UK padel has doubled, but there's subtlety beneath it.

The pipeline has doubled

Courts, approvals and applications doubled in the same number of days, at the same average size. The twelve months to August 2026 include a provisional August, so all three volume figures are floors.

Growth is still accelerating rather than levelling off. December alone carried 131 applications, the biggest month on record, and every one of the last four quarters has beaten the same quarter a year earlier.

The quieter movement in that chart is the two bars converging. In March there were 70 approvals against 115 submissions. By July it was 72 against 93. The winter surge is finally reaching determination, which means a good part of this year's approvals is a queue clearing rather than fresh demand.

What is actually happening

The volume is the easy part of this story. Five things underneath it change what you would actually build, and where. Jump straight to any of them.

1. Scheme size. The four-court scheme is dying, and both ends are growing instead.
2. The format. Big padel has become a conversion business, not a construction one.
3. Cover. A roof is the price of scale.
4. Recent months. August cleared faster than any month we have tracked, and refused more.
5. Demand. Supply is now growing faster than play.

Mid sized schemes are hollowing out

Both ends are growing for different reasons. The small end is bolt-ons: two courts added to a tennis club, a cricket club, a school, a pub car park.

The large end is conversions in big sheds, where the maths often favours economies of scale. The mid-size standalone build, four courts on a piece of land, is the format being squeezed from both sides.

A roof is the price of scale. Covered and indoor schemes average 3.18 courts against 2.51 outdoor, and the covered share of approvals rose from 31% to 38%. Above four courts, an uncovered UK scheme is close to a rounding error.

Why is less certain from the planning data alone. It may be the cost of canopies and groundworks, which only starts to make sense spread across more courts. Or it may be that operators are moving towards an all-in-one venue, with a gym, pilates and other amenities alongside the courts, and that model needs a big box unit to begin with.

Padel is absorbing empty buildings

Change of use went from 22% of new-court submissions in the year to August 2025 to 29% in the year since, and conversions out of industrial, warehouse and retail stock went from 50 applications to 151.

August's approvals read like a survey of what British high streets and trading estates have stopped needing: a former Homebase on Finchley Road, a furniture showroom in Carlisle, the old Floors To Go building in Bury, and the list goes on.

Conversions are not significantly larger on average. But at the top of the market they are close to the only thing happening.

July was bigger than we told you

Last month's issue reported 63 applications lodged in July. Now that the portals have caught up, the confirmed figure is 93. Approvals moved from 69 to 72, withdrawals from 11 to 13, refusals from 5 to 7.

Reported on the first of August, July looked like a sharp fall from June. It was not. July was an ordinary month that had been given one day to be published. We watched it fill in: 63 on 1 August, 79 by the 20th, 93 today, and it is still not finished.

Because of this we now only confirm a month's figures in the month that follows it. Here is August so far, provisional, with our projections.

What August put through

Councils cleared August's padel casework faster than any month in the two years we have tracked bar February, and refused a fifth of it while doing so. Expect that reading to slip: the back half of the month is only part counted, and the slower cases are the ones still to arrive.

Do not over-read the refusals. The monthly rate has swung between 7% and 20% since March, and across the last six months it sits at 14% against 13% for the twelve months before. Nothing structural has changed.

The month's biggest decisions

August's average approved scheme was 3.28 courts, the highest monthly reading in the series, until you take out Camden and Hertfordshire. Without those two it is 2.50, below the twelve-month average. August did not produce bigger schemes. It produced two big ones.

Camden is the one to watch. Ten courts under an all-weather canopy in a dead Homebase on Finchley Road, on a temporary consent, is the clearest statement yet of the economics: a covered product that trades all winter, and a lease short enough that the landlord keeps the redevelopment option. Expect it copied.

Hertfordshire is the one to think about. Nine courts at a sports ground there were consented retrospectively. They were already built. Retrospective applications have run at 3 to 6% of submissions all year, which says something quiet about how far ahead of planning some operators are willing to run.

On the other side, ten refusals, and not marginal ones: one scheme of five courts and two more of four. Three of the ten were warehouse or industrial conversions, so the shed route is not sailing through unopposed.

Consents are the easy half

The harder question is whether the courts already open are busy. Across the clubs we track, average occupancy was down in August against July.

Some of that is the calendar. August is the emptiest stretch of the padel year here, and this one was hot enough that plenty of people who would normally book did not fancy a game in over 30°. But the denominator moved too: the open fleet keeps adding courts faster than bookings are growing to fill them, and average court pricing has not moved to defend it. It is too early to know whether supply is outpacing demand, but it certainly does not feel like it. We will see what September does.

Besides, occupancy alone can be a poor scoreboard. The two highest revenue-generating padel clubs in the country in August were Carbon Padel Club and Rocks Lane Chiswick, and they finished within a whisker of each other despite being different businesses: Carbon on seventeen courts, Rocks Lane on twelve. Neither ran the highest occupancy rate in the country. Court count, price and the shape of the booking day decide the revenue, and counterintuitively, a club optimising for a full grid can often be leaving money on the table.

Three things to watch in September

Whether the convergence holds. If September's approvals come in above its submissions, the winter backlog is genuinely cleared and the market is running at its natural rate rather than working through a queue.

Sheds. Conversions have tripled in a year and now carry the top end. Three of August's ten refusals were conversions. One month is noise, but if that ratio holds through autumn it constrains the only route currently producing eight-court venues.

Whether the new courts fill. The consented pipeline is roughly half the size of the open market, and much of it is covered courts in northern industrial cities that have never had a padel club. Planning tells you what is coming. Occupancy tells you whether it should. Next issue we will report occupancy and revenue across the whole of August and show how the numbers actually moved.