Ask a club what it costs and you get one number. That number is the registration fee, and in the only national survey that breaks youth-sports spending down by sport, registration comes to under a quarter of what a soccer family spends in a year. The fee is still the right place to start, because it is the one figure you can check before you commit. Below it are our own measurements of what clubs charge, and then the rest of the bill.
What clubs charge, measured
Our catalog holds more than 10,000 US soccer clubs, and 2,686 of them publish a price list. Everything in this section is counted from those clubs' own pages, not from an industry estimate.
A club's fee page usually prints several programs at several ages, so we take one figure per club rather than one per line. These are dues, meaning what a club charges you to register. Uniforms, tournaments and travel sit outside them.
| Level | What it is | Published dues, per club |
|---|---|---|
| Recreational | Town leagues, no tryout | $123 a season (middle half $80 to $176, 608 clubs) |
| Level 5, travel and select | Where most club players are | $900 a year (middle half $478 to $1,718, 127 clubs) |
| Level 3, competitive regional | ECNL Regional, NPL and similar | $875 a year (middle half $400 to $1,850, 41 clubs) |
| Level 2, national elite | ECNL, Girls Academy | $2,090 a year (26 clubs) |
| Level 1, pre-professional | MLS NEXT and the top of the academy game | $3,200 a year (middle half $2,030 to $3,595, 29 clubs) |
Each figure is the median club, using the club's most expensive annual program. Levels 4 and 6 are missing because fewer than 20 clubs at each of those levels published a fee marked as annual, which is too few to quote. The rec figure is printed per season on 908 of the 1,010 rec price lines, so a child who plays fall and spring pays it roughly twice. The ladder page explains what changes between the levels beyond the money.
Moving up one rung does not reliably cost more. The median level 3 club and the median level 5 club are $25 apart. The money separates at the top: the median level 2 club charges more than twice what the median level 5 club charges, and the median level 1 club more than three times.
The top of the ladder is also the hardest to price, and that makes the top two rows above less trustworthy than the rest. Among clubs playing in MLS NEXT, the MLS NEXT Academy Division or the Girls Academy, 226 publish a price list, and only 82 of them, about a third, put a price on the top-league team itself. The rest priced other programs, mostly camps and younger age groups.
Read what that does to a median. For two clubs in three, the dearest annual figure on the page is not the elite team at all, so the level 1 and level 2 numbers above are closer to what those clubs charge for their ordinary programs than to what a place on the top team costs. Treat them as a floor. The direction of the error is knowable even when its size is not: a club that hides its top price is not hiding a bargain.
The fee is not the bill
Of the 2,686 clubs with a price list, 1,730 also print what the fee does not cover:
- Uniform or kit: 1,110 clubs, about two in three
- Tournament entry: 567 clubs, about one in three
- Travel or hotels: 368 clubs, about one in five
- Extra training, team costs, referee fees and league registration follow behind
For the size of those lines, the best source is the Aspen Institute's National Youth Sports Parent Survey, run with Utah State University and Louisiana Tech, which asked 1,848 nationally representative parents in late 2024 what they spent on their child's main sport. For soccer families it came to $910.22 for the year, split like this:
| Where the money went | Soccer, per child, 2024 |
|---|---|
| Travel and lodging | $237.27 |
| Registration | $209.66 |
| Equipment and uniforms | $169.47 |
| Lessons and instruction | $133.89 |
| Camps | $126.80 |
| Other | $30.24 |
Getting to games costs a soccer family more than signing up for them does.
That total needs one caveat, and it is a big one. Soccer was the primary sport for 270 families in that survey, and only 15% of them played travel, elite or club soccer. So $910 describes a group that is mostly rec and school players, which makes it the wrong number to budget a club season against. Nobody publishes a club-only version. Every "average club soccer costs $X" figure online is somebody's estimate, usually somebody with something to sell, and we are not adding one.
The shape of the survey is more useful than its total. Travel was the largest single line for soccer families, and it is also the third thing clubs most often tell you the fee excludes. If a club quotes you $2,000, the items it has already warned you about are where the rest of the year goes.
It is getting more expensive, and not evenly
Spending on a child's primary sport rose 46% between 2019 and 2024, which is about twice US price inflation over the same five years. Soccer rose faster than the average: the same survey series put a soccer family at $536.90 in 2019 and $910.22 in 2024, an increase of 69% in five years.
The gap by income is wider than most families assume. In the 2024 survey, households earning $100,000 or more spent $1,590.61 on a child's primary sport, households between $50,000 and $99,999 spent $961.20, and households under $50,000 spent $604.01. An earlier survey in the same series found that children from low-income homes quit sport over cost at six times the rate of children from high-income homes. Price is part of who is still playing at fourteen, not only part of the household budget.
In 2026, two new checks on all of this arrived from opposite directions. An AP-Ipsos poll of sports parents, run in July 2026 on a probability-based panel, asked households what they spend in a year on all their children's sports combined: 67% came in at $2,000 or less, and only 5% crossed $8,000. And when the Aspen Institute asked about 700 young players around New York City and North Jersey what they like least about soccer, the top answer in every group was that playing costs too much, named by 32% overall and by 41% of lower-income kids. Read together: the typical family's bill is smaller than the loudest numbers suggest, and the kids who feel the price most are exactly the ones an average hides.
Two clubs at the same level can be $2,000 apart
Published dues vary enormously inside a single state and a single level. In every state and level group where at least eight clubs published an annual figure, the range ran from a few hundred dollars to over $2,000. In Wisconsin at level 5 it was $160 to $2,025 across 13 clubs. In Massachusetts at the same level, $220 to $2,675 across 10.
We cannot tell you from a price list what causes that spread. Clubs that explain their fees point at field rental, how many tournaments they enter, and whether they own facilities or rent them. What the spread does mean in practice is that the price is a poor shortcut for how good a club is for your child. Work that out first, using the questions in the choosing-a-club guide, and treat cost as a separate question.
Asking about money without it being awkward
Tryouts are usually free. Of the clubs that state a tryout cost, 342 say it costs nothing and 156 name a price, with a median of $25. Trying out costs you a weekend. Accepting a place is what costs money.
About one club in four says something about financial aid on its own website, 1,460 of the 5,764 clubs in our catalog with a site we hold (25%), using words like financial assistance, fee assistance or need-based. Several of them also say the fund is limited, so asking early in the season beats asking late. Nobody publishes what share of players actually receive aid, so read a club's aid page as an invitation to ask, not as evidence you will get it.
About one club in six mentions a payment plan (985 of 5,764, 17%). A plan does not lower the total. It splits it into monthly instalments, which for a lot of families is what makes the same number workable.
There is one written rule at the very top worth knowing. From the 2025-26 season, MLS NEXT requires every member club to issue at least one scholarship a season equal to the full cost of participating, and its Talent ID events cost players nothing. One scholarship per club is small against a league of 151 clubs and more than 16,000 players.
The academies run by MLS clubs themselves are a different case, and this is the one place in youth soccer where the top of the ladder is the cheapest rung. Reading the fee pages in our catalog, nine level-1 clubs state in their own words that an academy place costs nothing, among them Atlanta United, Nashville SC, Orlando City, Minnesota United and Red Bull New York, whose page says all teams are fully funded with equipment and travel included. That is a per-club fact, not a league rule. MLS NEXT contains both those funded pro academies and independent clubs that charge like any other elite program, so the league name on a team's shirt tells you nothing about the bill. Ask the club.
Four questions to ask before you accept a place
- What is the total for the year, including everything the club invoices? Ask for the number that lands on your card between now and next summer, not the registration line.
- What do we buy separately, and what does it come to? Uniforms, tournament entries and travel are the three that show up most often on clubs' own exclusion lists, in that order.
- How many tournaments, and how many need a hotel? Travel and lodging is the single biggest line for soccer families in the national survey. Two overnight tournaments and four local ones are different seasons for the same fee.
- Is there financial aid, when do I apply, and is the fund still open? A quarter of clubs say they have something. The ones that say the fund is limited mean it.
If you want the version of this specific to your family, the Pathway Report lists the clubs near you at each level with what each one asks of you, so you can compare real options rather than ranges.
Where these numbers come from
- Our own catalog of more than 10,000 US soccer clubs, of which 2,686 publish a price list. Every dues figure, exclusion list, tryout cost, aid and payment-plan share and state-by-state range on this page is counted from those clubs' own pages.
- Aspen Institute, 2024 National Youth Sports Parent Survey, with Dr Travis Dorsch of Utah State University's Families in Sport Lab and Dr Jordan Blazo of Louisiana Tech. 1,848 parents, collected online 5 November to 19 December 2024. The soccer figure of $910.22 and its six-line split, the $1,015.64 all-sport average, the spending-by-income figures, and the share of soccer families playing in a travel or club setting.
- Project Play, family spending on youth sports rises 46% over five years (February 2025). The five-year increase overall and for soccer parents.
- Project Play, low-income kids are six times more likely to quit sports due to costs (January 2020). The six-times figure, from a survey of 1,032 parents.
- ESPN, kids aren't playing enough sports. The culprit? Cost (Kelly Cohen, August 2019). The 2019 soccer figure of $536.90, published from the same Aspen survey series.
- MLS NEXT, transformative sporting initiatives for the 2025-26 season (August 2025) and What is MLS NEXT?. The one-scholarship-per-club rule, free Talent ID events, and the size of the league.
- AP-Ipsos Poll of Sports Parents (August 2026). Fielded 21 to 26 July 2026 on Ipsos's probability-based KnowledgePanel, 1,737 adults with an oversample of 510 sports parents. The household spending distribution, which covers all of a family's children and all of their sports together.
- Aspen Institute, State of Soccer: New York City / North Jersey (April 2026). Around 700 local players surveyed between March 2025 and January 2026. The share of kids naming cost as the thing they like least about playing.
An older Project Play figure, soccer at $1,188 a year, is still quoted all over the internet as if it were current. It is from the 2022 survey and has been superseded by the 2024 one, where soccer comes in at $910.22 and baseball is the more expensive sport. As of August 2026 Aspen's own youth-sports facts page still lists the 2022 numbers, so you can find $1,188 on their site today. The survey series itself has moved on.