The Short Version

Both formats work. Franchisees are making money in each. The question is not which business is better, it is which one fits the building you can lease, the market you are standing in, and the capital you actually have.

Five numbers set the frame, and every one of them comes from a public filing or a published standard.

Capital. An indoor inflatable park runs $855,000 to $1,630,000 to open. National trampoline systems publish ranges from $1.6 million to $8.4 million, with most new builds landing between $2.1 million and $5.2 million. Soft-contained play, the third format on this page, sits lowest at roughly $482,000 to $759,000.

Footprint. The indoor inflatable format is specified at 12,000 to 22,000 square feet. Trampoline systems build at 25,000 square feet and up, with one publishing a range of 16,000 to 50,000.

Height. This is the one that surprises people. An inflatable park needs more clear ceiling height than a trampoline court does, not less, and it changes which buildings you can even bid on.

Revenue density. The one indoor inflatable park with a full 2025 year turned $182 of revenue per square foot. Trampoline systems publishing average unit volumes work out between roughly $50 and $117 per square foot.

The catch. Inflatables carry a disclosed replacement cycle that sits outside reported margins. Trampoline systems do not publish one at all, which is a different problem rather than a smaller one.

Everything below is sourced at the bottom of the page. Where a figure comes from a franchise disclosure document, the filing is named and dated. Where no source exists, this page says so rather than estimating.

The Three Formats, and What Actually Separates Them

Trampoline court. Connected trampoline beds in padded frames, usually with foam pits, dodgeball courts and a ninja course. Governed by ASTM F2970. Built for jumpers who can control their own landing, which in practice means school age and up.

Inflatable park. Air-filled structures, slides, obstacle runs and climbing walls, anchored and continuously inflated. Governed by ASTM F2374. Softer landing surfaces and a wider age band than a trampoline court.

Soft-contained play. Netted and padded structures, tunnels, ball pits and low slides. Governed by ASTM F1918. Built almost entirely for the under-five bracket.

Hybrids exist, and most large parks are one. A trampoline system that has added a ninja course, a ropes element and an arcade is a family entertainment center wearing a trampoline badge, and its filing will price it accordingly.

One naming note before the numbers. The phrase "bounce park" gets used for inflatable parks and, by some operators, for trampoline parks. When you read a filing, check what is actually on the floor rather than what the brand is called.

What It Costs to Open

The headline looks decisive. It is less decisive than it looks, because these formats are not buying the same amount of building.

Per square foot, the picture tightens considerably. At 15,500 square feet, the indoor inflatable range works out to roughly $55 to $105 of capital per square foot. Trampoline systems building at 25,000 square feet land between roughly $84 and $207 on their published ranges. The bands overlap.

So the inflatable format is not dramatically cheaper to build per square foot. It is cheaper in total because it takes a smaller box.

That distinction is worth sitting with, because it tells you what you are actually buying. The inflatable format is a density play, not a discount. You are betting that a smaller room can generate comparable revenue, which is a different bet from betting that the same business costs less.

The Building You Need, and Why This Is the Section to Read Twice

Footprint is the number every franchise sales page leads with. Clear height is the number that decides whether a building is even a candidate, and almost nobody publishes it.

Here is what the public record supports.

On the trampoline side, ASTM F2970 sets a minimum clear height of 17 feet. Design guidance puts most commercial builds at 20 to 25 feet, with zone minimums of about 14 feet over a freestyle court and 16 feet over a slam-dunk area. A trampoline park can work in a 20-foot building.

On the inflatable side, the tallest attraction in a standard indoor inflatable park is a 23-foot slide, published on the park pages themselves. State amusement regulation requires 48 inches of side and overhead clearance between an inflatable and any other object. Put those together and the room needs something close to 27 feet of clear height.

Which means the inflatable format needs the taller building, not the shorter one.

That has a price attached. Industrial and flex space at 16 to 18 feet of clear height is common 1990s and 2000s stock and leases at market baseline. Space at 24 to 28 feet is 2010-and-later construction and carries a 15 to 30 percent rent premium over the 16-foot tier. Anyone marketing an inflatable park as the format that drops into any empty retail box has not measured the ceiling.

What offsets it is footprint. The inflatable park takes 12,000 to 22,000 square feet where a trampoline park takes 25,000 and up. Fewer square feet at a higher rate per square foot. Whether that nets out in your favor depends entirely on your local market, which is exactly why this belongs on a site tour rather than in a spreadsheet.

There is evidence it nets out fine in practice. Across the four indoor inflatable parks with published 2025 results, facility costs ran 11 to 16 percent of gross sales. That line covers lease, maintenance, utilities, security and business liability insurance together.

The practical version. Walk the building with a tape measure and find the lowest immovable obstruction, which is usually a sprinkler main or a light fixture rather than the roof deck. That number is your clear height, and it rules buildings in or out before anything else gets a vote.

What the Parks Actually Earn

Most franchise comparisons stop at what it costs to open, because that is the only number every system publishes. Revenue is optional. A franchisor may include a financial performance representation in Item 19 of its disclosure document, or it may leave Item 19 blank. Plenty leave it blank.

Here is what is on the record for the indoor inflatable format, taken from Funbox Franchise LLC’s 2026 disclosure document. Four indoor parks, full year 2025, accrual basis, unaudited.

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.

Read the weeks-open row before anything else. Only Arcadia ran a full 2025. Mesa, Sacramento and Houston ran 40, 32 and 18 weeks, so their gross sales are partial years and cannot be set against a full-year figure from any other system without correcting for that first.

Correct for it and the density shows up. Average weekly revenue per square foot runs $2.05 at Mesa, $3.23 at Houston, $3.51 at Arcadia and $4.40 at Sacramento.

On the trampoline side, the systems that publish performance figures reported 2024 and 2025 averages between roughly $2.0 million and $2.9 million per park, with one system’s top quartile between $4.7 million and $5.3 million. Spread across footprints of 25,000 square feet and up, that works out to roughly $50 to $117 per square foot for a full year. Arcadia’s full year came to $182.

Margins are much closer than density. Reported EBITDA margin across the four inflatable parks ran 24 to 36 percent, and one trampoline system’s published model-park figures work out to about 30 percent. Comparable, in other words. The difference between the formats is not how much of each dollar they keep, it is how much capital and how much floor it takes to earn the dollar in the first place.

The Cost Nobody Prices In

Every format on this page replaces its play surface eventually. Only one of them tells you when.

The inflatable franchise agreement puts a usable life of 24 months on indoor inflatable components from the date of installation, with one possible 12-month extension granted at the franchisor’s discretion after a physical inspection the franchisee pays for. Replacement is mandatory at 24 months, or at 36 with the extension. Retired equipment must be destroyed and certified as destroyed, or listed for sale exclusively through the franchisor to a buyer outside the United States. Indoor parks must also be refurbished at least every three years.

Item 7 puts inflatable park components at $150,000 to $200,000. Spread over 24 months, that is $75,000 to $100,000 a year. Against Arcadia’s 2025 gross sales it is 2.7 to 3.5 percent of revenue. With the 36-month extension it falls to 1.8 to 2.4 percent.

And it sits outside EBITDA, because it is capital expenditure rather than an operating cost. The 24 to 36 percent margins in the table above do not carry it. Put it in your model yourself, because the filing will not put it there for you.

Here is the part that is easy to miss, though. Trampoline beds, pads and netting wear out too, and no trampoline system’s public filing states a mandated replacement interval. The absence of the number is not evidence that the cycle is longer or cheaper. It is evidence that the cycle is not disclosed.

Which is the real lesson of this section. When you compare two franchise systems, a disclosed cost will always look worse than an undisclosed one, and that is a property of disclosure rather than a property of the business. Read Item 7 and the franchise agreement for replacement language in every system you are considering, and treat silence as a question rather than an answer.

Insurance, Standards and Who Inspects What

Insurers price these formats differently, and their pricing is the most candid risk assessment publicly available on either one.

Brokers publishing 2026 figures place single-location trampoline parks in the highest injury-risk class among family entertainment attractions and quote annual premiums from $15,000 to $45,000, with another broker’s band running $20,000 to $100,000 and above. That second broker rates on jumper-hours, meaning attendance multiplied by session length, rather than on revenue. Typical general liability limits run $1 million per occurrence and $2 million aggregate at the low end, and $2 million and $4 million with a $5 million umbrella layer at the high end. Inflatable attractions sit a tier below trampoline courts in the same classification.

On the inflatable side, the franchise agreement requires commercial general liability at $1 million per occurrence and $2 million aggregate, a $1 million umbrella, workers compensation with employers liability of at least $1 million, employment practices liability of at least $500,000, internet liability of at least $1 million, and property cover sufficient to replace the inflatables, furniture, fixtures and equipment. Item 7 budgets $10,000 to $30,000 for insurance as a pre-opening cost.

Two cautions on reading that comparison, both of which matter. A pre-opening budget line is not an annual premium and the two should not be set against each other. And the very low premiums brokers quote for inflatables generally describe rental operators who truck equipment to events, which is a different business from a fixed-site park.

What is genuinely comparable is the umbrella requirement. A $1 million umbrella against a $5 million layered structure is a real difference in what the underwriter thinks it is pricing.

Standards and inspection sit on top of all of it. Trampoline courts are governed by ASTM F2970, inflatable amusement devices by ASTM F2374, and soft-contained play by ASTM F1918. Enforcement is by state rather than federal, and it varies more than most prospective owners expect. Maryland, to take one published example, requires at least one operator and one attendant for any inflatable attraction over 15 feet, and caps use at two users on the attraction and two in the queue where the manufacturer does not specify a maximum.

Check your own state’s amusement device rules before you sign anything. They set your inspection schedule, your staffing floor, and in several states whether the format is permitted at all in the building class you are looking at.

What the Injury Research Says, and What It Does Not

This section is deliberately careful, because the evidence is thinner than either side’s marketing suggests.

The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children of all ages avoid recreational trampoline use outside a supervised training setting, and states that children under six should never jump. That guidance is about trampolines specifically rather than about the category, and it is the clearest position any medical body has published anywhere near this business.

What does not exist is a United States dataset that isolates commercial inflatable parks from bounce-house rentals, backyard equipment and trampoline parks. Injury surveillance systems group these differently from year to year, so a clean format-against-format injury rate is not available to anyone, including whoever is quoting one at you.

What can be said is that insurers, who price risk for a living and hold loss data nobody publishes, tier these formats differently and charge accordingly. That is a market signal rather than a clinical finding, and this page treats it as one.

If a franchise sales page tells you flatly that one format is safe and another is not, the useful question is which dataset that came from.

Who Walks In the Door

Format determines age range, and age range determines almost everything downstream, including party mix, session length and how many tickets a single visit sells.

Soft-contained play is built for the under-fives and generally tops out somewhere around eight or ten. Trampoline courts are built for jumpers who can control their own landing, which is school age and up, and the pediatric guidance above sits directly on the under-six end of that. Inflatable parks sit across the middle and reach lower than a trampoline court does.

There is a revenue consequence at the youngest end that is easy to miss. At an inflatable park, published policy requires children five and under to be accompanied into the inflatable by a parent or carer, every guest holds a paid general admission ticket whether they jump or not, and only children aged zero to two are free. So a visit built around a four-year-old sells two tickets rather than one.

That is a structural feature of serving the younger end rather than a pricing trick, and it works the other way on capacity. A format serving younger children needs more adult floor space and accepts lower throughput per square foot than one serving teenagers. The two effects partly cancel, and which way they land in your market depends on your age mix.

Sessions run about 90 minutes at the inflatable parks whose pages publish a length, with a short changeover for cleaning between them.

Where Each Format Loses

No format on this page is the right answer everywhere. Here is the honest carve-out for each, at the same level of detail.

Trampoline court. The highest capital requirement and the largest footprint, which narrows your site options to large-format retail and industrial space. The highest insurance class in the category. The weakest fit for the youngest bracket, with pediatric guidance saying under-sixes should never jump. And the published average unit volumes, spread across those larger footprints, give it the lowest revenue density of the three.

Inflatable park. The tallest building requirement, which is not visible in the footprint figure and costs real money in rent. A disclosed 24-month replacement cycle that sits outside reported margins. The highest royalty among the systems compared here at 8 percent. And the shortest operating history at indoor scale, with only four indoor parks carrying published 2025 results and only one of those a full year.

Soft-contained play. The lowest capital and the lowest ceiling, in both senses. A narrow age band that children age out of quickly, which caps what a single household is worth and makes repeat business depend on a birth cohort rather than on a family. And the least published performance data of the three formats, which makes it the hardest to evaluate before you commit.

How to Decide

Six checks, in the order that actually eliminates options fastest.

1. Clear height in the buildings available to you. Measure to the lowest immovable obstruction. Under 20 feet rules out most of this category. Under 27 rules out a standard indoor inflatable park. Do this first, because it is the only check that can end the conversation in an afternoon.

2. Footprint against your rent per square foot. Run the total, not the rate. A smaller box at a higher rate can beat a larger box at a lower one, and only your local numbers settle it.

3. Capital you can deploy without borrowing against working capital. Every range on this page is initial investment, and each one assumes you still have operating cash on opening day.

4. The age mix in your trade area. Pull the under-ten population from census data for your drive time. A market weighted to under-sixes and one weighted to eight-to-fourteens do not support the same format.

5. Your appetite for the adult and teen jumper. That segment carries higher average spend and higher claim severity at the same time. Some operators want it. Some deliberately design it out.

6. What each system actually discloses. Ask for Item 7, Item 19 and Item 20, and read the franchise agreement for equipment replacement language. A system that publishes unit-level performance is telling you something that a system leaving Item 19 blank is not. If you have not done this before, it is worth walking through the eight steps of opening one alongside the filings rather than after them.

Run those six and the list usually narrows to a single format before you have spoken to one franchise development officer.

If the answers point you toward the inflatable format, the Funbox franchise team works through the same six checks with the numbers filled in for your market, from site criteria through opening day.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is an inflatable park cheaper to open than a trampoline park?

In total, yes. Published ranges put an indoor inflatable park at $855,000 to $1,630,000 against $1.6 million to $8.4 million across four national trampoline systems. Per square foot of building the gap narrows a great deal, because the inflatable format takes a smaller box. The saving is in scale rather than in unit cost.

Which format needs a taller building?

The inflatable park. A standard indoor inflatable park’s tallest attraction is a 23-foot slide, and amusement regulation requires 48 inches of overhead clearance, which puts the room near 27 feet of clear height. ASTM’s minimum for a trampoline court is 17 feet, and most commercial trampoline builds land between 20 and 25.

Are inflatable parks safer than trampoline parks?

No dataset supports a clean answer, because United States injury surveillance does not separate commercial inflatable parks from rentals and backyard equipment. What is documented is that insurers place trampoline courts in a higher risk class and price them accordingly, and that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends children of all ages avoid recreational trampoline use, with children under six never jumping at all.

How much revenue does an indoor inflatable park generate?

Four indoor parks published 2025 results ranging from $1,065,189 to $2,825,728 in gross sales, with EBITDA margins of 24 to 36 percent. Only one of the four ran a full year, so the others are partial-year figures. 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.

What is the replacement cycle on inflatable equipment?

Twenty-four months from installation, with one possible 12-month extension at the franchisor’s discretion. At $150,000 to $200,000 per park that is $75,000 to $100,000 a year, roughly 2.7 to 3.5 percent of a full-year park’s gross sales, and it sits outside reported EBITDA.

Where do I find these numbers myself?

Franchise disclosure documents are filed with state regulators, and several states publish them. California’s Department of Financial Protection and Innovation runs a searchable public registry. Item 7 gives you the investment range, Item 19 gives you financial performance where the system chooses to publish it, and Item 20 gives you unit counts, closures and transfers. Aggregator sites republish this material constantly, often from filings several years out of date, so it is worth pulling the primary document and learning how to read a franchise disclosure document yourself.

Sources

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

2. Franchise disclosure documents for four national trampoline park systems, 2025 and 2026 issues, as summarized by franchise research publishers including BizFranHub, FranDB and Franchise Times. Investment ranges $1,625,000 to $8,382,109; franchise fees $30,000 to $65,000; royalties 6 to 7 percent; footprints 16,000 to 50,000 square feet; published 2024 and 2025 unit revenue between roughly $2.0 million and $5.3 million. Accessed September 2026.

3. Published franchise investment guidance for a national soft-contained play system, for the range of $482,000 to $759,000. Accessed September 2026.

4. ASTM International: F2970 (trampoline courts), F2374 (inflatable amusement devices), F1918 (soft contained play equipment), astm.org. Accessed September 2026.

5. Indoor trampoline park design guidance on minimum and typical clear heights, topkidsplay.com and elitecj.com, citing the ASTM F2970 and PAS 5000 minimum of 17 feet. Accessed September 2026.

6. Maryland Department of Labor, Licensing and Regulation, inflatable amusement attraction regulations, for the 48-inch side and overhead clearance requirement and the operator and attendant minimums. https://labor.maryland.gov/forms/91266inflatableregs.pdf Accessed September 2026.

7. Industrial clear-height tiers and the associated rent premium, Palm Beach Warehouses clear height guide and Link Logistics industrial real estate guidance. Accessed September 2026.

8. Pro Insurance Group, "How Much Does Family Entertainment Center Insurance Cost in 2026?", proinsgrp.com, for the venue-type premium bands and the injury-risk classification. Accessed September 2026.

9. The Insurance Center, "Trampoline Park Insurance Cost", theinsurancecenter.com, for the $20,000 to $100,000 band and the jumper-hours rating basis. Accessed September 2026.

10. American Academy of Pediatrics, "Trampolines: What You Need to Know," healthychildren.org. Accessed September 2026.

11. FUNBOX official park pages for attraction heights, session length and age policy: funbox.com/houston, funbox.com/los-angeles and funbox.com/sacramento.