Almost every paddleboarding statistic on the internet traces back to the same handful of numbers, repeated without a year attached.
The most common one, “2.8 million Americans paddleboard,” is real. It is also from 2014.
We went back to the original participation studies, including three reports that are no longer on the web and had to be pulled from archives, and rebuilt the full series. Every figure below carries its year and its source.
Table of contents
Key takeaways
- 3.74 million Americans went stand up paddleboarding in 2021, the last year with a free, published figure.
- Participation more than tripled between 2010 and 2021, from 1.05 million.
- The real boom was 2013 and 2014, not the pandemic. Growth in 2020 was 3.2 percent.
- Paddleboarding has been flat since 2016, adding 16 percent in five years.
- Nobody can tell you the 2025 number for free. The data moved behind a paywall after 2021.
- Women became the majority of participants in 2018, at 52 percent.
- Nearly half of paddlers, 47 percent, are aged 25 to 44.
- More than three quarters of teenage paddleboarders are male.
- Over half of participants, 52 percent, live in households earning 100,000 dollars or more.
- A quarter of American paddleboarders live in the Pacific census region.
- The average paddler goes out 5 times a year. Kayakers go 8.1 times.
- 31 percent of paddleboarders went out exactly once all year.
- 29 paddleboarders died in US boating incidents in 2024, the highest count on record.
- 90 percent of those deaths were drownings, the highest share of any vessel type.
- 24 of the 26 drowning victims were not wearing a life jacket.
- There are roughly 117 million lakes on Earth and about 3.5 million in the contiguous US.
How many people paddleboard
3.74 million Americans paddleboarded in 2021
The Outdoor Industry Association counted 3,739,000 stand up paddling participants aged 6 and older in 2021. This is the most recent figure published in a freely available report, and it is the number that should be quoted today rather than the decade-old ones still in circulation.1
That is about 1.2 percent of the population
Paddleboarding reached a participation rate of 1.2 percent of Americans aged 6 and older in 2019 and held it through 2020. For scale, that is roughly one person in eighty, and about a quarter of the rate for kayaking.2
Participation more than tripled in eleven years
In 2010 the same survey counted 1,050,000 paddleboarders. By 2021 it counted 3,739,000, an increase of 256 percent. Here is the full series, in thousands of participants: 1,050 in 2010, 1,242 in 2011, 1,542 in 2012, 1,993 in 2013, 2,751 in 2014, 3,020 in 2015, 3,220 in 2016, 3,325 in 2017, 3,453 in 2018, 3,562 in 2019, 3,675 in 2020 and 3,739 in 2021.37
The boom year was 2014, with 38 percent growth
Participation jumped from 1.99 million in 2013 to 2.75 million in 2014, a single-year gain of 38 percent. That was the steepest rise the sport has recorded, and it is the year the widely quoted “2.8 million” figure comes from.4
There was no pandemic paddleboarding boom
This is the finding that contradicts almost everything written about the sport since 2020. US participation grew 3.2 percent in 2020 and 1.8 percent in 2021. Board sales and crowded launch ramps were real, but they did not translate into a measurable surge in the number of Americans who paddleboard.52
Nobody can tell you the current number for free
From the 2022 reporting year onward, the detailed activity tables moved behind a subscription. The Sports and Fitness Industry Association topline report and the single-sport paddleboarding report are both paid products. Any site quoting a 2024 or 2025 US participation figure without naming a purchased source is either extrapolating or recycling an older number.626
Who paddleboards
Women became the majority in 2018
In 2018 women made up 52 percent of stand up paddling participants. The Outdoor Foundation noted that it was the first time women had outparticipated men in a paddlesport.7
In 2014 the split was still 51 percent male
Four years earlier the balance was 51 percent male and 49 percent female. The shift toward women is one of the few clear demographic trends in the sport.8
Nearly half of paddlers are aged 25 to 44
The age split runs 11 percent aged 6 to 12, 14 percent aged 13 to 17, 12 percent aged 18 to 24, 47 percent aged 25 to 44 and 16 percent aged 45 and older. One participant in four is a minor.9
More than three quarters of teenage paddlers are male
Teenagers aged 13 to 17 have the highest participation rate of any age group, at 1.8 percent, and 76 percent of them are male. This runs against the overall trend toward women and is the sharpest gender skew in the data.10
Over half live in six-figure households
52 percent of paddleboarders live in households earning 100,000 dollars or more a year, 18 percent in the 75,000 to 99,999 dollar band, 15 percent in the 50,000 to 74,999 band, 8 percent in the 25,000 to 49,999 band and 7 percent under 25,000 dollars. Paddleboarding skews wealthy even by outdoor-recreation standards.11
A quarter of US paddlers are in the Pacific region
26 percent of American paddleboarders live in the Pacific census region, which also has the highest participation rate at 2 percent. The South Atlantic follows at 20 percent of participants, then the Middle Atlantic at 13 percent and the East North Central at 12 percent. The East South Central region is last at 3 percent.12
How often paddlers actually go out
The average paddleboarder goes out 5 times a year
Stand up paddlers averaged 5.0 outings each in 2014. That makes them the least frequent paddlers of all: kayakers averaged 8.1 outings and paddlers of all types averaged 7.13
13.7 million paddleboarding outings a year
Those 2.75 million participants produced 13.7 million outings in 2014. Kayaking produced 105.2 million and canoeing 70.5 million in the same year, out of 215.8 million paddling outings in total.14
Almost a third go out exactly once
31 percent of paddleboarders went out a single time all year. Another 24 percent went two or three times. More than half of everyone counted as a paddleboarder paddles three times a year or less.15
Only 11 percent are regulars
11 percent of participants went out 24 times or more, and 8 percent went 12 to 23 times. The remainder splits into 15 percent at four to five outings and 11 percent at six to eleven.16
“Participant” is a low bar
This matters for reading every other number on this page. A single outing in twelve months makes someone a participant in these surveys. The 3.74 million figure is a count of people who tried it at least once, not a count of paddleboarders in any everyday sense.17
Paddleboarding safety in numbers
29 paddleboarders died in 2024
The US Coast Guard recorded 29 stand up paddleboard deaths in recreational boating incidents in 2024, the highest figure since it began breaking the category out. The five-year run is 10 deaths in 2020, 18 in 2021, 17 in 2022, 11 in 2023 and 29 in 2024.18
90 percent of paddleboard deaths are drownings
26 of the 29 deaths in 2024 were drownings. That is the highest drowning share of any vessel type in the report. For comparison, open motorboats sit at 60 percent and personal watercraft at 26 percent.19
24 of 26 drowning victims wore no life jacket
Of the 26 paddleboarders who drowned in 2024, 24 were not wearing a life jacket. This is a first-party calculation from the report’s own cross-tabulation of vessel type against flotation device use.20
Paddlecraft account for 26 percent of US boating deaths
Kayaks, canoes and paddleboards together caused 143 of the 556 recreational boating deaths in 2024. That makes paddlecraft the second largest category behind open motorboats, which accounted for 255.21
The official count is a floor, not a census
A paddleboard death is counted here only when the board qualified as a vessel in use for boating under federal rules. Deaths where the victim was swimming near the board, or where a local authority logged the case as a general drowning, never enter this table. The real figure is higher by an unknown margin.22
Where there is water to paddle
About 117 million lakes on Earth
A satellite survey counted roughly 117 million lakes larger than 2,000 square metres, covering 5 million square kilometres, or 3.7 percent of the planet’s non-glaciated land.23
3.5 million lakes in the contiguous US
A US Geological Survey study counted about 3.5 million lakes and reservoirs larger than 1,000 square metres in the lower 48 states, excluding the Great Lakes.24
7.2 million kilometres of lake shoreline
Counting only lakes of 10 hectares and up, the world has 1.42 million of them, holding 181,900 cubic kilometres of water along 7.2 million kilometres of shoreline. That is roughly four times the length of the world’s ocean coastline.25
Frequently asked questions
Use this data
Every figure on this page is free to reuse in articles, presentations and research, as long as you link back to this page. If you need a year from the participation series that is not shown above, it is in the archived reports listed under Sources.
Cite this report
Copy one of the citations below.
Sources
- Outdoor Industry Association, 2022 Outdoor Participation Trends Report (outdoorindustry.org)
- Outdoor Industry Association, 2021 Outdoor Participation Trends Report (outdoorindustry.org)
- Outdoor Industry Association, 2022 Outdoor Participation Trends Report (outdoorindustry.org)
- Outdoor Foundation, 2019 Outdoor Participation Report (outdoorindustry.org)
- Outdoor Industry Association, 2022 Outdoor Participation Trends Report (outdoorindustry.org)
- Sports and Fitness Industry Association (sfia.org)
- Outdoor Foundation, 2019 Outdoor Participation Report (outdoorindustry.org)
- Outdoor Foundation, 2015 Special Report on Paddlesports (outdoorfoundation.org)
- Outdoor Foundation, 2015 Special Report on Paddlesports (outdoorfoundation.org)
- Outdoor Foundation, 2015 Special Report on Paddlesports (outdoorfoundation.org)
- Outdoor Foundation, 2015 Special Report on Paddlesports (outdoorfoundation.org)
- Outdoor Foundation, 2015 Special Report on Paddlesports (outdoorfoundation.org)
- Outdoor Foundation, 2015 Special Report on Paddlesports (outdoorfoundation.org)
- Outdoor Foundation, 2015 Special Report on Paddlesports (outdoorfoundation.org)
- Outdoor Foundation, 2015 Special Report on Paddlesports (outdoorfoundation.org)
- Outdoor Foundation, 2015 Special Report on Paddlesports (outdoorfoundation.org)
- Outdoor Foundation, 2015 Special Report on Paddlesports (outdoorfoundation.org)
- US Coast Guard, Recreational Boating Statistics 2024 (uscgboating.org)
- US Coast Guard, Recreational Boating Statistics 2024 (uscgboating.org)
- US Coast Guard, Recreational Boating Statistics 2024 (uscgboating.org)
- US Coast Guard, Recreational Boating Statistics 2024 (uscgboating.org)
- US Coast Guard, Recreational Boating Statistics 2024 (uscgboating.org)
- Verpoorter et al., Geophysical Research Letters (GLOWABO) (doi.org)
- McDonald et al., Limnology and Oceanography (doi.org)
- Messager et al., Nature Communications (HydroLAKES) (nature.com)
- Physical Activity Council, 2025 Participation Overview Report (physicalactivitycouncil.org)
