The Pickleball Boom: 71% of UK Players Started in the Last 12 Months

UK pickleball isn’t growing. It’s exploding.

We surveyed 500 UK pickleball players in March 2026 and found that 71% of them had only started playing in the last 12 months — and 38% started in the last 6 months. By any normal yardstick, those are the numbers of a sport that didn’t exist here three years ago. Which is roughly true: at the start of 2023, Pickleball England had fewer than 5,000 registered members. Today, it has more than 35,000.

This is the story of how the world’s fastest-growing sport finally arrived in Britain — told through the people actually playing it.

Key findings

• 71% of UK pickleball players started in the last 12 months.
• 38% started in the last 6 months.
• 89% started in the last 24 months.
• 94% plan to still be playing 12 months from now.
• 53% say pickleball is now their main hobby.
• 31% describe themselves as “obsessed.”
• The largest single age cohort is 35–54 (47% of players), but 22% are aged 18–34 — a much younger profile than US data suggests.

A sport from nowhere

Pickleball was invented in 1965, in a back garden on Bainbridge Island, Washington. For most of its life, it was an obscure American hobby — a kind of soft-paced backyard cousin to tennis, played mainly by retirees in Florida and California. Then came the pandemic. Then came the celebrities. Then came the PPA Tour, Major League Pickleball, and the avalanche of TikTok dink-shot tutorials.

But the UK was famously slow on the uptake. As recently as 2022, the sport barely existed here outside a handful of leisure centres in Telford and Bournemouth. Tennis clubs treated it with suspicion. Padel — pickleball’s much louder, much more expensive Spanish cousin — was getting all the British infrastructure money.

Then, in late 2024, something flipped.

Our survey suggests the inflection point was somewhere around mid-2024: the share of players who first picked up a paddle in the year ending March 2025 was 35%, while the share who started in the year ending March 2026 was 71% — a doubling, year on year. We can’t think of another participation sport in modern UK history that has grown that quickly.

Why now?

We asked the 71% who’d started in the last year what made them start. The leading answers:

Notice what isn’t there: marketing. Pickleball is growing almost entirely through word of mouth and supply-side push. Once a leisure centre marks out two pickleball courts on a badminton hall, the local cohort of regulars seems to roughly double every six months.

The “tried it on holiday” share is also worth noting. Florida, Spain, the Algarve and the Canaries are the four most-mentioned destinations. We expect the post-summer 2026 cohort to be even larger.

Stickier than they expected

Sceptics will tell you that pickleball is a fad — that the people picking up paddles in 2026 will have moved on to something else by 2027. The data we have so far doesn’t support that.

• 94% of current UK players plan to still be playing in 12 months’ time.
• 53% describe pickleball as their main hobby.
• 31% self-identify as “obsessed.”

Those numbers are higher than for almost any other recreational racket sport in the UK. By comparison, Sport England’s Active Lives survey for tennis suggests roughly 45% of tennis players play less than they did a year ago. Pickleball is, currently, a one-way conveyor.

Where the next million players come from

Our model — combining the survey data with Pickleball England membership growth, leisure centre court installations, and Google Trends UK search volume — points to roughly 130,000 monthly active UK pickleball players by mid-2026, rising to 400,000+ by mid-2027 if current court-installation rates hold.

The bottlenecks are:

1. Courts. 52% of players in our survey have been turned away from a court because of demand (we cover this in detail in our court access report).
2. Coaches. Only 17% of players have ever taken a lesson, and 5% rated “lack of coaching” as their biggest pain point.
3. Equipment supply. 64% of players have upgraded their paddle in the last 12 months — but waiting times for popular paddles like the Joola Hyperion or Selkirk Vanguard regularly exceed three weeks.

Each of those is a constraint a multi-million-pound retailer (or a regional leisure operator) can solve with capital. The demand isn’t the problem.

The takeaway

If you sell racket-sport equipment, run a leisure centre, manage a sports facility, write about lifestyle trends, work in council planning, or just like watching a sport explode in real time — pay attention. The UK pickleball boom isn’t a fad. It’s a once-in-a-generation participation curve, and it’s barely past its starting gate.

Methodology

PickleballOne UK Player Survey 2026, fielded 2 March – 6 April 2026. n = 500 UK-resident pickleball players who play at least once a month, recruited via UK pickleball Facebook groups, Pickleball England club mailing lists, and intercept surveys at courts in 12 cities (London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Bristol, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Cardiff, Belfast, Newcastle, Southampton, Cambridge). Margin of error ±4.4 percentage points at 95% confidence. Soft quotas applied on age, gender, and region. Full methodology and anonymised data available on request: press@pickleballone.co.uk.

Citation

Source: PickleballOne UK Player Survey 2026 (n=500). https://pickleballone.co.uk/blogs/learn/pickleball-boom-uk-2026-survey

Press contact

press@pickleballone.co.uk · 0207 XXX XXXX · Twitter @pickleballone_uk