The Short Numbers

Most answers to this question come from equipment sellers or forum posts. The figures below come from a franchise disclosure document filed in 2026, which any prospective buyer can download from the California registry, and from three companies that report to shareholders or spoke on the record.

Sales. Four indoor inflatable parks reported 2025 gross sales between $1,065,189 and $2,825,728. Only one of the four was open the full 52 weeks. The other three opened during the year and reported 18 to 40 weeks.

Margin. Their EBITDA margins ran from 24 to 36 percent, before debt, owner pay, depreciation and equipment replacement.

Biggest costs. Labor took 19 to 26 percent of sales, and facility costs, which include rent and liability insurance, took 11 to 16 percent.

Parties. Events and parties were 10 to 25 percent of revenue at the three operators in this category who disclose the figure, and each of them counts corporate events in that number.

The answer. Yes, when three things hold. The building fits the format, the trade area has enough families within a short drive, and the owner has priced in the costs that sit outside the margin. Miss one and the numbers above stop applying.

Most people asking this question have already decided they want to do it, and the real comparison in their head is against leaving the money invested at 8 to 10 percent. That is the right frame. A park is a return on capital and a job at once, and the sections below give you the inputs to work out whether it beats the alternative.

Where the Money Comes From

An indoor park sells time. General admission is the base. Around it sit party packages, group bookings, passes, grip socks, lockers, food and drink, games and merchandise. The Funbox filing counts all of them as gross sales, and the socks, party food and prizes show up as cost of sales at only 4 to 8 percent, which tells you how little of the money goes on goods.

The line that decides most parks is parties. A party sells a room, a host and a time slot at a fixed price, weeks ahead, to a customer who brings ten to twenty guests who then pay for socks and snacks. It is booked, it is predictable, and it brings in families who would not otherwise have come.

How big a share? No franchise disclosure document in this category breaks revenue out by line, so the honest answer comes from operators who report elsewhere. A publicly listed arcade-and-dining chain told shareholders that special events were 9.8 percent of revenue in fiscal 2018, and later stopped reporting the line. A publicly listed bowling operator, in the presentation for its 2021 listing, put events at about $140 million of $742 million, roughly 19 percent. And the chief executive of a trampoline park franchisor told a franchise trade publication in October 2023 that special events including birthday parties were about 25 percent of its business.

Three caveats travel with those figures. Each mixes birthday parties with corporate events. Each describes one company, not the category. And the two audited numbers come from adult-leaning venues, so a kids venue should expect to sit toward the top of the range or above it. Ask any operator you call what share of last year’s sales came from parties. It is the most useful number in the whole conversation.

What It Costs to Run One

The Funbox filing publishes a summary income statement for four indoor parks in 2025, the only line-by-line operating picture of an inflatable park in the public record. The table gives each cost line as a share of gross sales, with the range across the four parks. The dollar figures are in the filing, and in the full Item 19 table and a trampoline-side comparison in a separate article.

Some outlets have sold and earned this amount. Your individual results may differ. There is no assurance that you’ll sell or earn as much.

The catch on labor. The 19 to 26 percent range is with a manager on payroll and the owner off it. If you plan to run the floor yourself, the margin you keep is also your salary, and the filing says so plainly.

The catch on insurance. Liability insurance sits inside facility costs, so the filing does not publish it as its own line. Insurers class trampoline courts as a higher risk than padded inflatable surfaces, and Texas, for one, regulates continuous-airflow inflatables as amusement rides and requires $1,000,000 per occurrence in liability cover for them. Get a quote for your format and your state before you build a model, because it is the one cost line no filing will give you.

The catch on marketing. Three of the four parks opened in 2025, and their marketing lines include the grand opening. The full-year park spent 3 percent. Budget the higher figure for year one and the lower one after.

Margins, Break-Even and the Honest Middle

A 24 to 36 percent EBITDA margin is a strong operating result for a venue business. It is also not the number that lands in your account. EBITDA leaves out four things that an indoor park owner pays for.

1. Debt service on the build-out and equipment, if any of it is borrowed.

2. Owner compensation, if you run the park.

3. Depreciation, which is real money once the equipment needs replacing.

4. The replacement itself. Inflatable parks wear out. The Funbox franchise agreement sets a usable life of 24 months from installation for an indoor park, with one possible 12-month extension at the franchisor’s discretion, and the indoor park costs $150,000 to $200,000. Spread over two years, that is $75,000 to $100,000 a year that sits outside EBITDA because it is capital spending, not an operating cost.

Put those into a model and the honest middle appears. Take an illustration with round numbers that belong to no real park. A $1,500,000 park financed half by a loan at 9 percent over ten years carries roughly $114,000 a year in loan payments. Add $100,000 for an owner salary and $90,000 for equipment replacement, and the park needs about $304,000 of EBITDA a year before the owner earns anything beyond that salary. At a 30 percent margin, that is just over $1,000,000 in annual sales, or about $19,500 a week. Every one of the four filed parks was above that weekly figure except the smallest, which opened in March and averaged $26,630 a week, so it clears it too. What the illustration shows is that the weekly sales figure, not the margin, is what decides the year.

That is also how to think about return on capital. A park that clears the illustration above and keeps a further $150,000 is returning about 10 percent on $1,500,000 of capital, plus the salary, plus the equity in a business that can be sold. Whether that beats leaving the money invested is your call, and the filing gives you enough to make it with real inputs. A separate guide covers what an Item 19 can and cannot show, including the rules that stop a franchisor from telling you anything its filing does not. The short version is that the Franchise Rule allows a franchisor to publish performance figures only in Item 19, and the Federal Trade Commission settled with a fitness franchisor for $17 million in March 2026 over disclosure failures, so the rule is enforced.

The First Six Months

The question the forums ask most and never get answered with data is the ramp. The Funbox filing publishes first-month, first-quarter and first-half sales for each of its four indoor parks, the only such table in the category.

Two things stand out. The parks did not ramp slowly, because a grand opening is a launch with a marketing budget behind it, and the mature park’s January is the softest month of its year. And size is not destiny. Sacramento, the smallest park, outsold Mesa by nearly two to one in the same window, which is a trade-area story rather than a square-footage one. The filing notes that Houston’s 180-day figure runs into 2026 and that none of these figures predict full-year results.

The practical use of this table is working capital. The Funbox Item 7 estimate budgets one to two months of expenses for opening. If your first month looks like Mesa and your rent looks like Houston, that budget is thin. Model the low case, not the average.

The Seasonality Curve

A weekly average hides the swing. The full-year Funbox park averaged $54,341 a week in 2025, and no park earns its average every week. Indoor play runs on three calendars.

The school calendar. Weekends carry the week, school holidays carry the month, and summer is the peak for an indoor venue in a hot market. The same building that is full at 2 p.m. on a Saturday can be near empty at 2 p.m. on a Tuesday in term time.

The weather. Rain and heat both push families indoors. A park in Houston or Mesa fills on 100-degree days, and a park in the Pacific Northwest fills when it rains. Outdoor formats run the opposite curve, which is why the filing notes its outdoor parks operate seasonally.

The party calendar. Birthdays are spread across the year, which is the point. A strong party program pre-sells the February weekends that walk-in admission leaves empty.

Operators smooth the curve three ways. They sell parties months ahead. They sell passes that pull weekday visits from families who would otherwise come once a quarter. And they program the quiet hours with toddler mornings, school-break camps and field trips. None of that shows in a filing. All of it shows in the gap between a 24 percent margin and a 36 percent one.

Why Some Parks Fail

Every category has closures, and the reasons repeat. None of these is about any one brand.

The building is too big for the market. Rent is the largest fixed cost and it never flexes with a slow February. A 30,000 square foot lease in a trade area that supports 15,000 square feet is a park that is always half empty and always paying for the other half.

The trade area was counted wrong. Indoor play draws from a short drive and from families with children in a narrow age band. A territory drawn by total population can look large and hold few of the right households. Count children, not people, and check the number against public census data before signing anything.

The injury and insurance spiral. The American Academy of Pediatrics advises that children of all ages avoid recreational trampoline use, and that children under six should never jump. That guidance is about trampolines rather than the category, and it is a reason insurers price trampoline courts as they do. A venue that runs a thin supervision model to save labor tends to see incidents rise, then premiums, then the labor it saved comes back as a cost with a claim attached.

No repeat-visit engine. A park that relies on walk-in admission alone runs the seasonality curve with nothing to flatten it. Parties, passes and programming are not extras. They are what turns a venue into a business.

The counter-example is worth stating. Funbox’s Item 20 shows 28 franchised parks open at the end of 2025 and one termination in three years. It is a young system, so the record is short, but any franchise system you look at publishes the same table.

Franchise vs Independent Economics

The numbers above cut both ways for someone choosing between going independent and buying a system.

What a franchise costs. In the Funbox filing, the royalty is 8 percent of gross sales, and the indoor park investment runs $855,000 to $1,630,000 including a $75,000 franchise fee and $150,000 to $200,000 of inflatable equipment bought from the franchisor’s affiliate. Forum estimates for opening a trampoline park run $1,200,000 to $2,000,000, and published trampoline franchise ranges start above $2,000,000, so the format decides the capital before the franchise question does. The numbers by format are in what it costs to open an indoor park.

What the royalty buys. Eight percent of a $2,000,000 park is $160,000 a year. For that, an owner gets a proven layout, sourced equipment, a booking and party system, training and a support line on a Saturday. An independent operator keeps the $160,000 and pays for each of those separately, in money or in mistakes. The question is whether you already know how to run a venue.

What only a franchise can show you. An independent business plan is a forecast. A franchise system with an Item 19 is a record. Being able to read four parks’ 2025 cost lines before you sign a lease is worth something on its own, and it is the reason to ask every system you consider for its Item 19 before its brochure. The eight steps to opening an indoor playground, from site to opening day, are covered in a separate guide.

If an indoor park is on your list, ask the Funbox franchise team for the current FDD and read Item 19 for yourself.

Count the weekends. Price the replacement. Then run the return.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much does a trampoline park owner make?

Filed figures for four indoor inflatable parks show 2025 EBITDA of $259,421 to $1,011,188, at margins of 24 to 36 percent, before owner pay, debt and equipment replacement. What the owner keeps depends on how much was borrowed and whether they draw a salary.

What is the profit margin of an indoor playground?

The one filed example in the category shows EBITDA margins of 24 to 36 percent across four parks in 2025. Labor at 19 to 26 percent of sales and facility costs at 11 to 16 percent are the two lines that decide it.

How long does it take an indoor park to break even?

No filing publishes a payback period, and any site that quotes one for a specific brand is estimating. The filed ramp data shows first-month sales of $159,454 to $384,069 at four parks, so the operating break-even can arrive early. Paying back the build-out is a separate calculation that depends on debt and the equipment replacement cycle.

How much revenue do birthday parties bring in?

Operators who disclose it report events and parties at about 10 to 25 percent of revenue, with corporate events included. Kids venues sit toward the top of that range. Ask any owner you call for their own figure.

Is a trampoline park a good investment?

It can be, if the building fits the format, the trade area has enough children within a short drive, and the model prices in debt, owner pay and equipment replacement. Compare the return on capital with what the money would earn elsewhere, and remember you are also buying a job.

How much does it cost to open a trampoline park?

Published trampoline franchise ranges start above $2,000,000 for a new build, and forum estimates run $1,200,000 to $2,000,000. An indoor inflatable park is filed at $855,000 to $1,630,000. A separate guide compares what it costs to open an indoor park by format.

Sources

1. Funbox Franchise, LLC, 2026 Franchise Disclosure Document, Items 7, 19 and 20 and the franchise agreement, on the California Department of Financial Protection and Innovation registry. Issued April 2026. https://dfpi.ca.gov/search-result-detail/?id=564837&type=org

2. American Academy of Pediatrics, "Trampolines: What You Need to Know," healthychildren.org, updated September 2024. https://www.healthychildren.org/English/safety-prevention/at-play/Pages/Trampolines-What-You-Need-to-Know.aspx

3. Texas Department of Insurance, Amusement ride FAQ. Accessed September 2026. https://www.tdi.texas.gov/commercial/lcamuseinfo.html

4. Federal Trade Commission, Franchise Rule, 16 CFR 436.5 (Item 19), eCFR. https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-16/chapter-I/subchapter-D/part-436/subpart-C/section-436.5

5. Federal Trade Commission, "FTC Secures Settlement Against Xponential Fitness for Franchise Rule Violations," 18 March 2026. https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2026/03/ftc-secures-settlement-against-xponential-fitness-franchise-rule-violations