Netball participation in Australia: how many people play netball (AusPlay 2025)

Why the child figure is unusually large

For most sports on these pages the child count is a small fraction of the adult count. Netball's 239,000 children against 477,000 adults reflects a sport whose entry point is the primary-school-aged competition run by an association, with a large share of players starting before high school. Two consequences follow for anyone quoting the figure: the junior pipeline is where the retention question lives, and the adult number is not the ceiling of the sport's audience, because the parents on the sideline are usually former players.

Trend: no year-on-year figure printed here

The calendar year 2025 result is the only netball figure verified against the primary release for this page. AusPlay's earlier publications covered financial years, and a July-to-June count compared with a January-to-December count would be reported here as a change it is not. A calendar-year-to-calendar-year comparison becomes possible with the next ASC release; until then this page states the level and its dates and no direction.

How AusPlay produces the netball figure

AusPlay is the Australian Sports Commission's continuous national telephone survey of sport and physical activity. For the netball adult figure, respondents aged 15 and over list the activities they took part in over the prior 12 months without being prompted with a sport name, then answer follow-up questions on frequency and organisation. For the child figure, an adult in the household answers for one child aged 0 to 14, and only organised activity outside school hours is captured. The CY2025 results were collected across January to December 2025, weighted to the population, and released on 30 April 2026.

• Unprompted recall: netball is counted when the respondent names it, not from a checklist.
• Children: one child per household, reported by a parent or guardian, organised activity only.
• Weighting: results are population estimates carrying a sampling margin.
• Release: 30 April 2026, covering calendar year 2025.

Citing the netball figures

The Australian Sports Commission publishes AusPlay under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0. That permits quoting the numbers as published for non-commercial purposes provided the attribution below travels with them:

• Australian Sports Commission - www.ausport.gov.au
• Suggested citation: Australian Sports Commission, AusPlay calendar year 2025 (released 30 April 2026), netball, adults 15+ and children 0-14.
• Point readers to the AusPlay page on the Clearinghouse for Sport for the full data tables.

What the numbers mean for a netball association

A quarter of a million children in organised netball means the administrative load of the sport sits with volunteer committees managing junior registrations, team allocations, uniform sizes and a weekly draw. The clubs that keep those children as adult players are the ones that make the transition to social and mixed competitions easy to find and easy to book, rather than something a player has to ask a committee member about.