Tennis club finance for courts, floodlights and covered courts

Most tennis clubs earn from membership subscriptions, often collected at an annual renewal, alongside coaching, court hire and pay-and-play, leagues and tournaments, social events and a clubhouse bar. At many clubs coaching is run by a head coach as a separate business that pays the club for court time. Commercial centres rely more on court bookings, memberships and coaching programmes, and indoor centres can trade all year.

The big costs come in lumps. Court surfaces wear and need resurfacing, floodlights need replacing, fencing and nets wear out, and a clubhouse needs periodic refurbishment. Outdoor clubs lose playing hours to rain and dark evenings, which is why many look at floodlights or covered courts. A well-run club builds a sinking fund for these costs, and finance fills the gap when the bill arrives before the fund is large enough.

• Resurfacing or rebuilding courts, or changing surface type
• New or replacement floodlights, often switching to LED
• Covering courts with an air dome or framed structure
• Converting a court or spare land to padel
• Fencing, gates, access control and booking systems
• Refurbishing or extending the clubhouse and changing rooms
• Buying the club's land or freehold, or refinancing existing borrowing
• Opening a new commercial centre or adding a second site

Not-for-profit tennis venues may be able to use the LTA Facility Loan Scheme, which is aimed at properly constituted, not-for-profit venues and gives priority to covered courts, with floodlit courts and wider community access also considered. Sport England and the other national sports councils run grant programmes for community facilities. These routes are competitive and usually come with conditions about community access, so many clubs combine them with commercial finance or their own reserves. Commercial centres and companies limited by shares are generally not eligible for the LTA scheme.

Many tennis clubs are unincorporated members' clubs, with the land held by trustees. An unincorporated club cannot borrow in its own name, so commercial lenders usually need trustees, a club company or a community benefit society to be the borrower, and fewer lenders will consider it. Clubs registered as a community amateur sports club (CASC) also have rules on how they use their income and assets; see HMRC's CASC guidance. Commercial centres owned by a limited company borrow like any other business.

A loan for resurfacing should be repaid well before the surface needs replacing again, or the club ends up paying for two surfaces at once. Members' clubs should be clear about who carries the liability if the club cannot pay, and proprietors should expect personal guarantees; see our guide to personal guarantees. Test repayments against a cautious membership forecast, and remember that floodlights and domes add running costs as well as income.

Dome finance is the funding a club or centre uses to put a cover over outdoor courts so they can be booked through the winter and in bad weather. The cover can be an air-supported dome, a framed fabric structure or a permanent building, and the type decides how lenders fund it.

• Air domes and demountable framed covers: because they can be taken down and moved, some asset finance lenders will fund them on hire purchase or a lease.
• Foundations, anchoring, lighting and heating: fixed works that are usually funded with a term loan or a secured loan.
• Permanent covered courts: treated as a building project, usually funded with a term loan or property finance alongside any grant or governing body loan.

Lenders want to see planning consent, the club's security of tenure and a realistic forecast of the extra winter court hire set against heating, power and maintenance. Our pages on tennis dome finance and padel canopy finance go through each type in detail. To see which lenders on our panel fit your project, start with Instant Quotes.

Commercial tennis and racquet centres change hands like other leisure businesses, and buying one is usually funded with acquisition finance: a loan sized on the centre's court hire, coaching and membership income, the buyer's own contribution and sometimes part of the price paid to the seller over time. If the freehold is included, a commercial mortgage can fund the property separately. Lenders look closely at the lease or freehold, the condition and remaining life of the court surfaces and any dome, and whether the head coach and key staff will stay. See working capital after an acquisition for funding the first months under new ownership.