The Two Numbers Everyone Guesses
Every golf simulator business plan comes down to a short equation: bays, times open hours, times the share of those hours that get booked, times your hourly rate. Then subtract rent, people and everything else.
The rent you can get from a broker. Payroll you can work out. But the share of hours that get booked (utilization) and the price your market will pay are the numbers that decide whether the business works, and they're the two most calculators leave blank for you to fill in. A first-time operator types 40% because it sounds reasonable. The spreadsheet looks great. The studio doesn't.
So we rebuilt our business calculator to start from the market instead of a guess. Enter a ZIP code and it loads the competition, posted prices, rent, wages, power prices and weather for that area, then fills in the model. Every field says where its number came from, and you can type over any of them.
What We Researched
Over October 2026 we built a roster of every place the public can book a golf simulator in eight Western states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, Oregon, Utah and Washington. That's 848 venues, most confirmed on the venue's own website or booking page. 788 were open and bookable, with about 2,600 bays between them. Those are what the calculator uses.
For each venue we recorded the address, the number of bays where it's published, the simulator brand, the venue type (dedicated indoor club, training center, lounge or bar, golf course add-on, chain), whether it offers self-serve 24/7 access, and its public hourly price. We then layered on public data:
- People: 2020 Census population for every Census tract in the eight states.
- Rent: asking rents for flex/light-industrial and retail space from commercial broker market reports, by submarket or county.
- Wages: 2026 minimum wages, including city and regional rates where they apply.
- Power: average commercial electricity prices by state from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
- Weather: NOAA 1991–2020 climate normals for the nearest weather station.
The rule we held to while building it: never invent data, and blank beats wrong. If a venue doesn't publish its bay count, we don't guess one for that venue. If it doesn't post a price, it isn't counted in the price bands.
Step 1: Who Lives Within 30 Minutes
Simulator customers don't drive far. We treat 15 miles in a straight line as a stand-in for a 30-minute drive, and count every Census tract inside that circle around your ZIP code.
Those people aren't all yours. Each tract's population is shared among every venue within reach, weighted by how many bays a venue has and how close it is. A venue's pull halves roughly every four miles, so a studio five minutes away beats one twenty minutes away about 3.5 to 1. Add up your share of every tract, divide by your bays, and you get the number that drives the rest of the model: how many residents each of your bays would draw.
Step 2: How Crowded Is It?
A bay's draw only means something next to a benchmark. Across the eight states, the typical venue's bays each draw about 19,400 residents. That varies a lot by state, and the calculator compares your ZIP with the typical venue in your own state:
- Under-served: a new bay here would draw at least 30% more residents than a typical venue in your state.
- Balanced: within that range either way.
- Well served: a new bay would draw less than three-quarters of the state's typical draw. There's competition, and you'll need a reason to be chosen.
Here's how the eight states compare at the state level:
| State | Open venues | Bays (est.) | Bays per 100K people | No bay within 30 min | Median posted rate |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Utah | 114 | 354 | 10.8 | 4.8% | $40 |
| Idaho | 42 | 145 | 7.9 | 18.3% | $47.50 |
| Colorado | 119 | 409 | 7.1 | 9.4% | $50 |
| Nevada | 34 | 141 | 4.5 | 7.6% | $50 |
| Washington | 84 | 304 | 3.9 | 11.1% | $50 |
| Oregon | 46 | 154 | 3.6 | 16.4% | $50 |
| Arizona | 78 | 246 | 3.4 | 16.2% | $50 |
| California | 271 | 854 | 2.2 | 9.8% | $50 |
Utah has five times as many bays per person as California, and it also has the lowest typical price. That's not a coincidence: crowded markets compete on price. In total, about 7.9 million people across these eight states have no simulator venue within a 30-minute drive.
State numbers hide local ones. California is the least saturated state on this list, yet parts of Orange County are well served. Oregon looks thin overall, while Portland's west side is balanced. That's why the calculator works ZIP code by ZIP code, not state by state.
Step 3: Utilization, Honestly
This is the part we want to be straight about. Nobody can forecast utilization for a studio that doesn't exist yet, and we don't pretend to. Utilization varies widely by season, weather, local demand, local competition, marketing, and how much your customers enjoy and engage with the bays.
What we can do is start from something real and adjust it for the market in a way you can see:
- The starting point is 20–27% of open hours, averaged over a year. That's the range we see running our own studios. The calculator's middle case is 23.5%.
- Adjust for draw. If each of your bays would draw more residents than your state's typical venue, utilization goes up; fewer, and it goes down. We use the square root of that ratio, so doubling the draw lifts utilization by about 40%, not 100%. Not all latent demand turns into bookings.
- Adjust for weather. Bad outdoor-golf days (a high under 50°F, rain, snow on the ground, or 100°F+) fill indoor bays. Perfect days empty them. A ZIP with more bad-weather days than its state average gets a lift, and fewer gets a cut.
- Cap it. No market is modeled above 32%, and a draw beyond twice the state norm adds nothing more.
Two consequences fall out of this. More bays means lower utilization per bay, because you're splitting the same nearby demand more ways. That's why changing the bay count in the calculator changes the utilization too. And a sunny market can be worse for a sim studio than a rainy one with more competition.
The calculator then shows a slower case and a stronger case, scaled to the low and high end of that 20–27% range, so you can see whether the business survives a bad year rather than only a good one.
Step 4: Price
Of the 848 venues, only 316 post a public hourly price. We use the 273 that price per bay (not per person or per group) as benchmarks. If at least three of them are within 15 miles of your ZIP, the calculator starts your rate at their median and shows the typical range. If fewer than three, it uses your state's median and tells you so. That rule also means no single competitor's price can be read off the calculator.
Across the West, a bay typically rents for $45–50 an hour, and the typical membership is about $150 a month. One more finding worth knowing: 165 of the 273 venues with a posted per-bay rate charge one price all week, peak or not. If you plan to price Friday night differently from Tuesday morning, most of your competition doesn't.
Step 5: Costs
Costs are filled in from the same research, and each one is labeled with its source:
- Space: about 600 sq ft per bay, which covers the bay, circulation, a small lobby and a restroom.
- Rent: the most specific asking rent we have for your area (submarket, then county, then state), for flex space or a retail storefront, plus about $6 per sq ft per year of triple-net charges.
- People: your local minimum wage plus $2, with 15% payroll burden. A self-serve studio is modeled at about 20 staff hours a week plus a cleaning service and part-time management. A staffed studio puts an attendant on every open hour and adds a general manager.
- Running costs: booking and door-access software, simulator software licences, electricity at your state's commercial rate, insurance, maintenance, card fees and marketing.
The staffing choice matters more than almost anything else. When we ran the same model across 409 Western towns, the median self-serve studio earned about $76,000 a year before debt and taxes. Staff the same studio every open hour and the median town loses about $19,000. Labor is the line that decides it. That's why the calculator shows both, side by side, for your inputs.
Step 6: Build Cost and Payback
The model includes a planning build cost of about $35,000 per bay for equipment (launch monitor, PC, projector, impact screen and enclosure, padding and turf) and $40 per square foot for tenant improvements. Those are planning figures, not a quote. Your real number depends on the space and the gear, which is what a Launch House estimate is for.
Payback assumes your first year brings in 60% of a normal year's bookings, because new studios take time to build a customer base. You'll also see break-even utilization: the share of open hours you need booked to cover every cost, set against the utilization your market suggests. The gap between those two numbers is the clearest single measure of risk the calculator gives you.
If You're Outside Those Eight States
The calculator still works anywhere in the U.S., and it tells you plainly when it's not using local data. Outside the eight states we've researched venue by venue, it uses Western benchmarks for price, rent and wages, and a rough statewide saturation read from public directory listings. Treat those as starting points and replace the rate, rent and wage with your local numbers. We're adding states over time.
What It Doesn't Show
The calculator never shows a venue's name or contact details. Every number it returns is a count, a median or a range for an area. Our research is for helping you size up a market, not a list of your future competitors' phone numbers.
What It Can't Tell You
- How good your studio will be. Two studios on the same street can run at 12% and 35%. The experience, the booking flow and the marketing make that difference, and no market model sees it.
- The exact site. Fifteen miles is a stand-in for a drive. A highway, a river or a missing exit can change who actually comes.
- Venues we didn't find. A sim in the back of a bar with no website may be missing. Bay counts for about half of venues are estimated from similar venues, using the typical count for the brand or venue type.
- Next year. The research reflects October 2026. Venues open and close, sometimes within a couple of years of opening. We refresh the data periodically.
