Golf Simulator Revenue Per Bay

Short answer: a well-run bay in a staffed venue generates roughly $95,000 to $115,000 a year in total revenue. The published range across 114 real franchise locations runs from $58,785 at the bottom to $247,991 at the top.

That spread — better than a 4× gap between the worst bay and the best — is the whole story of this business. Two venues can buy the same TrackMan, sign a similar lease, and land four times apart. This page breaks down exactly where the gap comes from.

Every number below is sourced. Where the underlying data is ambiguous, we say so rather than rounding it into a cleaner story.

The benchmark: $94,970 per simulator

The single most reliable per-bay figure available comes from X-Golf America’s FY2025 Franchise Disclosure Document, which reports revenue per simulator across 114 franchised outlets that were open for the full year.

An independent check: aggregated booking data across 200+ indoor golf venues puts revenue per bay at approximately $105,000 USD per year, derived from roughly 1,900 bay-hours sold per bay annually.

Two completely different methodologies — a franchise disclosure filing and a booking platform’s transaction records — landing within 10% of each other. That’s about as much confidence as this industry currently allows.

One caveat we’d rather flag than bury

X-Golf’s disclosure says “revenue per simulator.” It does not specify whether that means total store revenue divided by bay count, or bay-time revenue only.

This matters enormously. If it’s total store revenue, then $94,970 already includes food, beverage, memberships, and leagues — and a venue’s bay-time-only revenue would be considerably lower. If it’s bay-time only, then a staffed venue with a bar is earning that plus F&B on top.

We’ve seen the figure used both ways in published analysis, usually without the author noticing there’s a question. Until someone pulls the underlying Item 19 language, treat $94,970 as a range check rather than a target, and model your own venue from the ground up.

A widely repeated error worth correcting

At least one major franchise data site currently reports X-Golf’s “Average Gross Revenue: $113,000 (unit-level)” and flags it as down 86% year over year.

That’s a misread. The $112,944 figure is per simulator, not per store. A six-bay X-Golf location averaging $112,944 per simulator is doing roughly $678,000 in store revenue — which is consistent with the separately reported average unit volume of about $582,000 and nowhere near an 86% collapse.

If you’re evaluating this business from franchise-portal data, check whether the number you’re looking at is per bay or per store before you build a pro forma on it.

How the number is actually built

Revenue per bay is four inputs multiplied together, plus everything that rides on top.

Bay-hours available  =  hours open per day × 365
Bay-hours sold       =  bay-hours available × utilization rate
Bay revenue          =  bay-hours sold × blended hourly rate
Total revenue        =  bay revenue + F&B + memberships/leagues/events

Here’s where each input actually lands in the US market.

Blended hourly rate — $40 to $55

The national median published rate is $40 per hour, with an interquartile range of $25 to $55 and a mean of $51, measured across 794 venues that publish their pricing. Booking-platform data across 200+ operating venues shows a higher median of $55, which makes sense — venues on a modern booking system skew larger and more urban.

Real published rate cards for context:

State-level medians run from $90 in South Carolina down to $25 in Maryland and Vermont. Henderson, Nevada is the highest-priced metro at a $87 median.

The detail most pro formas miss: these are per-bay rates, not per-person. A bay holds up to six players, and survey data shows an average of three players per session with more than 40% of groups splitting the cost. That has direct implications for how you take payment, which we cover in the F&B section below.

Utilization — the input that decides everything

This is where venues separate. Measured across 200+ venues, peak-season utilization distributes like this:

Annual blended utilization lands around 36% once summer is factored in.

The practical floor: below roughly 25% annual utilization, a staffed four-bay venue cannot cover its fixed costs. That’s not a margin problem, it’s a solvency problem.

Year-one venues typically run near 33% blended. Established venues reach 40–50%. Sustained 60%+ is exceptional and usually means either a supply-constrained market or a genuinely excellent membership program.

Hours open — and the trap inside them

A four-bay venue open 15 hours a day has 60 bay-hours to sell every day. Most operators mentally price against the evening rush and then wonder why the math doesn’t work.

Run it honestly:

• Selling only the 5–9pm peak: 27% utilization
• Adding daytime hours: 53%
• Adding late-night: 73%

The distribution backs this up. Weekday demand peaks at 6pm (13% of all booked hours) and 7pm (10%) — but 9am to 4pm on weekdays represents 57% of all available weekday bay-hours. Weekends peak at 1pm with no evening spike at all.

By day of week in peak season: Saturday 44%, Friday 44%, Sunday 39%, Thursday 36%, Wednesday 35%, Tuesday 34%, Monday 32%.

The single most-cited challenge among indoor golf operators is filling ambient weekday time. As one industry analyst put it: “Their biggest challenge is just how to fill up ambient time, and by that I mean, weekday time.”

There’s a counterintuitive pocket worth knowing about. The CEO of one 150-location unmanned chain: “Any of our locations near an engineering plant or hospital get a ton of golfers, especially 11 p.m. to 3 a.m.” Shift workers are an unserved market in most cities.

Seasonality: your best month earns 2.6× your worst

Monthly utilization across the same 200+ venue dataset, with bay revenue at a $40 rate:

Peak season (November through April) runs about 50% utilization. Summer (May through October) runs about 23%. Rent, utilities, insurance, and your salaried manager don’t move.

One operator, a year into running a facility, put it plainly: “Many days during the summer, only a few members would use the facility.”

The standard response is a summer pass — X-Golf Portland sells a $699 seasonal pass covering May 1 through October 15 with two hours of daily play. That converts a dead-season problem into prepaid cash in April, which is a materially better position than discounting hourly rates in July.

What you’re leaving out if you only count bay time

Bay revenue is roughly half the business at a staffed venue. Here’s what rides on top.

Food and beverage — a 73% uplift

The National Golf Foundation surveyed 354 facility operators and 569 golfers in late 2024. Their findings:

• Average session length: just over one hour
• Average session fee: $55
• Average F&B spend per visit: $40
• F&B revenue uplift: 73%
• Total per-visit customer value: approaching $100
• More than 40% of public-facility customers exceed $70 per session

Every dollar of bay time generates about 73 cents of food and beverage. Applied to a six-bay venue doing $627,000 in bay revenue, that’s roughly $458,000 in F&B — at 65–75% gross margin on beer and spirits, and 55–65% on food.

One caveat worth stating: that NGF sample is 74% public golf courses and 26% private clubs adding simulators, not standalone urban golf bars. It probably understates attach at a venue with a real kitchen and a cocktail program, and dramatically overstates it at an unmanned facility with no F&B at all.

We go deeper on this in indoor golf food and beverage, including why no franchise disclosure document in the category breaks out the F&B-versus-bay-time split.

Memberships, leagues, lessons, and events

Real published pricing:

• Memberships: X-Golf runs $99/month (one hour daily, twice weekly) up to $699/month (four hours daily, unlimited). Five Iron is around $129/month. Golf Lounge 18 runs $499–$649/month for unlimited, and $1,599/month for a five-seat corporate plan. The Back Nine sells $200/month unlimited 24/7.
• Leagues: X-Golf charges $199 per person for an eight-week league, or $300 per team for summer leagues.
• Lessons: $75–$150 per hour for private instruction.
• Events: a two-hour partial buyout runs $400–$800; a full four-bay venue buyout runs $2,500–$6,000. Landing two to four events a month is $8,000–$40,000 a year.
• Club rentals: $10–$15 per session.

Membership break-even math is worth understanding from the member’s side, because it tells you how to price: a $250/month unlimited plan divided by a $40 hourly rate is 6.25 hours — about two three-hour sessions. Members who come more than twice a month are getting value; members who come less are your margin.

Membership penetration and churn data does not exist publicly anywhere in this industry. If you’re running a venue, your own numbers are the only ones you’ll get.

A worked example — six bays, staffed, with a bar

Run your own version with the indoor golf revenue calculator — it takes the same inputs and benchmarks your output against the X-Golf cohorts above.

Sanity check: that per-bay figure sits above the X-Golf top quartile, which is either a signal that the model is optimistic or confirmation that the X-Golf figure is bay-time-only. Both readings are defensible on the available evidence. This is exactly the ambiguity flagged earlier, and it’s the reason we publish the assumption on the face of the calculator instead of hiding it in a footnote.

The gap between a good bay and a bad one

Four things separate the $58,785 bay from the $247,991 bay, roughly in order of impact.

1. Daytime and off-peak utilization. Peak evening hours sell themselves. Everything else is the actual business. This is where a 20th-percentile venue and a 75th-percentile venue diverge, and it’s why memberships, corporate day rates, leagues, and lesson programs matter more than hourly pricing does.

2. Whether there’s a bar. A 73% F&B uplift is not a rounding error. It is the difference between a simulator rental business and a hospitality business. See staffed vs. unmanned indoor golf for what that’s worth in dollars — the published franchise data puts it at roughly $460,000 per location per year.

3. Cancellation discipline. Measured across 200+ venues, the true no-show rate is about 1% — far lower than operators assume. But 18% of bookings cancel, and prepaid bookings cancel at 15% versus 20% for pay-on-arrival. Requiring prepayment recovers roughly five points of utilization for free.

4. Attach rate at the bay. Three players per session, 40%+ splitting the bill, sitting stationary for an hour or more. Whether that group orders a second round depends almost entirely on whether ordering requires walking to a counter. This is the operational detail with the highest leverage and the least attention paid to it.

What this costs to build

For context on the returns above: the National Golf Foundation’s operator survey puts average build cost at $45,000 per bay. X-Golf’s Item 7 discloses $407,850–$536,850 for a six-to-eight bay simulator package, or roughly $62,000–$68,000 per bay including proprietary hardware and installation.

Total investment:

• Independent, 4–6 bays, no full kitchen: $200,000–$350,000
• Independent with full bar and kitchen: $500,000–$1,000,000
• X-Golf franchise, 6–8 bays with full bar: $993,500–$1,939,500
• Five Iron Golf franchise, 8–10 bays with full restaurant: $1,728,500–$4,330,000

Break-even typically lands 12 to 18 months in, at 28–41% utilization depending on your cost structure.

Full breakdown in how much does it cost to open an indoor golf facility.

Frequently asked questions

How much revenue does one golf simulator bay generate per year?
Roughly $95,000 to $115,000 in a staffed venue, based on two independent datasets: X-Golf’s FY2025 franchise disclosure across 114 outlets (median $94,970 per simulator) and aggregated booking data across 200+ venues (approximately $105,000 per bay). The full published range runs from $58,785 to $247,991.

How many bay-hours can I expect to sell per bay per year?
About 1,900, based on measured booking data. That reflects roughly 36% annual blended utilization against typical operating hours.

What utilization rate do indoor golf venues actually run at?
Median 41% during peak season and about 36% blended across the year. The 25th percentile is 20% and the 90th percentile is 72%. Below approximately 25% annual utilization, a staffed four-bay venue cannot cover fixed costs.

What percentage of indoor golf revenue comes from food and beverage?
Survey data from 354 operators shows a 73% F&B uplift on bay revenue — a $55 average session generating $40 in F&B spend, or roughly 42% of per-visit revenue. No franchise disclosure document in the category publishes an explicit F&B-versus-bay-time split.

How much should I charge per hour?
The national median is $40, with most venues between $25 and $55. Urban markets support $55–$70; premium urban markets reach $90+. Nearly all successful venues use time-of-day tiering — a typical structure is $45 weekday daytime, $55 weekday evening, $65 weekends.

Is revenue per bay higher at a franchise or an independent?
Franchise data is the only published data, so a clean comparison doesn’t exist. What is clear: franchises carry 7% royalty plus 1% marketing on top of a $35,000–$50,000 franchise fee and a 2–4× higher build cost. Whether the revenue premium covers that is a venue-by-venue question.

Why is my revenue per bay so much lower in summer?
Seasonality in this business is severe. Peak season runs about 50% utilization; summer runs about 23%. September is the trough at 21%, earning roughly a third of what January earns. Seasonal passes sold in spring are the most common mitigation.

Run your own numbers

Every figure on this page is an industry benchmark, not a forecast for your venue. Market, lease, staffing model, and whether you hold a liquor license will move your result more than any assumption here.

Open the indoor golf revenue calculator →