Revenue Per Court Hour: The One Number Every Court Facility Should Track

Walk into a padel or pickleball facility at 7pm on a Tuesday and it feels like a gold mine. Every court booked, waitlist going, pro shop humming. Then look at the same building at 10am and you can hear the air conditioning. I have rebuilt the financials for indoor court facilities here in Arizona, and the pattern repeats: the evenings convince everyone the business is working while the daytime quietly decides whether it actually does. There is one number that cuts through it, borrowed from the hotel industry, and it takes five minutes a month to calculate. Revenue per available court hour, RevPACH, is total court revenue divided by every hour you could have sold, not just the ones you did. Let me show you how to compute it, what it revealed in a real 8-court example, and the three levers that move it.

What RevPACH Is and Why Utilization Alone Misleads

Hotels learned decades ago that occupancy alone lies and nightly rate alone lies, so they multiply them into revenue per available room. Court facilities need the same discipline. RevPACH is total court revenue divided by total available court hours, and because it blends price and occupancy into a single figure, neither one can fool you.

Utilization by itself is the trap. A facility can be fully booked every evening and still run 30 percent utilization across the whole week, because the whole week includes all those empty mornings. RevPACH forces the empty hours into the math, which is exactly where the money is hiding. This is the operator number that the racquet and court sports work is built around.

How to Count Your Available Court Hours Honestly

Available hours are courts times operating hours times days, minus only true closures and maintenance blocks. The temptation is to exclude the hours you know are dead, but that defeats the entire purpose. The emptiness is the thing you are trying to measure.

Run it monthly to start, then move to weekly once the habit sticks. The denominator does not care how you feel about the month, which is what makes it honest.

A Worked Example: An 8-Court Indoor Facility

Take an 8-court indoor facility open 7am to 10pm, which is 15 hours a day. Over a 30-day month that is 8 courts times 15 hours times 30 days, or 3,600 available court hours. That denominator never changes based on how you feel about the month, which is exactly why it works.

Now split the day where behavior splits. Evenings from 5pm to 10pm give you 1,200 peak hours, and this facility sells 80 percent of them at $60 a court hour: 960 sold hours, $57,600. Daytime gives you 2,400 off-peak hours, and only 25 percent sell at $40: 600 hours, $24,000. Court revenue for the month is $81,600.

Here is what the blended numbers say. Utilization is 1,560 sold hours out of 3,600, which is 43 percent. RevPACH is $81,600 divided by 3,600, which is $22.67. And here is why that matters more than the packed Tuesday night: if this facility's all-in monthly costs are $95,000, then its break-even RevPACH is $95,000 divided by 3,600, or $26.39. The building that feels like a gold mine every evening is losing roughly $13,000 a month.

The Three Levers That Move RevPACH

There are only three, and knowing which one to pull is most of the job.

• Peak price. If your prime evening slots book out days ahead with a waitlist, you are underpriced. That is the market telling you politely.
• Off-peak fill. Leagues, clinics, corporate blocks, and memberships are fill machines for the empty daytime, not just community nice-to-haves. This is almost always the biggest dollar lever.
• Non-court revenue per hour. Divide lessons, food and beverage, retail, and event revenue by the same available court hours. If the clubhouse is not pulling weight per hour, you will see it here. Hybrid facilities that add fitness offerings should measure that revenue against the same denominator.

Pricing Court Time Like an Airline

Airlines charge more when a flight fills and less to move empty seats, and you can do the same without annoying members. Keep it to two or three tiers at most, peak and off-peak and maybe a shoulder, because more tiers just confuse the front desk and the member.

Memberships are your cleanest off-peak tool. Sold correctly, a membership is pre-sold inventory: discounted hours you were never going to fill at rack rate anyway. That is the same membership-pricing logic that runs a gym on unit economics, applied to courts. Raise peak prices only when the signal is unmistakable, meaning sustained booking lead times and waitlists. A $5 bump on 960 peak hours is $4,800 a month, straight to the bottom line, from members who were already waiting.

What Good Looks Like

Mature facilities often land 45 to 60 percent blended utilization. Under 35 percent is a program problem, not a marketing problem, and no amount of ad spend fixes an empty schedule. For RevPACH itself there is no universal target, because rent per court hour varies wildly, so compute your own break-even RevPACH, all monthly costs divided by available court hours, and aim 15 to 25 percent above it. In our example that break-even was $26.39, which is what finally gave the number meaning.

Building the Weekly One-Page Court Report

One page, thirty minutes a week. The rows are available hours, sold hours, utilization, court revenue, RevPACH, and non-court revenue per court hour. Split every row into peak and off-peak, because the blended figure hides the very gap you are trying to close.

The data comes from your booking platform export plus your point-of-sale. Once it is a habit, you stop guessing which night was good and start seeing which part of the day needs work.

When to Add Courts, Add Hours, or Fix Fill First

Expansion multiplies whatever RevPACH you already have, including a bad one, so prove the number before you build. Extending hours is sneakier: new hours add to the available-hours denominator, so they lower RevPACH unless they actually fill. Nine times out of ten the right first move is to fix off-peak fill in the space you already have, then let the proven numbers tell you whether court nine is worth it. That expansion math is exactly what we build with facilities on the racquet and court sports page.