UK Badminton Court Price Index

What stands out

• Both extremes cluster on one platform each. Better accounts for 10 of the 12 most expensive courts in the index; GladstoneGo accounts for 8 of the 12 cheapest. This describes the 24 venues at the two tails, not the whole market. Across all 509 venues the platform medians overlap heavily, so it is a fact about the extremes rather than a rule about where prices come from.
• The median UK badminton court costs £14.81 per hour, but the spread is wide: 11% of venues charge under £10 and 10% charge £20 or more.
• Prices swing sharply within a few miles. In New Malden, Malden Centre charges £26.50 while New Malden Sports Club, 0.49 miles away, charges £7. That is 3.79 times the price for a court within easy reach.
• Booking a whole hall can be cheaper. The 117 venues whose rate card prices a whole sports hall charge a median £43 per hour. An illustrative per-court figure of roughly £10.75 assumes a Sport England four-court hall and sits below the £14.81 median for booking a single court, so a group of eight often pays less by taking the whole room.

For journalists

The full dataset is available as a CSV, published under CC BY 4.0. The figures and charts on this page are free to republish, including commercially, with attribution and a link.

• Download the full dataset (509 venues, CSV)
• Attribution: Source: BadmintonBooker UK Badminton Court Price Index, Q3 2026, badmintonbooker.com
• Licence: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International
• Corrections and interview requests: ops@badmintonbooker.com

Methodology

Every price is converted to a rate per hour per court before any comparison:

rate = price ÷ slot minutes × 60 ÷ courts covered

This matters because slot lengths differ. A 40 minute slot at £13.40 is £20.10 per hour, not £13.40, and a row priced “2 badminton courts £27.50” is £13.75 per court, not £27.50.

Two coverage numbers, not one

We checked 803 badminton venues and obtained a price for 704, which is 88% coverage. Of those prices, 57% came from the operator’s live booking system and the rest from a published rate card. Both figures are given because quoting only the higher one would overstate how much of this index is transaction-verified.

What this edition cannot tell you

• No provider exposes a per-slot time-of-day price broadly enough to compute an evening versus daytime premium this edition. A small number of rate cards do publish a peak and off-peak column; where they do, the peak figure is the one recorded, so those venues are represented at their dearest rather than averaged.
• This is the first edition. The first quarter-on-quarter comparison publishes next quarter.
• Only 10 venues publish a weekend rate that differs from their weekday rate, too few to report a national weekend premium.

Why city rankings need care

Most local authority leisure centres book through a single platform contract, so a city’s median often reflects one booking platform’s rate card rather than a competitive local market. Every ranked city below shows how many venues, how many distinct prices and what share one booking platform holds, and a city is only named cheapest or dearest when several prices exist and no single booking platform accounts for more than 70% of its venues. Cities that fail that test stay in the table but out of the headline: Belfast (one booking platform accounts for 100% of its venues); Durham (one uniform rate across every venue); North Lincolnshire (one uniform rate across every venue); Leeds (one booking platform accounts for 92% of its venues); Wirral (one booking platform accounts for 80% of its venues); Edinburgh (one booking platform accounts for 100% of its venues).

Separately, 3 areas are left out of the table altogether: either an operator estate label rather than a place a reader could travel to, or a real place whose venues are too geographically spread for a single city median to mean anything: Everybody Sport (11 venues; operator estate label, spanning 12.11 miles); Fife (9 venues spanning 20.64 miles); Wiltshire (17 venues spanning 20.08 miles). One of them, Wiltshire, has enough venues that it would otherwise rank, so it is named here rather than dropped quietly.

Limitations

• VAT. 301 SchoolHire rate cards (of which 109 are in this per-court index) state prices may be subject to VAT, while booking-system prices are what a customer pays at checkout. Those two are not perfectly comparable and we have not adjusted for it.
• Whole-hall hire is separate. 192 venues sell a hall or part of a hall rather than a single court. Those rows stay out of the per-court index. The implied per-court figure elsewhere on this page applies only to whole-hall-labelled rows after filters, assumes a Sport England four-court hall, and is illustrative (not a measured court count for each venue).
• Coverage skews to online booking. Venues taking bookings only by phone, or behind a membership login, are under-represented.
• Rate tiers. Only SchoolHire and Gladstone Go rows receive adult non-member tier filtering in this edition. For other platforms we take the public-booking default as published. Where SchoolHire or Gladstone Go publish several tiers we take the standard adult non-member rate; concession, member, junior, block booking and commercial club rates are excluded wherever a standard rate is published alongside them. A venue whose only published rate is a concession keeps that rate rather than dropping out, because a real price beats no price.
• Booking windows. 2 venues sell badminton only on set days or in set hours (a school hall letting courts on one evening a week, for example). Their price is real and is included, but a court is not available at it whenever you want one. The restriction is published verbatim in the booking_window_restriction column of the CSV.
• Exclusions. 1 priced outside a plausible range, 2 far above its own provider’s typical rate and likely a larger booking unit, 0 a promotional rather than standard rate, and 0 whose venue name in our records is not yet clean enough to publish.
• Place names. 26 venues show a postcode district rather than a town in the location column, because our records carry no clean area name for them yet. The price and the postcode are correct; the location label is less specific than the rest of the table.

Collection

Prices collected in Q3 2026, generated 30 July 2026. Published by BadmintonBooker. Corrections to ops@badmintonbooker.com.

Related

• London badminton court prices, borough by borough
• Find badminton courts near you