Padel Court Lighting Running Cost: kW per Court, kWh, Electricity Cost & LED Retrofit Payback (2026)

By PeakPadel Engineering Team · Published September 2026 · 11 min read · Updated: 2026-09-22

1. Why is the lighting bill the last padel court cost you can still cut?

Look at the operating account of a padel club and most lines are fixed or slow-moving. Land or building rent is negotiated once and indexed. Staff is a service decision. Turf replacement, glass, nets and sand are periodic. The bill for lighting electricity is different: it is paid every month, it scales with every hour the court is booked, and it is the one line an operator can genuinely engineer down — by changing the load, the hours, or both.

That is why the same question arrives from very different places: a club in Germany with a 2018 metal halide installation and an electricity contract that has doubled, an Italian or Spanish operator adding a covered court and redoing the lighting at the same time, and a North American developer pricing a four-court facility and trying to work out whether the solar quote in front of them makes sense. They are all really asking one question: what does it cost to run these lights, and what can I change about that number?

Three variables decide the answer, and only three:

• The load — how many watts the system draws when the court is lit. This is a specification decision (lux class, fixture count, efficacy) and it is where LED versus metal halide is decided;
• The hours — how many hours a year the lights are actually on. This is an operating decision, and it is usually the number no one has ever measured;
• The tariff — what a kilowatt-hour costs at your site, including network charges, taxes and the power factor penalty some suppliers write into the contract. This is a procurement decision.

Improving all three is realistic. Improving one and guessing the other two is how clubs end up with a €4,000 lighting upgrade and a payback calculation that never arrives. If you are costing the rest of the operation — staff, rent, sand, maintenance, and how the electricity line sits against them — the full operating budget is modelled in our padel court operating costs guide.

2. How do you calculate the lighting load of a padel court in kW?

The arithmetic is simple, and it is worth doing by hand before you read any supplier table:

Total load (kW) = number of fixtures × fixture wattage (W) ÷ 1,000, plus roughly 8–12% for driver or ballast losses on older gear, and plus any circuit you will add later (scoreboard, cameras, streaming rig, ball machine charging point).

So eight fixtures at 200 W is 1.6 kW; four fixtures at 200 W is 0.8 kW; and eight 400 W metal halide lamps with magnetic ballasts is 3.2 kW of lamps plus losses on top. The load is a product of two decisions — how much light you need (lux class) and how efficiently you produce it (lumens per watt) — and the second is where a decade of LED development shows up:

*Indicative load ranges for a 20 × 10 m court; the binding figures are the ones in your photometric study. When a supplier quotes a "1.6 kW court", the load is the least interesting part of that sentence — ask for the lux level, the uniformity and the luminaire photometric file behind it. The acceptance values we build to are listed on our padel court specification sheet.

3. How many lighting hours does a padel court actually run?

This is the variable that decides whether lighting is a rounding error or a serious line in the budget, and it is the one operators guess most often. An outdoor court in southern Spain is lit for perhaps two to three hours on winter evenings; an indoor club court in northern Europe or Poland is lit from mid-afternoon until late evening, all year. Both are "a padel court".

Build the number from four inputs instead of copying a default:

• Opening pattern: how many hours a day the facility offers playable slots after dark or under cover — typically 3–5 h per court outdoors in winter, 4–8 h indoors;
• Season length: outdoor courts in temperate climates are lit roughly 6–8 months a year with meaningful evening use, indoor courts 12 months, and covered courts 12 months with longer days on both ends;
• Utilisation: the lights are on for booked hours, not opening hours. A court that sells 60% of its evening slots costs 60% of what a fully booked court costs — provided the controls can actually turn the lights off;
• Daylight contribution: southern latitudes and summer evenings shift part of prime time outside lighting hours entirely, which is why a Spanish outdoor court and a Polish indoor court with identical fixtures have very different bills.

A practical way to sanity-check the answer: look at the metered kWh on the lighting sub-circuit for last month and divide by the system load. If a club court drawing 1.5 kW shows 900 kWh in an autumn month, the lights were on about 600 hours — twenty hours a day, which means the schedule, not the fixtures, is your energy problem.

4. How many kWh does a court light use per year?

*Illustrative only: replace the hours with your own bookings and the load with your own photometric figure. The ratio between the two systems — roughly 2.9–3× — holds across every scenario, because it is set by efficacy (140–170 lm/W for modern LED drivers against 80–100 lm/W for metal halide) and by the ballast losses the older system adds.

Two corrections are worth remembering before you take any kWh figure into a business plan. First, metal halide lamps lose output as they age and the court is often relamped at 60–70% of original output — so the "3.6 kW" court is sometimes running dim, which is a playing-quality problem that shows up as an energy saving. Second, LED output also falls, but slowly and in a predictable way (an L90 rating states the hours after which 90% of initial output remains), which is why a certified L90B10 figure at 50,000+ hours is a better buying argument than a claim about the first day of operation.

5. What does that cost in electricity in your market?

You cannot answer this from a vendor page, because the tariff is local and often contract-specific. What a supplier can give you is the structure: take the annual kWh from the table above and multiply it by your business electricity price including network charges, levies and VAT if you can reclaim it. The ranges below are indicative commercial tariffs for 2026 and are meant to be replaced by the figure on your own invoice.

*Indicative ranges for commercial and small-industrial supply, before any contract-specific power factor or capacity charge. Note what the table does not say: in a low-tariff market, the electricity line for an indoor court is roughly the cost of one court-hour of games a week. In a high-tariff market with long indoor hours, it can approach the value of a full week of play. The same fixtures, the same court — a completely different retrofit decision. That is why the honest answer to "is LED worth it" always starts with "where are you and how many hours do you run".

One more number is worth calculating because it is the one operators can price into a booking: cost per lit hour. A 1.2 kW club court at €0.25/kWh costs about €0.30 per hour of play; the same court on 3.6 kW metal halide costs about €0.90. On a court that sells for €8–14 per hour in most European markets, that is the difference between a 2% and a 10% cost of sales on the electricity line alone.

6. What does an LED retrofit cost, and what is the payback?

A retrofit is not "changing the lamps". On a padel court the luminaires are wired to poles or to the roof structure, aimed at the court, and sized around a photometric design; changing them changes the light on the playing surface. Budget the following scope per court:

• Luminaires: 4–8 fixtures at roughly €120–350 each, or €600–2,800 per court;
• Mounting and brackets: €40–150 per fixture for purpose-made brackets, crossarms or pole adapters, plus stainless fixings — €250–1,200;
• Drivers and control gear: usually integrated, but a separate control cabinet or DIN-rail driver box is €200–700;
• Dimming and controls: €300–1,200 if you want scheduling, booking-linked dimming or per-court switching rather than a wall switch;
• Electrical works: new cable runs, isolators and protection, €300–1,200 depending on how the court is fed and whether the old ballasts have to be removed;
• Photometric design and aiming: a proper design file and a commissioning check, €200–600 — cheap insurance, because mis-aimed fixtures are how retrofits end up dimmer than the system they replaced;
• Installation labour and access: €600–1,800 per court with a lift or scaffold, less if the poles are accessible;
• Poles: only if the existing poles are corroded, undersized or in the wrong place — €1,500–4,000 per court if they have to be replaced.

That puts a typical club-court retrofit without poles at €2,000–6,000 per court, which is consistent with the €3,000–12,000 range we quote for complete new lighting systems depending on level and pole count. Now the payback, which is simply the annual kWh saved multiplied by your tariff, divided into the capex:

*Illustrative paybacks using the tariffs in section 5; your figures will differ. The pattern is the same everywhere: the retrofit case is weak on a low-hour, low-tariff outdoor court and strong on a long-hour indoor court. If the court is already running modern LED with a certified photometric file, retrofitting is normally not about energy at all — it is about glare, uniformity or failure rate, and it should be judged as a playing-quality investment.

Two things that change the ranking of a retrofit. First, non-energy savings: metal halide lamps are replaced every 12,000–20,000 hours, which on an indoor court means a relamping cycle with a lift every two to three years; LED at 50,000–100,000 hours removes most of that labour. Second, capability: a dimmable, flicker-free LED system can be booked and streamed, which is a revenue argument, not an energy argument.

7. Why do controls and scheduling move the number more than the fixtures do?

An induction or metal halide court cannot be dimmed usefully and takes minutes to warm up, so the lights stay on for the whole booking period whether or not anyone is playing. An LED system switches instantly and dims to any level, which turns energy saving from a hardware problem into a control problem — and on a court with moderate utilisation the control saving is often larger than the retrofit saving:

• Booking-linked switching. Lights on only for the booked slot, off ten minutes after it ends — the single highest-return measure on any court, and free if your booking platform has an integration;
• Two-level dimming. Full output during play, 20–40% between bookings for cleaning and collection, instead of full output all evening;
• Per-court switching. In a four-court centre, one booked court should never light four. This sounds obvious and is routinely missed where a single contactor serves the whole hall;
• Scheduled dimming by hour. The last hour of the evening at 70% is invisible to recreational players and cuts 6–10% of the daily energy;
• Daylight and twilight control. Photocell or astronomical switching avoids lighting an outdoor court at sunset in July because the timer says 19:00.

The combined effect on a moderately utilised indoor centre is typically 25–45% of the lighting kWh, on top of the load reduction from the retrofit itself. Cost: a control layer is €300–1,200 per court — which is why, in the payback table above, the scenario with controls is the fastest of the LED cases. If your booking system already knows when each court is sold, the information needed to switch the lights is already on site; the missing piece is the contactor, the gateway and someone to configure it.

8. Can you lease or finance the lighting instead of buying it?

Yes, and for clubs that want the saving without the capital, lighting is one of the few parts of a padel project that leases sensibly — because the asset has a predictable lifetime (50,000+ hours), a measurable output, and a saving that appears on the same invoice as the cost. The structures you will meet:

• Equipment lease or rental: a monthly payment over 3–5 years, with ownership transferred at the end. The payment is comparable to the monthly electricity saving, which is how the case is normally presented — and it is worth testing that claim against the payback table rather than the sales sheet;
• Lighting-as-a-service: the supplier owns the luminaires and charges for the light (per court-month, or per hour of operation). The advantage is that the supplier carries the failure and output risk; the disadvantage is that you own nothing at the end and you cannot easily change supplier;
• Supplier or contractor financing: the lighting is rolled into the court package and paid on extended terms, which is the simplest route on a new build where the lighting is part of one purchase order, and the cleanest way to keep a single warranty.

Whatever the structure, read four things before signing: what happens at the end (transfer, buy-out price, or nothing); who maintains and replaces failures, and how quickly; whether output is guaranteed (a lux value at commissioning and a maintained percentage after 25,000 hours, not just a wattage); and what happens if the club changes hands or closes — a lighting lease that runs five years on a court that is resurfaced and re-let in year two is a liability, not an asset. Where the lighting sits inside a wider funding structure, the interactions with subsidies, grants and bank terms are covered in our padel court financing guide.

9. How does a roof change the lighting economics?

A covered court runs the lights for more hours than the same court outdoors in the same city — and that is the point of the roof: it converts lost weather days and dark evenings into bookable time. The energy consequence is simple and should be planned rather than discovered:

• Hours go up, not down. A covered court in northern Europe will be lit through the whole year and into late evening, so its annual kWh can be two to three times that of an open court in the same town. The saving from LED is proportionally larger;
• Roof-mounted fixtures change the design. Luminaries mounted on the roof structure need different aiming, different glare control and greater attention to vertical illuminance on the glass; they also make access for maintenance a permanent planning issue;
• Condensation and heat affect the luminaires, not the kWh. A sealed, insulated hall stresses drivers and seals differently from an open pole installation, which is why IP and IK ratings and the driver warranty matter more under a roof — the same class of product used outdoors is not automatically the right one indoors;
• The roof adds a controllable load that is easy to control. In an indoor hall, per-court switching and dimming to the actual booking are straightforward; on an open court in the rain they are not.

If a roof is part of the project, size the lighting from the same photometric study as the structure — including the mounting positions the roof actually offers — rather than buying a lighting package and making the roof design fit around it. The systems, spans and clearances involved are set out in our covered padel court guide, and the height and ventilation requirements for an indoor hall in our indoor court requirements guide.

10. What maintenance cost sits behind the energy bill?

The electricity line is only half of the lighting cost of ownership. The other half is what it takes to keep the court lit at the level it was designed for — and this is where the comparison between technologies is most dramatic:

The operating message: on a long-hour court, the relamping labour saved by LED is a real cash line, and it repeats. Which makes two supplier questions practical rather than technical. Are the luminaires and drivers still available in five and eight years, and in the same form factor — the fastest way to turn an efficient installation into an expensive one is to discover at year six that a failed driver cannot be replaced and the pole brackets do not accept the current model. And does the warranty cover the driver and the module separately, for how long, and what does the claim actually require? Under a roof or in a humid climate, a five-year driver warranty on a sealed luminaire is worth more than a longer one on a lamp that is unlikely to fail.

11. What should you check in a supplier's lighting offer?

Lighting is the part of a padel court package where a quotation can look complete and still be impossible to evaluate. What separates a serious offer from a number is a short list of documents and figures — and all of them can be produced before you order:

• A photometric study, not a wattage. A design file with average lux, uniformity (typically 0.7 or better on the playing surface) and the mounting geometry for that specific court, plus the .ies or .ldt photometric files for the luminaires. Without the files you cannot check the design independently, and you cannot redo it later when a fixture is discontinued;
• Efficacy in lumens per watt. Modern LED sports luminaires are generally in the 140–170 lm/W band; a 200 W module quoting 25,000 lumens is a different product from one quoting 32,000, and the difference shows up in the second column of section 2;
• The class and standard. Which lighting class the design achieves, and against which standard — EN 12193 for sports lighting is the usual European reference, with national equivalents elsewhere. "LED, 300 lux" without a class and a standard is a marketing sentence;
• Glare, but for padel. Padel is played in an enclosure 4 m high, with glass walls, and players look upward at the back glass. Vertical glare and spill control matter as much as horizontal lux, and full-cutoff optics are not optional on a court with housing nearby;
• Electrical ratings and certificates. IP and IK ratings for the luminaire, CE documentation for luminaires and drivers under the Low Voltage and EMC directives, and the electrical design for the supply — which belongs in the same compliance file as the rest of the court, as set out in our certification and compliance guide;
• Running-cost figures you can audit. Ask the supplier to state the assumed hours, the assumed tariff and the luminaire count behind any "annual cost" they quote. A figure without those three assumptions is not a calculation — it is a slogan;
• What is excluded. Poles, brackets, cable, protection, controllers and commissioning are the usual exclusions, and on a retrofit they are most of the labour. One page of exclusions saves a month of argument.

At commissioning, spend twenty minutes with a lux meter and the design file. Measure three points along the centre line and two near each back glass, at court level, with the lights on and no daylight, and compare with the design values. This is the only step in a lighting project that cannot be argued about afterwards, and it catches the two failures that matter — mis-aimed fixtures and undersized circuits — while the installer is still on site.

12. Padel Court Lighting Running Cost FAQ