Commercial

What a golf simulator facility actually costs to run.

Most facility calculators multiply bays by rate by hours and stop there. That number is revenue, and revenue is not the question. This one subtracts rent, labour, utilities, licensing, cost of goods and card fees, then tells you the utilization you have to hit to cover them.

Figures retrieved 7 August 2026. Reviewed against their published sources on the same date.

1 bay12 bays
$20$200

Share of your total open bay-hours that are actually billed. Published first-year venues average 33%.

5%75%
6 hrs24 hrs
20 days31 days
Market
Equipment tier
Food and beverage
Staffing
Footprint, staffing hours and financing

Defaults to 300 sq ft per bay plus 900 for back-of-house, bar and circulation. Replace it with a real figure from a listing if you have one. fitted to the published venue footprint

Two more are added for open and close.

Debt service is reported as its own line and is deliberately kept out of operating cost.

0%90%

Utilization needed to break even

34%

Published first-year venues average 33%; mature venues reach 50–65%.golfoclock, 200+ venues

0%50%100%
You, 33%Break-even, 34%Year oneMature
Billed bay-hours a monthPublished break-even for a four-bay venue is 210–640 hours. golfoclock486
Break-even rate at your 33%Published break-even is $75–100 per bay-hour.$51

Monthly, at 33%

Revenue$21,384 – $26,374$23,879
Operating cost$17,559 – $31,434$24,496
Operating profit−$10,050 to $8,815−$618
Rent and occupancy$4,550
Labour$10,764
Utilities$1,400
Software and licensing$941
Maintenance and consumables$1,483
F&B cost of goods$1,283
Marketing$2,350
Insurance, admin and card fees$1,725
Build cost$145,000 – $335,000$240,000
PaybackBest case only. At the high-cost end this does not cover its monthly cost, so there is no worst case to state.16 months best case
Revenue per bay per yearOperating venues in published data report $45,000–$90,000. industry benchmark$71,636

Short by $618 a month. Three ways to close it.

Raise the rate$51 per bay-hour breaks even at 33% utilization.You set $50.
Raise utilization34% breaks even at $50 per bay-hour.First-year venues average 33%.
Cut fixed cost$618 a month has to come out.Rent and labour are the two largest lines.

An estimate, not a quote. Payback here is build cost divided by monthly operating profit on your own inputs. It ignores taxes, working capital and the ramp-up period, and debt service unless you turn financing on. Every constant, sourced

This does not reliably cover its monthly costAt the high-cost end of our range, this configuration does not cover its monthly operating cost. Whether it works depends on decisions that are still open.golfoclock
No manager salary is includedThis assumes you or an owner work the floor and take no salary. Add $4,500–$7,500 a month for a hired general manager.our assumption

Read the caveats before you read the number

What this does not tell you

  • An estimate, not a quote. Nothing here has been priced by a builder, a landlord or a lender. It is arithmetic on figures you chose and constants we publish.
  • Utilization here means the share of your total open bay-hours that are actually billed. Some published utilization figures measure prime evening and weekend hours only, which produces a much higher number for the same venue. If your figure came from somewhere else, check which one it is before you compare.
  • Payback is build cost divided by monthly operating profit on your inputs.It ignores taxes, working capital, and the ramp-up period during which a new venue does not yet run at the utilization you set. It ignores debt service unless you turn financing on.
  • Most of the cost constants are our assumptions, not published figures. Of the sources behind this model, seven are published third-party figures, five are our decompositions of published totals, and fourteen are our own judgement. Which is which is labelled on the methodology page, line by line.
  • Rent, wages and licensing are intensely local. The bands here are indicative. One real lease quote and one real payroll figure will move this model further than every other input on the page combined.
  • This is the commercial model, not the residential one. If you are pricing a simulator for a home, the residential estimate is the one you want — it is a different build with different economics.

Why break-even utilization is the headline

Revenue scales with utilization; most cost does not. Rent, the manager, the course licences and the insurance are owed whether or not anyone books a bay. So the question that decides whether a venue works is not how much it can make in a good month — it is how full it has to be before it stops losing money.

That figure is also the one you can check against something. Published data puts first-year venues at around 33% of open bay-hours and mature venues at 50–65%. If your break-even lands above what you can realistically reach in year one, you know before you sign a lease rather than after.

The same truth is reported three ways — as a percentage, as billed bay-hours per month, and as a rate per bay-hour — because each has an independent published benchmark to sit against, and because an operator thinks in hours where a developer thinks in percentages.

Where the numbers come from

Every constant is listed on themethodology page with its source and, more importantly, with what kind of figure it is: published by a third party, our decomposition of a published total, or our own assumption. Fourteen of them are assumptions. Saying so is cheaper than being caught.

The third-party figures the model is calibrated against are reproduced on thebenchmarks page, each naming its source in its own row.

The build fails if any constant loses its source. That is not a policy, it is a script.

Building one at home instead?

This is the commercial model — multiple bays, staff, a lease, and revenue. A residential build is a different product with different economics.Our homeowner estimate covers that, including the ceiling height question that decides most of it.