The State of Pickleball in Australia 2026: 251 Courts, Mapped and Counted

There are 251 pickleball venues in our directory as of 11 August 2026. Victoria has the most at 67, followed by Queensland at 62 and New South Wales at 53. But once you adjust for population, the ranking inverts almost completely: the Northern Territory has the best court access in the country and New South Wales has the worst, by a factor of nearly four.

That is the headline finding from counting our own dataset. Below is the full breakdown, what it says about how pickleball is actually being played in Australia, and — because this matters for how much weight you put on any of it — exactly what we could not determine from the data.

The national picture

Courts by state and territory

Courts per head, which changes everything

Using Australian Bureau of Statistics population estimates at 31 December 2025, here is the same data expressed per 100,000 residents.

The three smallest jurisdictions occupy the top three places. The largest is last, and not narrowly: a Territorian has 3.7 times the court access per head that someone in New South Wales does.

There is a plausible mechanism rather than a mystery here. Small jurisdictions have concentrated populations and a handful of well-used multi-sport facilities that serve almost everyone, so a small absolute number of venues produces a high per-capita figure. Every one of the NT’s six venues is a tennis facility. New South Wales, by contrast, has 8.6 million people spread across an enormous area, and its 53 venues have to cover Sydney, the Central Coast, Newcastle, Wollongong and a very large regional footprint.

Which reframes the number. New South Wales does not have a pickleball problem so much as it has the most obvious growth headroom in the country. Bringing NSW to the national average of 0.90 venues per 100,000 would take it from 53 venues to about 78.

Victoria plays indoors, Queensland plays outside

The indoor–outdoor split is the sharpest regional difference in the dataset, and it is almost entirely a weather story.

Victoria: 43 indoor, 12 outdoor. Roughly 3.6 indoor venues for every outdoor one. Queensland: 10 indoor, 32 outdoor. Roughly 3.2 outdoor venues for every indoor one.

These are the two largest pickleball states by venue count and they are near-mirror images. Tasmania follows Victoria’s pattern even more sharply, with 9 indoor venues to 1 outdoor. Western Australia leans indoor at 17 to 7. At the other extreme, all six Northern Territory venues are outdoor. New South Wales is the most balanced state in the country at 18 indoor to 22 outdoor.

What this means practically: if you are moving between states, your game may change. Queensland pickleball is a wind-and-sun game on hard outdoor surfaces. Victorian pickleball is largely a sports-hall game — and Victoria is also where most of the country’s top-rated venues sit.

Dedicated courts versus painted lines

This is the number that best measures how established the sport is in a given place, because a dedicated court represents a facility that has committed space to pickleball rather than sharing it.

Nationally, 66 of our 251 venues are dedicated — about one in four. Victoria has 25 of them, New South Wales 18, Queensland 11, Western Australia 8, the ACT 2, and South Australia and the Northern Territory one each. Tasmania has none.

Victoria leads on both count and share: 37% of its venues are dedicated, the highest proportion of any state. New South Wales is closer than the raw count suggests at 34%. Queensland is the interesting contrast — it has nearly as many venues as Victoria, but only 18% are dedicated. Queenslanders are overwhelmingly playing on shared or lined courts at tennis and multi-purpose facilities.

South Australia and Tasmania sit at the other end. Sixteen venues and one dedicated court in SA; eleven venues and none at all in Tasmania. If you play in Adelaide or Hobart, you are almost certainly playing on borrowed lines.

The tennis-club effect

Pickleball in Australia is, to a striking degree, being hosted by tennis. Every one of the Northern Territory’s six venues is a tennis facility: Tennis Palmerston, Tennis NT, Gardens Tennis, Darwin International Tennis Centre, Katherine Tennis Club and Tennis Alice Springs. Gardens Tennis is the only one of the six with dedicated pickleball courts. Tasmania’s eleven are mostly community sports centres and PCYC-type facilities, with the Domain Tennis Centre and Latrobe Tennis Club among them.

The shape of most Australian pickleball: yellow lines over an existing tennis court, a portable net, and a club that already had the fencing and the floodlights.

This is not a criticism of either sport. Tennis clubs have the surfaces, the fencing, the lighting and the membership infrastructure, and pickleball lines are cheap to paint. But it does explain the dedicated-court numbers, and it explains why growth in a given town often depends on a single club committee’s decision.

Where the gaps are

One region stands out as a genuine hole in the map, and a few others are holes in our own plumbing rather than in the ground truth.

• Geelong, Victoria’s second city with a population well over 250,000, returns no venues at all — not on the city page and not anywhere in the underlying data. As far as we can tell this is a real gap.
• Gold Coast: one venue attached to the city page, for a population above 700,000.
• Adelaide: one venue at city level, against 16 across South Australia.
• Darwin and the Sunshine Coast show nothing on their city pages, but that one is our fault. Greater Darwin actually has three venues in the directory, and the Sunshine Coast has two — Pickleball Palace Sunshine Coast at Buderim and Caloundra Indoor Stadium at Golden Beach. Our city pages are not picking them up.

If you run or know of a court in Geelong, tell us, because our data says it does not exist and we would like to be wrong.

The best-rated venues in the country

Seven venues hold a perfect 5.0 with at least 20 reviews. Six of the seven are Victorian, which reinforces the indoor, dedicated-facility picture.

Level Up Pickleball Knox City is the standout: a perfect rating across 517 reviews, more than ten times what most of the others carry. It is the most-reviewed venue in the directory that exists primarily for pickleball, and that depth of feedback at that rating says something real about the Melbourne east scene.

The most-reviewed venues overall are a different list, and worth separating out, because they are large multi-purpose leisure centres where pickleball is one activity among many.

Read those second-table ratings with care. A 4.3 at a council aquatic centre is a verdict on the pool, the parking and the change rooms as much as the courts, which is a good reason not to compare it directly with a 5.0 at a venue that only does pickleball.

Across the 204 venues that carry a Google rating, the average is 4.6 stars. The other 47 have no rating at all, usually because they are small or newly listed.

How 251 venues compares to how many people play

The best available participation figures put this in perspective, though they come with caveats.

AusPlay data for July 2023 to June 2024 recorded more than 90,000 Australians aged 15 and over playing pickleball in the previous year. The Pickleball Australia Association’s 2023-24 annual report, released 4 December 2024, cited the same figure and reported PAA membership of over 15,000. The Australian Sports Commission’s November 2025 AusPlay release named pickleball and padel among the fastest-growing physical activities in the country, but attached no number to it.

Against that, 251 venues nationally works out at roughly 360 players per venue — and that ratio uses a participation figure that is now two years old in a sport that the national sports body describes as one of the fastest-growing in Australia. The real figure today is likely worse.

One methodological warning, because it is widely ignored: AusPlay moved from phone to online collection in 2023, and the Clearinghouse for Sport states that data from 2023 onward cannot be compared with 2015–2023 figures. Any article telling you pickleball has grown by a specific percentage since 2019 using AusPlay numbers is making a comparison the data does not support. We are not going to make it either.

How we counted, and what we cannot tell you

This analysis uses our own directory, and we would rather be explicit about its limits than present a clean number that is not.

What the counts are. Each figure is a venue, not an individual court. A venue with eight playing courts counts once, exactly as a venue with one does. So the tables above measure where you can play, not how much capacity exists.

We only know the court count for 74 venues. Between them those 74 have 411 courts, an average of 5.6 each. We are not going to extrapolate that across the other 177, because the venues that publish a court count skew towards the larger dedicated facilities and the number would come out flattering and wrong. A real national court count is the single biggest thing missing from this picture.

58 venues have no indoor or outdoor classification. That is 23% of the directory, and it is why the indoor and outdoor columns never add up to the state total. Queensland is the worst affected with 20 unclassified venues, then New South Wales with 13 and Victoria with 12. Treat 108 indoor and 85 outdoor as minimums.

Ratings cover 204 of 251 venues. The 4.6-star average is the average of those 204. If you divide the same total by all 251 venues you get 3.7, which is a different and much less useful number — it silently treats every unrated venue as a zero. We mention it because that is an easy mistake to make with this dataset, and we made it ourselves in an early draft of this article.

City pages undercount badly. Our fourteen city pages account for 51 venues of 251. Canberra shows 1 while the ACT shows 10; Adelaide shows 1 while South Australia shows 16; Darwin and the Sunshine Coast show none while both regions have venues in the directory. Venues are matched to a city by suburb and keyword, and that matching is missing a lot. Read the city pages as a starting point and the state pages as the fuller list.

Ratings and reviews come from Google Places. They are not written by us and we do not moderate them. Our review policy explains how they are sourced.

Population figures are ABS estimated resident population at 31 December 2025, released 18 June 2026. Per-capita figures are our own calculation from those figures and our venue counts.

Court data was retrieved from our directory on 11 August 2026 and changes as venues open, close and are added.

What we would like to fix next

Three things would materially improve this picture, and we are working on them. Recording individual court counts for the 177 venues that lack one. Classifying the 58 venues that currently fall outside indoor and outdoor. And fixing city-page matching so Darwin and the Sunshine Coast stop reading as empty — then filling the one gap that appears to be genuine, Geelong.

If you know a court that is not on this list, or you can tell us how many courts a listed venue actually has, add it or correct it here. This analysis is only as good as the directory underneath it.

Browse every pickleball court in Australia →

Sources

• Pickleball Australia court directory, retrieved 11 August 2026
• Australian Bureau of Statistics, National, state and territory population, December 2025, released 18 June 2026
• AusPlay participation data, July 2023 – June 2024
• Pickleball Australia Association, Annual Report 2023-24, released 4 December 2024
• Australian Sports Commission, AusPlay 2024-25 data release, 14 November 2025
• Clearinghouse for Sport, note on AusPlay methodology change from 2023

Read next

• How to Find Pickleball Courts and Clubs in Australia
• Pickleball Clubs in Australia
• How to Play Pickleball: A Beginner’s Guide