody has read either.
The part that does travel is the question. Every regulator, insurer and plaintiff’s expert eventually asks a version of it: what stops the projectile? The answer is a drawing, not a policy. Our standards overview sets out which framework applies where, without claiming the frameworks are interchangeable.
6. Drawing the energy gradient: six decisions, in order
The useful output of the Shunyi judgment is not a compliance checklist. It is a sequence. Mixed venues fail at the seams because the seam is nobody’s line item, and the way to fix that is to decide the seams before the equipment list is frozen. Here is the order that works, from the least reversible decision to the most.
6.1 Sort by energy, then by what the activity throws
Most operators sort activities by popularity or by age band. Sort them twice instead: once by kinetic energy, meaning contact, height and fall distance, and once by whether the activity produces a projectile.
The dangerous adjacency is not high energy next to high energy. Those zones are usually separated by rules, marshals and visible risk. The dangerous adjacency is high energy next to a low-energy zone that throws something, because the projectile arrives without warning and the person in the air cannot react to it. That is the geometry of the case: jumping is a two-footed, committed action, and a rolling ball is silent.
| Adjacency | What crosses the seam | What has to be physical |
|---|---|---|
| Trampoline beds next to basketball or football | A ball, rolling or bouncing, at ankle to knee height | Ball-stop threshold at the boundary plus netting on the open sides |
| Trampoline beds next to ball pit or foam block area | Loose foam cubes and balls kicked out by jumpers | Solid low wall or full-height net, not a soft rail |
| Climbing or ropes above a walkway | Falls, dropped hardware, harness parts | Exclusion of the walkway beneath, or a catch deck |
| Airbag or foam pit exit next to a circulation route | A body at speed, still out of control at the bottom | Exit run-out that does not point at a crossing path |
| Toddler zone next to junior or adult zones | Older children moving fast through a low-speed area | Physical gate with a supervised opening, not a change of floor colour |
| Arcade next to a jump court | Nothing fast, but a crowd standing at the seam | Setback wide enough that spectators sit outside the fall zone |
6.2 Draw the throw envelope before you place the hoop
A basketball leaves the hand on an arc and lands somewhere. The horizontal reach of that arc, measured from the rim and adjusted for banked shots off the backboard, defines two things: how high the netting must be at the boundary, and where the ball-stop threshold goes on the floor.
We are deliberately not printing a number here. Rim height, ceiling height, court depth and the distance from the key to the boundary all move the answer, and a figure copied from another project is worse than no figure because it looks considered. What matters is that the calculation is done per project, written down, and handed to the netting supplier as a drawing rather than a request.
6.3 Make the boundary a hard edge
A floor decal, a change of surface, a low foam rail and a line of cones do not stop a rolling ball. A ball-stop threshold at the boundary does, and so does netting on the open sides. The threshold is also the element most likely to appear in the incident file, because it is either there or it is not there.
6.4 Do not share a run-up path
Two impact zones should not share a sprint lane. Corners are where a running child and a falling body arrive at the same moment, and a corner is where a designer is most tempted to save floor area. The saving is real and the cost arrives later, in a claim and in a zone that has to close while the fix goes in.
6.5 Fix the patrol post by sightline, not by headcount
Choose the position from which one person can see the seam between the two highest-energy zones. If no such position exists, the seam is unsupervised no matter how many staff you hire. This is the same problem as blind spots created by columns, mirrors and partitions, covered in the supervision blind spots analysis, and it is cheaper to solve on paper than on a ladder.
6.6 Move enforcement to the gate
Socks, height, age band and accompaniment should be decided at entry, in one motion, by a person who has the authority to refuse. Everything after the wristband is issued is supervision, and supervision is the weakest form of control in a courtroom because it depends on a human being watching the right square metre at the right second.
7. The line item that disappears from the budget
Here is the structural problem, and it is why this keeps happening to well-run companies.
Netting, ball-stop thresholds, gates and exclusion decks are site works. They are not in the equipment invoice, which quotes beds, slides, pits and structures. They are not in the fit-out quote, which covers ceiling, flooring, lighting and decoration. Each supplier assumes the other has it. The item that exists in neither document is the item that gets value-engineered out, and it is the item the court described as missing.
The fix is procedural rather than technical. Put a single line in the tender called activity separation works, reference a drawing, and require each bidder either to price it or to exclude it in writing. An explicit exclusion is information. Silence is how the barrier disappears.
On cost, we will not give you a unit rate, because netting and steel thresholds vary by supplier, country and fire rating, and a number invented here would be repeated in somebody’s investment model. What can be said without inventing anything is the shape of the comparison: the Shunyi award was ¥301,806.42 for one injury, before the operator’s own legal costs and before whatever the insurer did to the premium at renewal. The barrier is measured in linear metres and installed before the floor is finished.
There is a second reader of that line item, and most owners meet them late: the underwriter. Commercial liability proposals for indoor venues ask for the activity mix, the layout and the supervision plan. A drawing showing a hard edge where a projectile can cross is easier to price than one showing a colour change. Our guide to the design-to-delivery process puts the separation drawing at concept stage, which is the only point at which it is still free to change.
The retrofit is where the money actually goes. A threshold added before the floor screed is a strip of steel and an hour of labour. The same threshold added after opening means closing the zone, lifting the surface, and in some buildings cutting and re-sealing a floor that was finished to a landlord’s specification. That is the cost nobody puts in the model, and it lands in the month the park can least afford a closed zone.
8. Three things to do before the drawing is fixed
1. Mark every seam on the plan and label what crosses it. Take the current layout and draw a line wherever two activities meet. For each line, write down the object or body that can cross it: a ball, a foam cube, a runner, a falling jumper. Any line with no physical control is a defect you have just found for free.
2. Price the separation works as their own line. Not absorbed into equipment, not absorbed into fit-out. A named line, with a drawing reference, that a quantity surveyor can see and a lender can finance.
3. Change the patrol log from counts to events. The form should ask what was stopped, where and when. That single change turns a supervision programme from an assertion into evidence, and it costs one field on a printed sheet.
If you are at concept stage and want a second pair of eyes on where your activities meet, send the layout and the activity list. We will mark the seams and tell you which ones need a hard edge rather than a rule.
FAQ
Can a trampoline park include a basketball court or hoop area?
Yes, and many do. What the Shunyi judgment penalised was not the combination but the absence of a physical barrier between the two. If a ball can leave the basketball area and reach a jumping bed, the layout has a seam that no amount of signage closes.
How far should a basketball hoop be from a trampoline bed?
There is no universal figure, and any supplier who gives you one without asking about ceiling height, rim height and court depth is guessing. The distance is derived from the flight arc of the ball plus a margin for banked shots, and it is calculated per project. What you can specify is that the calculation exists and is drawn.
Does a warning sign protect a trampoline park from liability?
It satisfies the duty to inform, not the duty to enforce. In the third Shunyi case the venue had posted wet floor and accompaniment notices and still carried 40% of the damages, because staff had not stopped a child entering without grip socks and nobody was on the floor keeping order.
Does a mixed-activity ticket change a venue’s insurance position?
It changes what underwriters ask for. Proposals for indoor venues typically request the activity mix, the layout and the supervision plan, and the separation between activities is part of how the risk is priced. Ask your broker before the drawing is final, not after the policy is bound.
Do ASTM F2970 or EN ISO 23659 require barriers between activities?
No. ASTM F2970 addresses commercial trampoline courts, EN ISO 23659 addresses trampoline parks, and ASTM F1918 addresses soft contained play equipment, each within its own scope. None of them decides what sits next to what. Zone separation is a design decision the standards leave to the designer and the operator.
Sources
- Legal Daily (Fazhi Ribao), “Child Play Safety and Clearly Defined Liability”, 28 October 2026. legaldaily.com.cn
- Legal Daily print edition, page 06, 28 October 2026, same report. epaper.legaldaily.com.cn
- People’s Rule of Law Network (Renmin Fazhi Wang), reprint of the same report, October 2026. rmfzw.org.cn
- Civil Code of the People’s Republic of China, Article 1198 (duty of safety care) and Article 1173 (reduction of liability for the injured party’s own fault), as quoted in the report above.
- ASTM International, F2970 standard for trampoline courts, scope and designation. astm.org
- International Organization for Standardization, ISO 23659 for trampoline parks, scope. iso.org
- US Consumer Product Safety Commission, Public Playground Safety Handbook, publication 325. cpsc.gov
- New York Civil Practice Law and Rules, Article 14-A, section 1411 (comparative negligence). nysenate.gov