One builder,
not six quotes

The short version

What should I ask a padel court builder?

Ten questions. They take ten minutes and they turn three incomparable totals into three comparable ones.

• Which Incoterm is the kit priced on? EXW leaves freight, insurance, duty and haulage with you. DDP includes them. This one question explains most of the gap between quotes that otherwise look identical.
• Who owns the slab? Some padel court builders quote supply and erect only, assuming you deliver a finished, level, load-rated slab. Others price the groundwork. The difference is five figures.
• How many padel courts have you completed, and where? Ask for addresses, not photographs. Photographs come from the manufacturer's library.
• Who does the actual installation? Their own crew, a subcontractor, or a crew flown in by the manufacturer. All are workable. You want to know which, because it decides who returns for a warranty claim.
• What is the lead time from deposit to delivery? Courts are manufactured to order, mostly abroad, and shipped by sea. A vague answer here usually means they have not placed the order with the factory yet.
• What does the structural warranty actually cover, and who honours it? A warranty from a factory with no US entity is harder to enforce than one from the company standing in front of you.
• What gauge is the steel and what corrosion class is the coating? Ask for the millimetre thickness and the ISO 12944 class by name. C5 is the class rated for marine and heavy industrial exposure. "Galvanised" on its own is not an answer.
• What wind speed is the structure rated to, in mph? A number, on paper, for the model you are being quoted. Coastal and hurricane-zone counties will ask for it before they will ask you anything else.
• Who carries the permit application, and have you checked zoning? These are two separate approvals and people conflate them. Zoning decides whether a court is allowed on that parcel at all; the building permit decides whether the structure passes. A builder should supply stamped CAD drawings and wind-load calculations for the permit, and should have raised zoning before you signed anything.
• Are you licensed and insured in this state, and can I see the certificates? Ask for the certificate of insurance directly from the insurer, not a PDF.

Reference

What does a good specification look like?

Use this as the row you measure a quote against. These are the figures currently offered by established US padel court builders, so a quote that falls short of them should come with a reason.

Is there a certification for court builders?

Yes, though not padel-specific. The American Sports Builders Association runs a Certified Builder program and maintains a public member directory of sports facility builders, designers and suppliers, along with published construction guidelines for courts.

ASBA certification tells you a contractor works to recognised standards on sports surfaces generally. It does not tell you they have erected a 4 metre glass and steel enclosure, because padel is newer than the certification. Treat it as a strong signal on the groundwork and a neutral one on the structure, and ask the completed-court question separately.

The FIP publishes the court specification itself in the Rules of Padel. Any builder should be able to talk fluently about the 20 by 10 metre footprint, the 0.5% tolerance and the 6 metre indoor clearance without looking them up.

What should make me walk away?

Four things, in rough order of how much they should worry you.

• A total with no scope behind it. A single number with no breakdown of kit, slab, freight and lighting is not a quote, it is an opening position.
• Reluctance to survey before pricing. Nobody can price groundwork from a photograph. A builder quoting a slab sight-unseen is either guessing or planning to reprice later.
• A deposit above the industry norm with no manufacturing milestone. Deposits are normal because courts are made to order. A deposit that is not tied to a factory order date is not.
• No answer on the warranty chain. If nobody can tell you who replaces a cracked panel in year three, assume the answer is you.

How this works

How do you match me with a builder?

You send the site details. We pass them to the one builder holding your region and they contact you directly, usually within a business day. We are not in the middle of the quote, the contract or the build.

1. You describe the site

   Location, court count, indoor or outdoor, and whether a slab already exists. Two minutes, no phone call required.

2. We check the territory

   One builder holds each region. If nobody covers yours, we say so rather than routing you to a company two states away.

3. They contact you directly

   No bidding pool, no call centre, and your details are not resold to anyone else.

Disclosure: CourtBaseline is funded by the builders who hold each region. They pay a fixed monthly fee for territory access. They do not pay per enquiry, per quote or per contract signed, and no builder pays to influence what we publish about costs, specifications or their competitors. We check that a builder is trading, insured and has completed comparable work before signing a territory agreement. We do not supervise their work or warrant it, and you should satisfy yourself independently before contracting with anyone.

Which regions have a padel courts installation partner?

Coverage follows the market. Florida holds roughly 41% of all US padel courts, ahead of Texas at 18%, California at 10% and New York at 4.7%, so those regions were allocated first.

If your region is unallocated we will tell you plainly and, if you want, notify you when a builder takes it on. We would rather say nobody covers Nebraska yet than hand your project to a company that has never worked there.

Common questions

Padel court builders, answered

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