Pickleball Courts Cost $25 an Hour at County Parks and $6 at City Parks.

Ranked by what a single hour actually costs once the permit fee and the lights land on top of the posted rate.

The cheapest hour on a public pickleball court in Los Angeles County costs nothing. The dearest of the six priced here costs $56. Both are for sale in Cerritos. The city's thirteen courts at Liberty Park are drop-in and carry no fee at all. The ten courts at Don Knabe Community Regional Park, also in Cerritos, belong to Los Angeles County, and the county's fee schedule prices one of them at $25 an hour for an individual, plus $31 more for the lights.

We priced six ways onto a pickleball court in Los Angeles County on October 5, 2026, against a single question: what does one hour on the court cost the person who turns up? Every figure below was read that day off a government's own fee schedule or program page. The arithmetic is ours and it's named each time — a per-session fee divided by the session the same page allows, and a per-hour fee carrying the application fee the same schedule charges on top.

The spread isn't the surprising part. A county this size will always have a wide one. The surprising part is that the two largest park agencies in Los Angeles have reached opposite conclusions about which racket sport is the cheap one: at a city of Los Angeles recreation center the 2026 rate is $6 an hour for a pickleball court and $10 for a tennis court, and at a Los Angeles County park it's $25 for the pickleball court and $15 for the tennis court. One of them has the order backwards from the other, and neither says why on the page that charges it.

The criteria, stated once. Cheapest hour wins. Where a city sells a session rather than an hour, the fee is divided by the shortest session the city itself posts, so the per-hour figure is the least flattering one available. Where a schedule charges a fee to apply, that fee rides in the first hour, because a first visit isn't a season. Memberships, annual cards, youth rates, nonprofit rates and the rates agencies reserve for commercial operators are reported where they're posted and don't set the order. Nobody from this desk picked up a paddle; we read the fee schedules, not the courts.

1. Cerritos city courts — $0 an hour, and the price is the queue

Cerritos charges nothing for any of its pickleball, and it has a lot of it. The City Council converted two tennis courts in April 2025, each one splitting into four pickleball courts, and the city's own announcement put the Liberty Park total at thirteen courts and the citywide total at 23 outdoor courts. They're open to the public Monday through Friday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m., and 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on fall and winter weekends — which is the window in force now — with no fee named anywhere on the page.

Free isn't a rate, though. It's a queue, and Cerritos has written the queue's rules onto the court: “Court time is limited to one game to 11 points if other players are waiting.” Liberty Park is at 19211 Studebaker Road, and what the five rungs below it are really selling is the right not to stand behind anybody.

2. Santa Monica, Memorial Park — $3 for three hours, the cheapest paid hour on this page

Santa Monica sells pickleball by the session and the session is long. The city posts sixteen pickleball courts laid over four tennis courts at Memorial Park, 1401 Olympic Blvd., with drop-in play Monday through Thursday from 5 to 9:30 p.m. and on Saturday and Sunday from 8 to 11 a.m. and 11:15 a.m. to 2 p.m.; John Adams Middle School runs dedicated pickleball on weekends from 8 a.m. to noon. The drop-in fee is $3.00 for residents and $5.00 for non-residents, and the city's enrollment explainer says “drop-in play sessions are 3 or 4 hours long.”

Divide the fee by the shorter of those and a resident is paying $1.00 an hour and a non-resident $1.67. That is the cheapest paid hour in this ranking, and Santa Monica is the only city here that checks where a player lives before charging it. The catch is the calendar: registration runs through the city's ActiveNet system and opens seven days ahead for residents and five for non-residents, residents have to email a photo ID to the city's pickleball office before the resident price applies, and walk-ups are taken only if the session has room.

3. Long Beach drop-in — $5 a person, up to three hours

Long Beach put its pickleball inside its two city tennis centers and priced it per head. The parks department's own page gives the Billie Jean King Tennis Center four shared-use pickleball courts with drop-in play on Saturday and Sunday afternoons from 2 to 6 p.m., and El Dorado Tennis Center eight shared-use courts with drop-in on Tuesday and Thursday mornings from 8 to 11 a.m. and Friday evenings from 6 to 9 p.m. The rate is stated flatly: “$5 per person for drop-in play (up to three hours).”

That's $1.67 an hour, the same figure a Santa Monica non-resident pays, from a city that asks for no ID and no resident file. Long Beach also lists a wider schedule — weekday mornings at El Dorado, weekend mornings at Billie Jean King, weekday reservations at both — under the heading “future offerings,” and attaches no date to any of it.

4. Long Beach reserved — $10 a court an hour, and nothing underneath it

The same two Long Beach centers rent a court outright for “$10 per court per hour.” There's no application fee on the page, no deposit, no separate charge for lights and no residency test. Four players splitting one court pay $2.50 each for the hour — more per hour than any drop-in session above it, and it buys something no session does: a court held in one name, at a time the group picks.

It is also, as the next entry argues, the cheapest guaranteed hour in this ranking — which is a different thing from the cheapest posted rate.

5. City of Los Angeles — $6 a court an hour on paper, $31 for one hour in practice

Here's the placement worth arguing about, and the arithmetic that produced it. The city's Facility Use Permit Fee Schedule, revised April 2026, prices a pickleball court at a recreation center at $6.00 per court per hour in daylight and $8.00 when the lights are used, and $4.00 and $6.00 at the centers the department classes as subsidized. Those are the second-cheapest reserved-court rates in this ranking. Then there's the line at the top of the same document's first page: “$25.00 will be assessed to all permit applications. (non-refundable).” The same page adds a $35.00 hourly staff fee that “may be assessed in addition to Rental Rates” and a refundable maintenance and security deposit starting at $100.00.

So yes, we ranked a $6 court below a $10 one, and we'll defend it in one line: one daylight hour on a Los Angeles city court costs $31 and one on a Long Beach court costs $10. Each city hour after that is $4 cheaper than Long Beach's, so it takes six and a quarter of them on a single application before Los Angeles is the better buy — a full working day on a pickleball court, which is not what anybody is booking on a Tuesday. The objection is fair and it's this: a group running a weekly league files once and plays for months, and for them the city is far and away the cheapest reserved court on this page. Granted. This page prices the hour, and the hour is $31.

There is a free door in the city, and it's a quiet one. The department's own pay tennis permit policy states that “when the Department Tennis Booth is closed, the pay tennis courts are available to the general public on a ‘first come, first served’ basis.” How much pickleball that opens up is a separate question: Long Beach's parks department, surveying the region on the page quoted above, counts four dedicated lighted pickleball courts in the city of Los Angeles and 34 shared-use ones, with eight more dedicated courts it describes as under development.

6. Los Angeles County — $25 a court an hour, and the lights cost more than the court

Last, by a distance. The county's fee schedule effective August 1, 2025 — still the one the department posts as current — prices an outdoor pickleball court at $25 an hour for individuals, $18 for a community program partner, $35 for a commercial operator and $0 for what it calls a core program partner. Outdoor field and court lighting is billed separately at $31 an hour for an individual and $47 for a commercial one. A lit county court after dark is therefore $56 an hour for a private person, and the larger of the two numbers on the invoice is the lights.

The comparable sits two rows down the same column. A tennis court at a county park costs that same individual $15 per court per hour — $10 an hour less than pickleball, on a bigger piece of asphalt, from the only agency in this ranking that prices the two sports in that order. The county isn't singling pickleball out, exactly: its basketball court is $35 an hour for an individual and its futsal court $40. But it is the one place on this page where pickleball is the expensive racket, and the only one that bills the lights as a line of their own — then charges more for them than for the court.

Both rows also sit under a heading that does some work: “NON-DEPARTMENT SPORTS ACTIVITIES — All fees are subject to additional fees and/or services, including reimbursement of staff time.” The county's fees page repeats it in plainer words, that facility use “is subject to staffing and other costs.” The $25 is a floor.

What the county doesn't publish is what it costs to walk onto one of its courts that nobody has booked. The fee schedule prices reservations; the fees page prices reservations; neither says a word about drop-in play, and we couldn't establish the walk-on rule from anything the county posts. It isn't estimated here.

The number the city has already written down

The city of Los Angeles schedule carries three columns for every rate — 2024, 2026 and 2028 — and the figures above are the middle one. A pickleball court went from $4.00 to $6.00 in daylight and from $6.00 to $8.00 under lights, and the column on the right takes them to $8.00 and $10.00. Tennis makes the same two steps to $12.00 and $14.00. The gap between the two sports in the city stays four dollars, with pickleball on the cheap side of it the whole way.

Which leaves Cerritos holding both ends of this page. Thirteen city courts at Liberty Park cost nothing and make a player wait out somebody else's game to 11; ten county courts at Don Knabe will hold one by name for $25 an hour, $56 once it's dark. Same city, same sport — and only one of them sends a bill.