Pickleball injury statistics

Hospital admissions from pickleball rose 257%^[1] between 2020 and 2022. Not visits. Admissions, the injuries serious enough to keep you.

How common are pickleball injuries? In 2022, an estimated 16,997^[1] of them reached US emergency departments, up from 8,894^[1] two years earlier. Those are the countable ones; the sprains iced at home never make a database. This page collects the published numbers in one place, every one cited to the study it came from, so you can check the math yourself. If you want the injuries themselves, start with the complete injury guide.

A note before the charts: these are estimates built from a sample of emergency departments, not a census of every twisted ankle in America. They are the best numbers that exist, and they are still floors. Keep that in mind every time a figure below looks precise to the last digit.

Six numbers carry most of this page. Each tile links to its study in the sources list, and each gets its full context in the sections below.

Pickleball injuries barely registered in the medical literature until the last few years. The first dedicated emergency department analysis covered 2001 through 2017 and found an estimated 19,012^[4] injuries across the entire seventeen year span, with 90.9%^[4] of patients aged 50 or older. Seventeen years of injuries then roughly equals one year of injuries now.

A follow-up study focused on players 60 and older from 2010 to 2019 filled in the picture of what goes wrong: strains and sprains led the senior diagnoses at 33.2%^[5], fractures followed at 28.1%^[5], and slips, trips, falls, and dives caused 63.3%^[5] of the injuries. Those proportions have stayed remarkably stable as the sport exploded, which tells you the mechanisms are baked into the game, not into any one era of it.

Injuries are rising because play is rising. US participation went from 4.2 million^[2] players in 2020 to 24.3 million^[2] in 2025, growth of 171.8%^[2] in just the last three of those years. An industry count found 48.3 million^[10] US adults had played at least once in the year ending August 2023.

The two charts below stay separate on purpose. The injury series ends in 2022, where the published study ends, while the participation series runs to 2025, and stitching them onto one axis would invite a per-player injury rate the data cannot honestly support. Read them side by side instead: both climb, and the player curve climbs harder.

The most cited pickleball injury study queried the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System, a probability sample of US emergency departments run by the Consumer Product Safety Commission^[3]. Between 2020 and 2022 it found ED visits up 91%^[1] and hospital admissions up 257%^[1], from 992^[1] admissions in 2020 to 3,541^[1] in 2022.

The middle year matters too: 2021 already showed 14,808^[1] estimated visits and 2,392^[1] admissions, so the climb was steady across the window rather than a single pandemic-era spike.

An admission means the emergency physician was not comfortable sending you home: surgical fractures, head injuries, cardiac events on court. The distinction matters because visits can grow just from more people playing, while a faster rise in admissions, 257%^[1] against 91%^[1], hints the average injury is getting worse, not just more frequent.

The honest caveat: surveillance estimates are extrapolations from a hospital sample, and they undercount everything treated in urgent care, in clinics, or on the couch. The real injury number is higher; nobody can say how much higher. For scale, an earlier analysis of 2001 to 2017 estimated 19,012^[4] ED visits across that entire seventeen year window^[4], roughly what 2022 produced on its own.

Injuries concentrate hard in the 60 to 79^[1] age range, which accounts for 73%^[1] of estimated ED visits. Women edge out men slightly overall at 51%^[1] of injuries, and the study notes that women aged 60 to 69 contributed largely to that edge^[1]. The gap widens sharply for fractures, covered below.

Age does not only change how often players get hurt. The same study found that patients 65 and older faced a higher risk of being admitted once they arrived at the ED^[1], meaning the injuries themselves run more serious, not just more frequent. The lesson is not subtle: for older players, the floor is the opponent that matters, and the falls section of the injury guide is the chapter to read twice.

In the 2020 to 2022 emergency data, fractures lead at 29%^[1], strains and sprains follow at 21%^[1], and lacerations and contusions each account for 5%^[1], with 25%^[1] recorded as other or unspecified.

Where they land is just as consistent as how often. Fractures cluster in the upper body: 63%^[1] hit the upper extremity, usually the wrist that broke a fall, and another 21%^[1] hit the trunk, which mostly means ribs and hips. Strains and sprains flip the map, with 62%^[1] in the lower extremity, the ankles, calves, and Achilles tendons doing the sport's stop-and-go work.

A dedicated fracture analysis spanning 2002 to 2022 found a 90-fold^[6] increase across the window, roughly 5,400^[6] fractures a year by the end of it. Falls caused 92%^[6] of them, 87%^[6] happened to players over 60, and 69%^[6] happened to women, a pattern that tracks bone density. The wrist leads the count, which is what happens when a backpedal meets an outstretched hand. The full story lives in the falls and fractures guide.

US emergency departments recorded an estimated 3,100 plus^[7] pickleball eye injuries from 2005 through 2024, with 1,262^[7] of them in 2024 alone. The curve is steepening: the study's regression estimates roughly 405^[7] additional eye injuries per year from 2021 through 2024, and more of them land on players 50 and older than on everyone younger combined^[7]. The documented injuries include retinal detachments, orbital fractures, and bleeding inside the eye, from balls, paddles, and falls.

Context makes the case: a clinical review puts typical ball speeds at 30 to 40 mph^[8], and at kitchen distance, fourteen feet, that leaves roughly a quarter second to react. Read the eye injuries guide for what a hit can do, and the protective eyewear guide for the cheap way to make the whole section irrelevant.

A 2025 series followed players who ruptured an Achilles tendon playing pickleball. Only 47%^[9] returned to sport, at an average of 1.6 years^[9] after the injury. Most striking, 68%^[9] of the ruptures happened within the player's first month of pickleball, a number that should be printed on every paddle sold to a former athlete starting up again after a decade off.

The detail behind the headline is just as telling. The average patient was 63.9^[9] years old, and 32%^[9] ruptured the tendon while playing pickleball for the very first time. Among those who never made it back to sport, all but one named fear of reinjury as the reason^[9]. Whether the tear was repaired surgically or managed without surgery made no measurable difference to the outcomes^[9].

The honest reading: this is a small series of 28 patients from one institution^[9], so the exact percentages travel poorly. The direction of the finding still stands, deconditioned tendons fail early, and a rupture costs a season or more. The Achilles guide covers the warning signs that usually come first.

Three habits keep injury statistics useful instead of scary. First, ask what got counted. Emergency department studies count the injuries bad enough to end up there the same day, so they overweight fractures and underweight the tendinopathies that build for months and get diagnosed in a clinic on a Tuesday.

Second, ask about the denominator. Injuries doubling means little on its own when participation grew faster over a longer window; the pair of charts at the top of this page belongs together, never apart. A rising count in a booming sport can coexist with flat or falling risk per player, and the published data cannot yet separate the two cleanly.

Third, translate percentages into decisions. Fractures leading the injury table means fall prevention beats everything else on offer: court shoes, no backpedaling, and eyes up on lobs. The lower-body sprain pattern argues for the boring warm up. None of these numbers argue for playing less; every one of them argues for starting smarter, and the prevention hub is where that starts.

A few figures circulate widely and are absent from this page on purpose. Estimated dollar costs of pickleball injuries trace to an analyst note built on assumptions, not to a surveillance database, so they stay out. Per-player injury rates do not exist in the published literature yet, as the next section explains. And any statistic whose primary source could not be located and read gets cut rather than paraphrased from coverage of it. An absent number is this page keeping its promise to you.

Nobody has published a true injury rate for pickleball, injuries per thousand hours of play, because nobody measures the hours. Until someone does, every claim that pickleball is "more dangerous" or "safer" than another racquet sport is a guess wearing a percentage.

The surveillance studies also say nothing about the injuries that never reach an emergency department, which is most tendinopathy, most low back pain, and nearly every case of pickleball elbow. Those get counted in clinics, if anywhere, and published rarely. So the numbers on this page describe the sharp end of the injury spectrum, and the everyday end runs through the injury guides on the strength of clinical experience and the broader sports medicine literature instead.

Most rows on this page trace to the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System^[3], run by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission. NEISS collects every product-related injury from a probability sample of roughly 100 hospitals and extrapolates national estimates from it, which is why the figures arrive with decimal-free confidence and wide error bars nobody prints. It is the best public window into sports injuries, and it still misses everything treated in urgent care, in physician offices, or with a bag of frozen peas.

Participation figures come from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association's annual participation research^[2], with one industry survey figure noted where the underlying injury study cited it^[10]. Survey methodologies differ, which is why this page never mixes two participation sources in one chart.

Every statistic on this site lives in one data file with its source attached, and no number appears on any page without a citation you can click. Before publication, each figure was traced back to its primary study rather than to press coverage of it. This page was last reviewed in July 2026 and gets re-checked when new surveillance studies publish, at least once a year.