Why Youth Sports Costs What It Does

The bill, in averages

The Aspen Institute's National Youth Sports Parent Survey, run with Utah State University's Families in Sport Lab and Louisiana Tech University's Minds in Motion Lab (1,848 youth sports parents, fielded November-December 2024 and released March 2025), put average family spending on a child's primary sport at $1,016 in 2024, up 46% since 2019. Parents also estimated another $475 on the same child's other sports teams, which brings the average to nearly $1,500 a year for one child's sports. Aspen estimates, based on that survey and other research, that parents spend more than $40 billion a year on youth sports.

The survey broke the $1,016 into categories. The averages for a child's primary sport were $278 for travel and lodging, $197 for team registrations, $183 for lessons and instruction, $165 for equipment and uniforms, $148 for camps or athletic schools, and $43 for other expenses. Travel and lodging was the largest category. By sport, average spending on a child's primary sport was $1,113 for baseball, $910 for soccer, and $876 for basketball, and Project Play reports that over five years the average basketball parent spent 105% more, and soccer and baseball parents 69% and 68% more.

A second source gives a different cut. In the July 2026 AP/Ipsos poll of 510 parents of K-12 children who play organized sports, 68% estimated that their household spends $2,000 or less a year on equipment, fees, training, and travel for their children's athletics, and 11% estimated more than $5,000. Both sources rely on parents' own estimates, and the two surveys ask different questions, so their figures are not directly comparable. The sections below pair each cost with the sourced figure that exists for it, and say where that figure is about strain and not about price.

What the money covers

Registration and club fees

In the July 2026 AP/Ipsos poll, 73% of sports parents called team or club fees a major or minor challenge for their household: 26% called them a major challenge and 47% a minor one. On the provider side, 92% of park and recreation agencies charge registration fees for youth sports (NRPA, 2020), and 65% offer reduced fees for lower-income residents. Our read: fees are where other costs land, because an organization that cannot cover a cost another way passes it on through registration.

Equipment and uniforms

In the same poll, 69% of sports parents called equipment or uniform costs a major or minor challenge: 24% major and 45% minor. A separate study, the Good Sports Cost of Sports Study (conducted by The Harris Poll in October 2024 among 741 U.S. parents of minors), found that 58% of parents whose children currently play sports said paying for equipment has become a financial stress for their family. In the same study, 14% of parents of minors said they have not signed a child up for a sports team because of the cost of equipment and related expenses, and 10% of parents whose children have ever played said they pulled a child from a team for that reason. The poll figures are parent-reported, and "major or minor" includes any level of difficulty.

Fields and facilities

NRPA's agencies list insufficient sports fields and courts among their long-term challenges. Aspen's March 2025 Washington, D.C. report found too few quality fields and gyms to meet demand, with providers frustrated by permitting and maintenance, and one provider reported spending $22,000 a year on four football games at high school fields. That is one provider's report, not an average. Our read: clubs that lease facilities they do not own carry that pressure straight into their budgets.

Officiating

NFHS estimates that at least 50,000 officials left the profession in 2020-21. In NASO's 2023 survey of 35,813 officials, 60% said they were underpaid but accept budget constraints at their level, about 21% said they were underpaid and dissatisfied, and 79.06% had taken on more assignments because of the shortage. NASO's published survey dashboard on officiating finances does not report a per-game fee, so none of these figures is a dollar cost per game. It does report officials' own costs: 22.92% of respondents (8,208 officials) said their personal costs for officiating are too much, and 31.31% said they spend more than $800 a year on personal officiating costs that their sport does not reimburse.

Coaching

Youth sports relies on volunteer coaches, and 81% of coaches said their community needs more coaches (Project Play, State of Play 2022). NRPA's agencies also list difficulty recruiting enough volunteer coaches among their long-term challenges. Our read: where coaching is unpaid, its cost shows up as time and recruiting effort, not as a line in the budget, and the sourced figures here measure that strain and not a price.

Travel and club programs

In the AP/Ipsos poll, 72% of sports parents called the amount of travel a major or minor challenge for their household, 26% major and 46% minor. In Aspen's parent survey, travel and lodging was the largest single category of what families spent on a child's primary sport, at an average of $278, and Project Play's March 2025 analysis named travel and lodging for non-local play among the drivers pushing costs up. Project Play's October 2026 analysis of SFIA data says travel expenses for youth sports are among the largest costs for families. Aspen's State of Play 2025 also names expensive club programs among the pressures on youth sports. A researcher with Utah State University's Families in Sport Lab, which ran Aspen's parent survey, has called it "a serious problem if at 8, 9, or 10 years old, kids are deciding or being told ‘this sport isn't for you’" (Project Play, 2019).

Time and scheduling

Time is a cost families report alongside money. In the AP/Ipsos poll, 84% of sports parents called the time commitment, and 84% called scheduling and logistics, a major or minor challenge for their household: 36% called the time commitment a major challenge and 31% said the same of scheduling and logistics. No dollar value is assigned to time here.

Safety services

A 2015-2018 census of 20,272 U.S. secondary schools found that 66% had access to athletic trainer services and 34% had none, and only 37% of public schools had full-time services (at least 30 hours a week). The data is several years old. Our read: services like these are a cost a school or league has to find money for.

Income and quitting

Income is the clearest divide, and it widened in 2025. Participation among children ages 6-12 in households earning $25,000 or less fell 7% in a single year, while every higher income bracket grew between 2% and 7%, and the gap between the highest- and lowest-income tiers went from 14.5 percentage points in 2022 to 24.8 in 2025 (Project Play's analysis of SFIA data; the $25,000 line is an SFIA category, not a poverty measure). On spending, Aspen's 2024 parent survey found that households earning $100,000 or more spent $1,471 more a year on a child's primary sport than households earning under $50,000.

Among the 268 parents of K-12 children in the AP/Ipsos poll whose child had ever quit or stopped an organized sport, 41% said cost played a major or minor role, behind lost interest (86%) and not feeling good enough (51%). An earlier Aspen survey (2019) found that youth from low-income homes quit because of cost at six times the rate of high-income youth.

Participation and the trade-off

Overall participation is up. By SFIA's measure, regular team-sport participation among kids ages 6-17 reached nearly 41% in 2025, the highest level in 12 years, and 58% of U.S. youth played sports in 2024 against a federal Healthy People 2030 target of 63%. Most parents who pay for it say it is worth it: 89% of sports parents said the benefits of youth sports outweigh the drawbacks for their family. Our read: participation rising while costs rose suggests cost has not kept most families out, but the 2025 income figures show that is not evenly true.

Where sponsorship fits

Our read: sponsorship is one way an organization can offset some of these costs. A sponsor can pay for a specific, named cost, such as equipment, officiating, entry fees, or field upkeep, instead of that cost reaching families through registration. The Sponsorship Inventory's cost-coverage section lists what that can look like, and What Families Pay Beyond Registration, and What a Sponsor Can Cover goes through it from the family side. Sponsorship does not cover every cost, and none of the figures above measures how much of a family's bill it offsets.

Zubie Five sells sponsorship brokerage to youth leagues, high school athletics programs, and cities and parks and recreation departments, and earns a commission on the sponsorships it closes (How We're Paid), so it has a stake in this topic.