Yes.

The amount of money the average American family spent on one child’s sports team significantly increased from 2018 to 2024, rising from $693 to $1,016. 

Project Play, an initiative of the Aspen Institute think tank that collected the data, attributed increasing costs to inflation and to families’ eagerness to participate in sports after the pandemic shutdowns. 

According to UNLV professor Chris Kearney, the trend is also due to cultural shifts, which have made participating in sports a strong activity on college applicants’ resumes. This, in turn, has made students and families more willing to spend money on it.

In 2024 and 2018, the earliest year for which data was available, the greatest share of sports’ costs were travel related. 

In 2024, the second-greatest cost was team registration fees. In 2018, registration fees were not as prominent – parents spent more on equipment and sports lessons instead.

This fact brief is responsive to conversations such as this one.

The Nevada Independent partners with Gigafact to produce fact briefs — bite-sized fact checks of trending claims. Read our methodology to learn how we check claims.

Sources

• Aspen Institute’s Project Play, 2019 State of Play.
• Aspen Institute’s Project Play, 2025 State of Play.
• The Nevada Independent, “Nevada youth rank last in sports participation. Will rising costs make it worse?”