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Court Cost Splitter — who owes what tonight

Court price, a tube of balls, the guest who came along and the friend who never showed — in one tap you get the per-head number, what a weekly habit costs over a month, and a settle-up line you can paste straight into the group chat.

The booking

What the club charges for the whole court, not per player.

Only used for the per-hour line — it never changes the split.

A tube’s price. Set it to 0 if nobody bought any.

Spread across the nights a tube actually lasts.

Tonight’s heads
Players on court
Guests among them
What a guest pays

The crew subsidy: a regular pays the court every week, a guest pays once. The extra comes off the regulars’ shares.

No-shows
A no-show

Goes into the settle-up line, so nobody has to ask.

Method

How the split is worked out

Everything starts from one pot: the court price for the whole booking, plus a tube of balls divided by the number of nights a tube lasts. A €7.50 tube on every third night adds €2.50 to the pot, which is €0.63 a head at four players — amortising it is why nobody has to remember who bought balls in March.

The pot is then divided by heads. A head is a player who was on court, plus each no-show if the crew's rule says a no-show still owes; set the rule the other way and the no-shows drop out of the division entirely and the people who turned up carry the whole booking.

The guest premium is a transfer, not a surcharge. A guest pays their share plus 25%, and the surplus is taken straight off the regulars: each regular pays base − (guests × base × 0.25) ÷ number of regulars. The pot therefore still adds up to exactly the pot — the club is not paid twice, the regulars are paid back. Turn the premium off and every head on court pays the identical share.

Three of those numbers are ours and not derived from anything. The 25% guest premium is a convention, chosen because a regular pays the court every week and a guest pays once. The per-hour line divides a share by the booking length purely so you can compare clubs, and it never changes the split. And the monthly figure multiplies the pot by 4.3, which is the honest average number of nights in a month for a weekly slot rather than a tidy 4.

Two conventions do most of the work in real life, and neither is arithmetic: round to the nearest 0.05 and let whoever fronted the court absorb the cents, and agree the guest rule and the no-show rule in advance. A rule agreed while everyone is in a good mood is a rule; the same rule invented afterwards is an accusation.

Rivals is not affiliated with any padel federation and nothing here is coached, reviewed or official. Where a number is our own judgement rather than a published figure, the note above says so and cites nothing. Method last checked 21 August 2026.

Why court money breaks up crews

Court money is the quietest reason crews fall apart. Nobody quits over a euro; they quit because one person has been fronting the booking for four months and has stopped being able to face asking. The split itself is trivial arithmetic — the hard part is that it has to be the same arithmetic every week, out loud, before anyone is holding a card reader.

For scale: padeldrops and nxpadel put US courts at roughly $20–60 an hour ($5–15 a head at four players), while a 90-minute booking in Spain or Argentina frequently comes in under €7 a person. Balls are the rounding error people over-think — a €7.50 tube that survives three nights adds €0.63 to each head, which is why this splitter amortises it instead of charging whoever happened to buy them.

Two conventions do most of the work. Round every share to the nearest 0.05 and let whoever fronted the court absorb the cents, because chasing three cents costs more goodwill than it collects. And decide the guest rule and the no-show rule once, in writing, while everyone is in a good mood — a rule agreed in advance is a rule; the same rule invented after the fact is an accusation.

Questions

How much does padel cost per person?
It depends almost entirely on the court, because you are splitting one booking four ways. US clubs charge roughly $20–60 an hour, which lands at about $5–15 a head; in Spain and Argentina a 90-minute booking often works out under €7 a person. Add a tube of balls at €6–9 spread across the two or three nights it lasts, and the per-head number moves by well under a euro.

What is the fairest way to handle a guest?
Two systems work, and both are fair as long as they are agreed before the guest arrives. The flat split treats the night as the night: four heads, four equal shares, nobody counts coins. The crew subsidy charges a guest their share plus 25% on the logic that regulars carry the slot every week while a guest turns up once — the surplus comes straight off the regulars’ shares rather than being pocketed by anyone. What is not fair is deciding which one applies after you see the bill.

Should a no-show still pay?
If the court was booked on their head, yes — the club charged for four spots whether or not four arrived, and someone is out of pocket. The social version of this rule is gentler than it sounds: a deadline for dropping out, a waitlist that gets a shot at the spot, and after that the share stands. Crews that write the rule down once argue about it far less than crews that relitigate it every time somebody gets stuck at work.

How do crews keep track of who owes what over a season?
Badly, mostly — a chat thread nobody scrolls back through, plus one organizer who quietly eats the difference. What actually works is a running ledger: who fronted each booking, what each person owes against it, and what has been settled, all in one place instead of in somebody’s memory. That is a record-keeping job, not a payments job, which is why it belongs next to your results rather than inside a bank app.

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Read next

How to Split Padel Court Costs Fairly Four fair ways to split padel court costs, with worked numbers: rotate the payer, split per night, run a kitty, or keep a ledger. Plus guests and no-shows. 8 min The Fee Ledger: Who Paid for Court, Balls and Beers How to track shared padel costs without spreadsheets: what to log, when to settle up, and a worked month that closes six costs with two transfers. 8 min Is Padel Expensive? The Real Cost Per Year What a year of padel actually costs: court share, balls, racket and shoes, worked out for four real scenarios with 2026 court prices from the UK and Spain. 8 min

Rivals keeps the court money straight all season

The fee ledger tracks who fronted the booking and who still owes, nudges the settle-up, and hands off to your payment app — Rivals never touches the money, it just remembers who does.

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Free for a crew of four. Nothing inside is metered.