The US Sporting Goods Industry: Sales, Prices, Tariffs and Players

What the official numbers cover

There is no single official figure for the size of the American sporting goods market. Equipment, footwear and clothing for sport are sold by specialist chains, department stores, warehouse clubs, gun shops, brand outlets and online sellers, and no federal survey adds all of those channels up by product. What federal agencies do publish is a set of narrower, reliable measures, and read together they give a clear picture of the industry.

The Census Bureau counts the monthly sales of sporting goods stores, the retailers classified under industry code 45111. The Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates what households spend on sporting equipment, supplies, guns and ammunition wherever they buy them. The Bureau of Labor Statistics tracks prices on the shelf and at the border, and the number of people who work in sporting goods stores. Trade policy is set by the White House and the Office of the US Trade Representative, and the Sports and Fitness Industry Association (SFIA) runs the largest annual survey of who actually plays.

This report keeps to the American market, its retailers, its imports and its players. Revenue and rankings of the brands that make the products, such as Nike and adidas, are covered in our separate report on the biggest sports brands, so they are not repeated here.

Store sales: from pandemic boom to a slow decline

The Census Monthly Retail Trade Survey shows how unusual the last six years have been for sporting goods retailers. Between 2015 and 2019, annual sales at sporting goods stores drifted between 42.5 billion and 46.6 billion dollars, with two years of decline as mall traffic weakened and several chains closed. Then the pandemic changed buying habits almost overnight.

A plateau above the old level: sales jumped by 43 percent between 2019 and 2021, then gave back only a fraction of the gain over the next four years.

Store sales rose 16.8 percent in 2020, despite closures in March and April, as Americans bought bicycles, weights, camping gear and anything else that could be used at home or outdoors. In 2021 they climbed another 22.4 percent to 62.16 billion dollars, a record that still stands. The following four years were all slightly negative: sales slipped 0.7 percent in 2022, 0.9 percent in 2023, 4.0 percent in 2024 and 1.3 percent in 2025.

The pattern matters because the old level never came back. Even after four years of decline, 2025 sales of 57.97 billion dollars were a third higher than in 2019. Part of the difference is inflation, but not most of it: as the price section below shows, sporting goods prices rose much less than sales over the same period. The pandemic brought new players into running, cycling, golf, fishing and racquet sports, and many of them kept buying.

The figures cover stores classified as sporting goods retailers, such as specialist chains, golf, bike, outdoor and hunting shops. They exclude sporting goods sold by Walmart, Target, Costco and other general merchandise stores, by shoe stores such as Foot Locker, and by online-only sellers, which the Census Bureau counts in other industries. That is why the store total should not be read as the size of the whole market, a mistake made by many published estimates, including the earlier version of this page.

2026 so far: every month ahead of last year

The turn came in 2026. From January to July, sporting goods stores sold 34.01 billion dollars, against 31.45 billion in the same seven months of 2025, a gain of 8.1 percent. Growth accelerated through the spring: sales were up 4.2 percent in January and March, 10.6 percent in April and 12.9 percent in June, before easing to 7.3 percent in July against a strong July 2025.

Seven out of seven: each month of 2026 has topped the same month of 2025, with the biggest gains in April to June.

The faster Census advance estimate, which covers the wider group of sporting goods, hobby, musical instrument and book stores (NAICS 451), points the same way. Seasonally adjusted sales for that group reached 9.06 billion dollars in August 2026, 10.7 percent more than in August 2025, and unadjusted sales for January to August were up 10.1 percent. Total retail and food services sales rose 6.0 percent over the same twelve months, so sporting goods are growing faster than retail as a whole.

Two cautions apply. First, the figures are in current dollars, and with sporting goods prices up about 5 percent in a year, real growth in volume is closer to 3 percent than 8 percent. Second, the business is strongly seasonal. December alone brought in 7.14 billion dollars in 2025, or 12.3 percent of annual sales, while January and February are the weakest months, so the full-year 2026 result will depend on the holiday quarter.

Household spending on sports gear: $126.5 billion

A wider view comes from the national accounts. The Bureau of Economic Analysis estimates personal consumption expenditure on sporting equipment, supplies, guns and ammunition, whatever kind of shop or website the goods are bought from. In 2025 that spending reached 126.5 billion dollars, up 4.0 percent from 121.7 billion in 2024 and almost double the 64.1 billion of 2015.

No post-pandemic slump in spending: unlike store sales, household outlays on sports gear have risen every year since 2017.

This series moved differently from store sales. It jumped 29.6 percent in 2020 and 17.4 percent in 2021, like store sales, but it did not fall afterwards. Spending rose every year from 2022 to 2025, while sales at specialist stores declined. The difference suggests that a growing share of sports equipment is being bought outside traditional sporting goods stores, at mass merchants, warehouse clubs, gun shops and online.

The two figures cannot be compared directly. BEA includes firearms and ammunition and leaves out sports clothing and shoes, which are counted with general apparel and footwear, while sporting goods stores sell all of those things. Together, though, they show the scale of the business: Americans spend well over 100 billion dollars a year on gear alone, before shoes and clothing, and specialist stores capture only part of it. How that compares with total output is set out in our report on US gross domestic product.

Prices: sporting goods inflation runs ahead of the CPI

Before the pandemic, sporting goods prices in the United States barely rose for years, as production moved to low-cost Asian factories and online competition squeezed margins. That changed in 2026. In August 2026 the BLS consumer price index for sporting goods was 5.3 percent higher than a year earlier, against 3.4 percent for all items. Within the category, sports vehicles including bicycles rose 6.8 percent and sports equipment 3.5 percent.

Above the average: sporting goods prices are rising more than one and a half times as fast as prices in general.

Monthly moves show where the pressure built. Seasonally adjusted, sporting goods prices rose 1.6 percent in June 2026 and 1.0 percent in August, while sports equipment prices were flat in August. Sporting goods carry a relative importance of 0.531 in the CPI basket, meaning they account for about half of one percent of the spending the index tracks, and footwear for 0.590. Broader price trends are tracked in our data on monthly US inflation.

At the border, the story is different. The BLS import price index for toys, games and sports requisites (HS chapter 95), which measures prices paid to foreign suppliers before duties, hardly moved between January 2024 and June 2026, staying between 106.1 and 107.2 points. It rose to 109.8 in July 2026 and stood 3.2 percent above August 2025. Because foreign prices barely changed while shelf prices rose, the gap is consistent with tariffs being paid by American importers and passed on in part to shoppers, rather than absorbed by overseas factories.

Jobs: fewer people selling more gear

Higher sales have not brought more jobs. The BLS productivity program, which publishes annual employment for sporting goods stores, counted 300.7 thousand jobs in 2025. That was 18.4 thousand, or 5.8 percent, fewer than in 2024, and 30.0 thousand below the 2015 high of 330.7 thousand.

Back below 2022: the post-pandemic hiring wave reversed in 2025, when stores cut about one job in seventeen.

Employment followed sales up and down until 2023, falling to 267.8 thousand in 2020 and recovering to 319.5 thousand in 2023. The break came in 2024 and 2025, when store payrolls fell faster than sales. Dividing Census sales by BLS jobs, each sporting goods store job supported about 193 thousand dollars of sales in 2025, compared with about 137 thousand dollars in 2015. Some of that is price inflation, but the BLS labor productivity index for the industry also rose 1.0 percent in 2025, to 129.9 points (2017 = 100).

Self-checkout, buy online and pick up in store, and fewer but larger stores all reduce the number of staff needed per dollar of sales. Pay levels across retail are summarised in our report on the US minimum wage, which sets the floor for many store jobs.

Imports and tariffs: a year of legal reversals

Most sporting goods sold in the United States are made abroad, chiefly in Asia. Big 5 Sporting Goods, for example, told investors in its last annual report as a listed company that a significant portion of the products it buys for resale is manufactured in Asia. That makes the industry highly exposed to trade policy, and 2026 has been an unusually turbulent year for it.

On 20 February 2026 the Supreme Court ruled that the tariffs imposed in 2025 under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA) were unlawful. The same day the President replaced them with a flat 10 percent surcharge on imports from all countries under Section 122 of the Trade Act of 1974, effective 24 February for 150 days. In March the Court of International Trade ordered refunds of the IEEPA duties, and on 7 May it ruled the Section 122 surcharge invalid as well, a decision the Administration appealed while collection continued.

When the Section 122 surcharge expired on 24 July 2026, new duties under Section 301 took its place. USTR found that 60 economies had failed to enforce bans on imports made with forced labor and set additional tariffs of 10 percent for 17 of them, including Cambodia, Indonesia, India, Bangladesh, Mexico, Canada and the United Kingdom, and 12.5 percent for most of the others, which include China and Vietnam. Goods from the European Union, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and Switzerland face a rate that brings their combined duty to 10 or 12.5 percent. Goods qualifying under USMCA remain exempt.

The sourcing map has been shifting for years. In the first eight months of 2026, the United States imported 183.5 billion dollars of goods from China and 176.1 billion from Vietnam, according to Census trade data, so Vietnam is now close to overtaking China as a supplier of all goods. For footwear and sports equipment, where Vietnam is a major producer, the near equal tariff treatment of the two countries since July removes much of the incentive to keep moving orders between them.

Retailers felt the reversals directly. Dicks Sporting Goods received 59.0 million dollars in IEEPA tariff refunds in its second quarter of fiscal 2026 and said it had received substantially all of the refunds due. Academy Sports + Outdoors said net tariff refunds added 6 cents to its second quarter earnings per share and that it was reinvesting tariff-related benefits into value for customers. A full breakdown of tariff revenue and rates is in our US tariff statistics, and the economic effects of the 2026 measures in our report on the 2026 tariffs.

Participation: a record 250 million active Americans

Demand for sporting goods starts with people playing. The SFIA Topline Participation Report, based on about 18,000 interviews a year with Americans aged six and over, found that 250.0 million people took part in at least one of 126 sports, fitness or outdoor activities in 2025. That was a record, up 1.2 percent from 247.1 million in 2024, and equal to 80.5 percent of the population aged six and over.

Growth is slowing, however. The 1.2 percent rise in 2025 compares with an average of 1.7 percent a year since 2020. Core participants, who take part regularly enough to be counted as committed players, rose 1.3 percent to 158.8 million. The share of Americans who were completely inactive fell below 20 percent for the first time, the seventh straight year of decline, after 21.2 percent (64.9 million people) in 2023.

For retailers the participation data explain the mix of what sells. Team sports and racquet sports need specific equipment that wears out or is outgrown, while walking, running and gym fitness drive footwear and apparel sales. Interest in professional leagues, which supports demand for team gear and licensed products, is compared in our ranking of the most popular sports leagues and events.

Pickleball: from 4.2 million to 24.3 million players

No sport has changed the shelves of American sporting goods stores more quickly than pickleball. SFIA counted 4.2 million players in 2020. The number rose to 4.8 million in 2021, 8.9 million in 2022, 13.6 million in 2023 and 19.8 million in 2024, and reached 24.3 million in 2025, a gain of 22.8 percent in a year. Pickleball has been the fastest-growing sport in the United States for five years in a row.

Almost six times larger in five years: pickleball added about 4.5 million players in 2025 alone.

Growth is now slowing in percentage terms, from 45.8 percent in 2024 to 22.8 percent in 2025, but the absolute increase is still large. Most players remain occasional. SFIA counts 16.8 million casual players, who played one to seven times in the year, and 7.48 million core players, who played eight times or more. The core group grew 20.4 percent in 2025, a sign that the sport is retaining players rather than only attracting first-time visitors.

Seven in ten still casual: about 69 percent of pickleball players played fewer than eight times in 2025.

The player base is also widening. Women made up 42.9 percent of players in 2025, up from 38.6 percent in 2020, and teenagers and young adults aged 13 to 24 now have the highest participation rates of any age group, overturning the early image of pickleball as a retirement sport. SFIA reports that nearly 94 percent of avid players say they play for exercise. Paddles, balls, court shoes and portable nets have become a standing category in most large sporting goods chains.

The figures also correct a number that circulated widely, including on the previous version of this page: a claim that 36.5 million Americans played pickleball. That estimate came from a separate industry survey using a different method, not from SFIA. The SFIA count, which uses a consistent method across 126 activities, is 24.3 million.

The outdoor economy behind the gear

Outdoor recreation is one of the largest drivers of sporting goods demand, and it has its own official account. The BEA Outdoor Recreation Satellite Account, released on 5 March 2026, estimated that outdoor recreation generated 696.7 billion dollars of value added in 2024, or 2.4 percent of US GDP. Real output of the sector grew 2.7 percent, slightly slower than the 2.8 percent growth of the whole economy.

Retail trade is the biggest single industry inside the outdoor account, at 169.1 billion dollars, or almost a quarter of the total, and it was the largest outdoor industry in 24 states. Boating and fishing was the largest conventional outdoor activity at 38.4 billion dollars, followed by RVing and by hunting, shooting and trapping. Those three activities are the core business of outdoor chains such as Bass Pro Shops, Cabelas, Sportsmans Warehouse and Academy Sports + Outdoors.

The largest sporting goods retailers by sales

Sporting goods retail in the United States has consolidated into one dominant chain, a few large regional players and many independents. Company filings show how far ahead the leader now is. The ranking below uses the latest full fiscal year reported by each company; Bass Pro Shops, which also owns Cabelas, is privately held and does not publish revenue, so it cannot be included.

Bigger than the next four combined: Dicks sales are almost one and a half times those of Academy, REI, Sportsmans Warehouse and Big 5 together.

Dicks Sporting Goods reported net sales of 17.22 billion dollars for fiscal 2025, the year to 31 January 2026, up 28.1 percent. Most of the jump came from Foot Locker, which Dicks acquired on 8 September 2025 and which added 3.11 billion dollars of sales in less than five months. The original Dicks business grew to 14.11 billion dollars, with comparable sales up 4.5 percent, while Foot Locker comparable sales fell 3.3 percent on a pro forma basis. Dicks expects cost savings of 100 to 125 million dollars from the deal over the medium term, mainly in purchasing and sourcing.

Academy Sports + Outdoors, based in Texas, had net sales of 6.05 billion dollars in fiscal 2025, up 2.0 percent, although comparable sales fell 1.5 percent. Its growth comes from new stores: it opened 24 in the year to reach 322, and had 327 by August 2026. In the second quarter of fiscal 2026 Academy sales rose 3.0 percent to 1.65 billion dollars, with e-commerce sales up 12.8 percent while comparable sales slipped 0.4 percent.

REI Co-op, the member-owned outdoor retailer, reported 3.54 billion dollars of net sales in 2025, roughly unchanged from 2024, and cut its net loss by 102 million dollars to 54.3 million. It counts more than 26 million members and distributed 203 million dollars to them through member rewards. Sportsmans Warehouse, focused on hunting, fishing and shooting, posted fiscal 2025 sales of 1.21 billion dollars, up 1.0 percent. Big 5 Sporting Goods, a western chain with about 410 stores, left the stock market on 2 October 2025 when a partnership of Worldwide Golf and Capitol Hill Group bought it for 1.45 dollars a share; its last reported annual sales were about 795 million dollars for fiscal 2024, after a 9.4 percent fall in same store sales.

Brand owners are also large sellers to American consumers, through their own stores and websites as well as through these chains. Nike, for example, reported 20.5 billion dollars of North America revenue in its fiscal year to May 2026, roughly the figure quoted on the old version of this page, though that covers Canada too and includes wholesale sales to retailers as well as direct sales to shoppers. Its long-run sales are tracked in Nike worldwide sales since 2005. Claims that Amazon is the second-largest sporting goods seller in the US could not be checked against any published figure and are not repeated here; its overall business is covered in our Amazon statistics.

Online and in store: where sporting goods are bought

E-commerce keeps taking share of American retail, and sporting goods are no exception. The Census Bureau estimated seasonally adjusted e-commerce sales of 340.2 billion dollars in the second quarter of 2026, or 17.1 percent of all retail sales. Online sales grew 12.2 percent from a year earlier, while total retail sales rose 6.7 percent.

The Census Bureau does not publish an official online share for sporting goods alone, and the figure of 32 percent quoted on the previous version of this page could not be traced to any primary source. Retailer filings show the direction instead. Academy, whose stores are concentrated in the South, grew e-commerce sales 12.8 percent in its latest quarter, much faster than its stores. Global trends in online retail are covered in our data on retail e-commerce growth worldwide.

Outlook for 2026 and 2027

The official data point to a stronger year for sporting goods retail in 2026 than in any year since 2021. If store sales hold their 8 percent pace through the holiday season, the 2026 total would be above 62 billion dollars, close to or slightly above the 2021 record in current dollars. That is a BusinessStats extrapolation, not a forecast by the Census Bureau, and the August to December months carry a large share of annual sales.

Company guidance is more cautious. Dicks expects fiscal 2026 net sales of 21.9 billion to 22.2 billion dollars, including a full year of Foot Locker, with comparable sales growth of 2.5 to 4.0 percent in the Dicks business and a decline of up to 2 percent at Foot Locker. Academy expects sales of 6.23 billion to 6.36 billion dollars, growth of 3 to 5 percent, with comparable sales flat to up 2 percent. In August Dicks lowered its sales outlook for Foot Locker, while Academy raised its profit guidance in September, helped by tariff refunds.

The main risks are prices and policy. Sporting goods inflation of 5.3 percent is eating into real growth, and the Section 301 duties of 10 to 12.5 percent that took effect on 24 July 2026 will reach store shelves mainly in the autumn and holiday season. On the demand side, participation is at record levels, team sports are growing and pickleball is still adding millions of players, while the 2026 FIFA World Cup, played in the United States, Canada and Mexico in June and July, gave soccer an unusual stage, covered in our 2026 World Cup report.

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