Contents
- U.S. paddle sport participation: latest counts and trends
- Participation by paddling activity: kayaking, canoeing, rafting and SUP
- Paddler demographics: age and gender
- Regional participation and paddling access
- Paddling frequency, outings and days on the water
- Windsurfing participation and international paddling context
- Sources
U.S. paddle sport participation: latest counts and trends
More than 34 million Americans participated in paddlesports in 2025. Participation added 446,000 people compared with 2024, following a cumulative gain of 10 million participants since 2019, according to the Outdoor Industry Association’s 2026 executive summary. These figures describe participation across the paddlesports tracked in that report; the summary does not provide a detailed breakdown of how often each person paddled or how the overall count was constructed. (Outdoor Industry Association, 2026 Paddlesports Report: Executive Summary)
The latest figure is much higher than the historical totals in an earlier Outdoor Foundation report. In 2014, that report counted 21.7 million U.S. participants ages 6 and older, equal to 7.4% of that population. It also reported participation rates of 7.8% in 2016 and 7.7% in 2017 for the U.S. population ages 6 and older. These earlier measures offer historical context, but they should not be treated as a directly comparable time series with the 2025 total: the reports differ in date and the supplied summaries do not establish that every measure uses identical definitions. (Outdoor Foundation, Special Report on Paddlesports 2015; Outdoor Foundation, 2019 Special Report on Paddlesports & Safety)
Participation totals count people, not outings. That distinction matters because the 2026 summary says roughly 85% of U.S. paddlers went out fewer than eight times a year. The size of the participant base therefore should not be read as a measure of frequent paddling or regular days on the water. (Outdoor Industry Association, 2026 Paddlesports Report: Executive Summary)
Participation by paddling activity: kayaking, canoeing, rafting and SUP
Recreational kayaking was the largest named paddlesport in the 2025 U.S. figures, with 15.3 million participants. Canoeing followed at 10.2 million. These are activity-specific counts, and participants may take part in more than one paddlesport, so the figures should not be added together as if each represented a separate person. (Outdoor Industry Association, 2026 Paddlesports Report: Executive Summary)
Growth varied by activity. Rafting recorded the fastest one-year increase among the tracked paddlesports, rising 4.8% in 2025. Stand-up paddling had the strongest three-year growth, at 5.8%; the public summary does not specify the exact start and end years for that comparison. Sea and touring kayaking moved in the other direction, losing 92,000 participants in 2025 and standing as the only activity in decline in the summary. These different paths show why a single total can conceal meaningful variation among paddling disciplines. (Outdoor Industry Association, 2026 Paddlesports Report: Executive Summary)
An earlier snapshot helps show how the activity mix looked in 2014. The Outdoor Foundation reported 13.0 million participants in kayaking of any type and 10.0 million in canoeing among U.S. participants ages 6 and older. The 2014 kayaking figure covers any type of kayaking, whereas the 2025 figure above is specifically recreational kayaking; the two should not be interpreted as a like-for-like comparison. (Outdoor Foundation, Special Report on Paddlesports 2015)
Paddler demographics: age and gender
The 2018 profile in the 2019 paddlesports report showed a near-even gender split across U.S. paddling participants: females represented 47.4% and males 52.6%. The activity-specific female share was 49.4% in recreational kayaking, 43.4% in sea and touring kayaking, and 51.1% in stand-up paddling. These figures describe the participant profiles reported for 2018, not current demographics. (Outdoor Foundation, 2019 Special Report on Paddlesports & Safety)
Age profiles also differed by discipline. In 2018, people ages 25–34 made up 19.5% of U.S. canoeing participants, while those ages 13–17 represented 10.6% and those ages 55–64 represented 9.0%. In whitewater kayaking, 62% of participants were adults ages 18–44; within that group, 29% were ages 25–34. The whitewater figure describes an age range and a subgroup, while the canoeing figures are shares of all canoe participants by age band, so they are useful as separate profiles rather than direct comparisons of a single age group. (Outdoor Foundation, 2019 Special Report on Paddlesports & Safety)
Regional participation and paddling access
The 2018 U.S. profile counted 4.7 million paddling participants living in the South Atlantic region, 3.8 million in East North Central, and 3.5 million in the Pacific. These are counts by participants’ residence. They do not measure access to launch sites, the availability of suitable water, or how often people paddle. (Outdoor Foundation, 2019 Special Report on Paddlesports & Safety)
Regional distributions depended on the activity. In 2014, the Pacific region accounted for 26% of U.S. stand-up paddling participants and the South Atlantic for 20%. In the later 2018 report, the South Atlantic had more than 663,000 sea and touring kayakers, out of 2.8 million total U.S. participants in that activity. The South Atlantic also led in whitewater kayaking, with more than 620,000 participants. The numbers concern different activities and years, so they should be read as separate regional snapshots. (Outdoor Foundation, Special Report on Paddlesports 2015; Outdoor Foundation, 2019 Special Report on Paddlesports & Safety)
The 2019 report also described changes in sea and touring kayaking over an imprecisely defined recent period: participation was up 3% in West South Central and 2% in Mountain, while Middle Atlantic participation was almost 5% below its level six years earlier. Because the report does not provide exact start years for the first two comparisons, those percentages should be treated as directional regional context rather than annual growth rates. (Outdoor Foundation, 2019 Special Report on Paddlesports & Safety)
Paddling frequency, outings and days on the water
Historical outing data help distinguish how many people participated from how often they paddled. U.S. paddling participants made 215.8 million outings in 2014. Kayakers accounted for 105.2 million of those outings and averaged 8.1 outings each. Canoeists made 70.5 million outings, averaging seven per person; rafting participants made 20.5 million outings and averaged 5.4 each; stand-up paddlers made 13.7 million outings and averaged five each. These figures are from 2014 and should not be presented as current outing patterns. (Outdoor Foundation, Special Report on Paddlesports 2015)
A later report measured canoeing in days rather than outings. In 2018, U.S. canoe participants logged a collective 55 million days on the water, averaging six days per participant. Canoeists ages 55 and older averaged seven days per year. An outing and a day on the water are not necessarily equivalent units, and these canoe-specific 2018 measures should not be combined with the all-paddlesport outing totals from 2014. (Outdoor Foundation, 2019 Special Report on Paddlesports & Safety)
Windsurfing participation and international paddling context
The available recent non-U.S. figures cover Wales and distinguish recent participation from stated demand. Sport Wales’s 2024–25 survey covered adults ages 16 and older. It estimated that 0.8% of adults, about 19,000 people, had participated in canoeing or kayaking during the previous four weeks. Paddleboarding participation was 0.7%, or about 17,000 adults, over the same period. These are four-week survey measures, so they are not directly comparable to U.S. annual participant counts. (Sport Wales, State of the Nation report 2024–25)
The survey separately recorded demand, meaning stated interest in doing more. For canoeing or kayaking, demand was 1.1% of Welsh adults, about 27,000 people; for paddleboarding, it was 0.7%, about 18,000. Demand is not participation, and these estimates should not be combined with the four-week activity counts. (Sport Wales, State of the Nation report 2024–25)
The supplied figures do not provide a windsurfing participation count. They support a current U.S. paddlesports overview, historical U.S. profiles and outings, and a clearly scoped Welsh comparison for canoeing, kayaking and paddleboarding, but not an estimate of windsurfing participation.