Trampoline Park Staff Turnover: A $116,700 Annual Line Item
Every trampoline park pro forma carries a payroll line. Almost none carries a line for replacing the people who cycle through that payroll every year.
The federal numbers say it should exist. In 2025, the arts, entertainment, and recreation sector recorded an average monthly total separations rate of 6.1 percent, the highest of any US industry and nearly double the all-industry figure of 3.3 percent. Annualized, roughly seven in ten seats turn over.
A park with 30 team members therefore turns over about 22 seats in a year. Each replacement carries a real cost, and the honest range is wide: about $1,000 on a lean bottom-up build, $5,300 under the Work Institute benchmark, $8,000 or more at the low end of the Gallup range.
On a reference park doing 63,024 admissions a year, the middle estimate works out to $1.85 per admission. That is more than electricity costs per visitor, and it sits inside the ticket price as quietly as sales tax.
This article assembles that line item from public data only: Bureau of Labor Statistics turnover surveys, wage tables, and published retention research. Where an input is an assumption rather than a measurement, the text says so.
1. The Three Estimates at a Glance
Start with the destination, then work backward through the arithmetic. Applying the 2025 industry separation rate to a 30-person park produces about 22 departures a year. Each method of pricing one departure gives a different annual bill.
| Method | Cost per departure | Departures per year | Annual total | Per admission | Share of a $19.99 ticket |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bottom-up floor (component build) | $1,007 | 22 | $22,154 | $0.35 | 1.8% |
| Work Institute: 33% of base pay | $5,306 | 22 | $116,732 | $1.85 | 9.3% |
| Gallup: half of annual salary | $8,039 | 22 | $176,858 | $2.81 | 14.0% |
The spread between $22,154 and $176,858 is not noise. It reflects a genuine disagreement in the research about what a departure costs, and the right number for a given park depends on who is leaving. The sections below build each method, state every assumption, and then narrow the range with a distinction that the aggregate benchmarks hide.
Where the reference park comes from: 31,512 sq ft (2,928 m²) leased box, 72 open hours per week, 63,024 annual admissions at the 2.0 visits per sq ft convention used throughout this series. The 30-person headcount is an illustrative staffing model, not a published figure from any operator.
2. What the Federal Data Actually Says
The US Bureau of Labor Statistics runs the Job Openings and Labor Turnover Survey, known as JOLTS, which tracks hires, quits, layoffs and discharges, and other separations across industries. Its annual tables are the only consistent, verifiable turnover record covering the sector that BLS classifies as arts, entertainment, and recreation.
Two series matter. The total separations rate counts every exit: quits, layoffs, discharges, retirements, and transfers. The quits rate counts only voluntary departures. Five years of both, as published in the annual averages:
| Industry | Total separations 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 | 2025 | Quits 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Arts, entertainment, and recreation | 6.6 | 6.3 | 6.2 | 6.1 | 6.1 | 2.2 |
| Accommodation and food services | 7.1 | 7.0 | 6.3 | 5.4 | 5.5 | 4.2 |
| Total private | 4.4 | 4.3 | 4.0 | 3.7 | 3.6 | 2.2 |
| All industries | 3.9 | 3.9 | 3.6 | 3.3 | 3.3 | 2.0 |
Read the units carefully, because this is where most secondary reporting gets it wrong. The figures are monthly rates: 6.1 percent of employment separated in a typical month in 2025, not 6.1 percent across the whole year. Annualized by the usual twelve-month approximation, the sector runs at roughly 73 percent total separations, against about 40 percent for the economy as a whole. The approximation slightly overstates true annual turnover when one job turns over more than once, but the direction is unambiguous: recreation is the most churn-heavy industry the BLS measures.
The second row of that table is the comparison an owner actually faces. Accommodation and food services churns at a similar pace but for a different reason, and the quits column shows it: 4.2 percent of restaurant workers quit each month against 2.2 percent in recreation. In recreation, most of the churn is not people walking out. It is something else, and section 6 shows why that distinction is worth more than any retention program.
The rate has also been stable, which matters for planning. Arts, entertainment, and recreation posted 6.6, 6.3, 6.2, 6.1, and 6.1 across 2021 through 2025. Whatever drove the 2022 quitting spike in the wider economy, this sector barely moved. A park budgeting on these figures is not betting on a cycle turning.
3. What One Departure Costs: Three Ways to Price It
3.1 The bottom-up build
Price each step of replacing one part-time floor attendant and the bill is small but not trivial. The role pays a median of $15.46 per hour (BLS OEWS, May 2025, occupation 39-3091, based on 397,830 employed nationally), and the federal employment cost survey implies a benefits load of about 1.25 for part-time private-sector staff, giving a fully loaded rate of $19.33 per hour.
The components, with every assumption labelled:
| Component | Basis and arithmetic | Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Job advertising | Assumed budget for a standard hourly posting; no published per-role figure exists | $150 |
| Screening and background check | Midpoint of a $30 to $75 range typical for commercial checks | $60 |
| Supervisor time for interviews and scheduling | 6 hours × $23.34, the median for first-line supervisors of entertainment and recreation workers (OEWS 39-1014) | $140 |
| Paid on-the-job training | 20 hours × $19.33; O*NET classifies the occupation as requiring short on-the-job training, so the hours are an assumption | $387 |
| Ramp-up output gap | New hire at roughly 70% productivity for 40 paid hours, so 12 hours of output lost × $19.33 | $232 |
| Separation administration | 2 hours × $19.33 for paperwork and scheduling cleanup | $39 |
| Bottom-up total | Sum of the six components | $1,007 |
Note what the build excludes. It does not count overtime paid to cover vacant shifts, guest experience lost to thin staffing, or the safety risk of an under-supervised court. It also does not count the SHRM cost-per-hire average of $4,700, because that benchmark blends executive hiring ($35,879 per the same report) with entry roles, and an hourly recreation job does not recruit like a director search. The bottom-up number is a floor.
3.2 The percentage benchmarks
The Work Institute, which has tracked voluntary turnover through exit interviews since 2017, conservatively prices one departure at about 33 percent of that person’s annual base pay. Gallup, working across a broader set of roles, puts the full range at one-half to two times annual salary depending on how hard the position is to backfill. Applied to a part-time attendant earning 20 hours a week at the median wage, the arithmetic is:
Annual base pay = 20 h/week × 52 weeks × $15.46 = $16,078. The Work Institute method gives 0.33 × $16,078 = $5,306 per departure. The low end of the Gallup range gives 0.5 × $16,078 = $8,039.
Both benchmarks were built mostly on salaried and full-time workforces, which is why they sit at five to eight times the bottom-up figure. For a role where the wage bill is small and the recruiting process is a posting and a phone screen, they likely overstate. For a park manager or party host lead, they likely understate. The honest use is to treat $1,007, $5,306, and $8,039 as the floor, the center, and the ceiling for different kinds of seats.
4. Turning Rates into an Annual Bill
Now close the loop. The reference park staffs 600 floor hours a week, which is 31,200 paid hours a year. Organized as part-time roles averaging 20 paid hours each, the schedule requires a headcount of 30. At the 2025 sector separation rate, annualized to roughly 73 percent, the park loses about 22 team members a year. Eight of those are quits; the remaining 14 are layoffs, discharges, and other separations, a split that section 6 examines.
Multiply the headcount by the departure cost and the line item appears. The first table in this article shows the result: $22,154 a year on the bottom-up floor, $116,732 under the Work Institute benchmark, $176,858 at the low end of the Gallup range. Dividing by 63,024 annual admissions gives $0.35, $1.85, and $2.81 per visit respectively.
Context makes the middle number land. This series has already priced other per-admission costs from public data. Electricity intensity across US commercial buildings works out to $0.54 to $1.82 per admission depending on the state. Rent at the Q2 2026 CBRE US retail average of $24.79 per sq ft costs the reference park $781,183 a year, or $12.39 per admission. Sales tax on the same ticket ranges from $0 to $2.40 across six cities. Staff turnover, at $1.85 per admission, costs more than the lights and more than the tax line in most of the country.
Against payroll itself, the same number reads differently. Direct wages and benefits for the model come to 31,200 hours × $19.33 = $603,096 a year. Turnover priced by the Work Institute method adds roughly 19 percent on top of that payroll before a single party booking is counted, and the party analysis in this series already showed how thin the margin on booked groups runs. The full labor cost analysis, which built $72,389 per staffed post per year, never carried this addition, and neither do most park pro formas.
5. What the Data Does and Does Not Show
The JOLTS series covers the arts, entertainment, and recreation sector as a whole, NAICS 71. That bucket includes stadiums, museums, gambling venues, guide services, and independent artists alongside trampoline parks. The BLS does not publish a separate turnover series for family entertainment centers, so the 6.1 percent monthly rate is a sector proxy, not a measured park figure. No operator examined in this series has published its own separation rate either.
The twelve-month approximation also carries a known bias. Multiplying a monthly rate by twelve overstates annual turnover when one position turns over more than once a year, which is common in seasonal recreation. The true share of seats churning annually sits somewhat below 73 percent, and BLS itself does not publish a corrected figure.
On the cost side, the gaps are wider. The federal data counts separations but assigns them no cost. The 33 percent benchmark comes from exit-interview analysis skewed toward larger employers and salaried staff, and the report itself calls the figure conservative rather than precise. The Gallup range was never built for part-time recreation roles. The bottom-up build is transparent but rests on four labelled assumptions: advertising spend, screening cost, training hours, and the ramp-up curve. None of these has an industry-published value for trampoline parks.
One more boundary deserves an explicit statement. Correlation is not causation here: nothing in the data shows that a park with lower churn earns more, and nothing shows that pay raises reduce separations by any specific amount. What the data does show is the pace of churn and the structure of its cost. The decisions those numbers support are the subject of the next two sections.
6. The Split That Matters: Quits Versus Seasonal Separations
The single most useful fact in the JOLTS tables for a trampoline park owner is the gap between the two rates. In 2025 the sector separated 6.1 percent of employment in a typical month, but only 2.2 percent of it quit. The remaining 3.9 points are layoffs, discharges, and other separations, and in a recreation business most of that is seasonal: parks staff up for summer and holidays and shed hours after them. The federal series cannot split that gap further, but its size leaves little room for another explanation.
| Separation type | Monthly rate basis | Annualized share | Of 30 team members | Nature |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Voluntary quits | 2.2% | About 26% | About 8 | Manageable through retention |
| Layoffs, discharges, other | 3.9 points | About 47% | About 14 | Structural, driven by seasonality |
This inverts the usual advice. Retention research, including the Work Institute finding that 63 percent of exits are preventable and that 40 percent of all turnover happens in the first year, describes workforces that mostly resemble offices and healthcare. A trampoline park faces the mirror image: the majority of its churn is employer-initiated by design, because the demand curve is seasonal. Treating all 22 departures as a retention failure wastes money; treating them as a scheduling problem addresses the actual cause.
The corollary is that only about eight seats a year are worth retention spending. If a structured onboarding process, which the first-year research identifies as the highest-leverage intervention, cut voluntary quits in half, the park would avoid four departures. At the Work Institute price that saves about $21,200 a year, which happens to be nearly the entire bottom-up annual estimate. Retention programs should be evaluated against the eight, not against the 22.
7. Decision Rules for an Owner
The numbers above convert into a small set of if-then rules rather than a prediction. Each rule states its condition, so it can be checked against a specific park before being applied.
- If your staff is mostly part-time students on seasonal schedules, budget the bottom-up floor, $0.35 per projected admission, and treat the remaining churn as a scheduling line, not a retention line. The Work Institute percentage was never built for this workforce.
- If you carry career-track seats such as party hosts, shift leads, and a park manager, apply the 33 percent benchmark to those salaries specifically. A $48,560 supervisor role (the OEWS median for 39-1014) implies a $16,025 departure cost, and replacing one of those is worth more than replacing ten attendants.
- If you are writing a pro forma for lenders, carry turnover at $1.00 to $1.85 per projected admission as a contingency line between the payroll and utilities rows. A lender treats a model that accounts for churn as a sign of operational competence.
- Before funding a retention program, price it against the eight quits, not against the total. A program that costs more than four to six avoided departures cannot clear the Work Institute bar, and the bottom-up floor makes the bar even lower.
- Before giving everyone a raise, run the same arithmetic on the raise. An extra $1.00 per hour across 31,200 model hours costs $31,200 a year and only pays for itself if it prevents about six departures at the benchmark price. That is a defensible bet for supervisors and party leads and a hard one for short-tenure summer staff.
- If your opening is approaching, weight the first hiring wave most heavily. With roughly 40 percent of turnover happening in year one, the team hired in the first months carries most of the risk, and the carry-cost analysis for delayed openings already showed what idle, staffed facilities cost per week.
One honest admission closes the list. How churn interacts with safety performance is genuinely unknown: no published study links park-level separation rates to injury rates, even though both series exist. A park that wants to know should track its own two numbers side by side for a year, because the federal data cannot answer that question.
8. Three Things You Can Do Today
1. Compute your own monthly separation rate. Divide departures in a typical month by headcount and compare the result against 6.1 percent monthly for the sector and 3.3 percent nationally. A park running above the sector figure has a problem the pro forma has been hiding; a park running below it can relax its retention spending.
2. Split your exits into quits and schedule-driven separations. Two columns, updated monthly. Everything on the quits side is eligible for retention spending; everything on the other side belongs in the staffing calendar. The labor cost model in this series gives the per-post annual price to use for both.
3. Put the line in the pro forma. Add $0.35 to $1.85 per projected admission between payroll and utilities, labelled as a turnover contingency. When you review the model with a lender or a landlord, the line invites better questions than its absence does. For a fitted cost model on a real box, ask for the operating worksheets that accompany a design quote.
FAQ
How much does it cost to replace a trampoline park employee?
For a part-time attendant, a transparent component build covering advertising, screening, supervisor time, training, ramp-up, and administration totals about $1,007. The Work Institute benchmark of 33 percent of annual base pay prices the same role at $5,306, and the low end of the Gallup range gives $8,039. For supervisors and managers, the percentage benchmarks apply to much larger salaries, so the cost per departure rises accordingly.
What is the employee turnover rate in the entertainment and recreation industry?
BLS JOLTS data for 2025 shows an average monthly total separations rate of 6.1 percent for arts, entertainment, and recreation, the highest of any US industry, against 3.3 percent across all industries. Annualized, that is roughly 70 to 75 percent of seats per year. The sector has held between 6.1 and 6.6 percent monthly every year since 2021.
How many staff does a 30,000 sq ft trampoline park need?
No public dataset answers this directly, and layouts differ. A reasonable planning model for a 31,512 sq ft (2,928 m²) box open 72 hours a week is about 600 staffed floor hours per week, which is equivalent to roughly 30 team members averaging 20 paid hours each. Weekday off-peak shifts run two to four staff while weekend peaks need far more; the hourly coverage, not the headcount, is the number to plan around.
Are trampoline park employees mostly part time?
The federal evidence points that way. BLS occupational profiles note that attendant work is often seasonal and part time, and O*NET lists no formal educational credential and only short on-the-job training for the occupation. The JOLTS split confirms the pattern indirectly: recreation has the highest total separations rate of any industry but one of the lowest quit rates, which is the signature of seasonal scheduling rather than dissatisfied career staff.
How can a trampoline park reduce staff turnover costs?
Target the voluntary slice first. Only about a third of sector separations are quits, and structured onboarding is the highest-leverage intervention because roughly 40 percent of all turnover happens in the first year. Halving quits saves about $21,200 a year at the benchmark price in a 30-person park. The remainder is seasonal churn, which scheduling, cross-training, and an honest staffing calendar address more cheaply than any retention program.
Sources
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, JOLTS Table 20, “Annual average total separations rates by industry and region, not seasonally adjusted,” 2021–2025 data, revised March 13, 2026 — bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t20.htm
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, JOLTS Table 22, “Annual average quits rates by industry and region, not seasonally adjusted,” 2021–2025 data, revised March 13, 2026 — bls.gov/news.release/jolts.t22.htm
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS May 2025, occupation 39-3091, Amusement and Recreation Attendants (397,830 employed; median $15.46 per hour) — bls.gov/oes/2025/may/oes393091.htm
- U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, OEWS May 2025 national news release, occupation 39-1014, First-Line Supervisors of Entertainment and Recreation Workers, Except Gambling Services (median $23.34 per hour) — bls.gov/news.release/pdf/ocwage.pdf
- Work Institute, 2025 Retention Report, as summarized in ASIS International Security Management, April 2025 (33 percent of base pay; 63 percent of exits preventable; 40 percent of turnover in year one) — asisonline.org
- Gallup and Work Institute turnover cost ranges, as summarized in Business.com, “Tips and Tricks for Staffing Your Business” — business.com/articles/how-to-staff-business
- SHRM Human Capital Benchmarking figures ($4,700 average non-executive cost per hire; $35,879 executive), as compiled in the Onboarding Cost research bibliography, updated April 2026 — onboardingcost.com/research
- O*NET OnLine, occupation 39-3091.00, Amusement and Recreation Attendants (2025 wage data; training requirements) — onetonline.org