The Top 13 Hobbies & Activities Trends of 2025

Festivals and comfort boost camping gear

Camping is having a renaissance. The ending of COVID restrictions and the popularity of festivals encouraged 58 million U.S. households to camp in the past year, generating an estimated revenue of almost $44 billion in 2023 and propelling camping to a rank among the top hobby trends.

But outdoor brands are hungry for more.

To grow the market further, tent makers have only two choices: convince existing customers to upgrade, or persuade new campers to buy their first tent. It turns out that you can unlock both options with the right product innovation.

One of the biggest complaints about camping is having to set up your tent. Outdoor brands have taken note and created products to suit low-effort campers — such as inflatable tents. Supported by air rather than fiddly fiberglass poles, these shelters can be erected quickly using an electric pump.

Similarly, blackout tents allow campers to enjoy a lie-in or get some sleep on a brightly lit festival ground.

These products also tie in with the movements towards "glamping", one of the top camping trends, and reflect broader outdoor activities trends aimed at making nature experiences more comfortable and accessible. While some people enjoy battling with nature, most casual campers just want to relax and enjoy peaceful surroundings.

Pickleball surge inspires fresh formats

With a global audience and frequent spotlight in tournaments like the Olympics and Wimbledon, racket sports have been a cornerstone of athletics for over a century. Equipment sales alone are soon expected to hit $10 billion worldwide, and the category continues to generate new business opportunities.

However, the popularity of sports within it is rapidly shifting away from traditional disciplines like tennis and squash. Instead, newcomers are drawn to options like pickleball, America’s fastest-growing sport for three consecutive years and the driver of rapid growth for businesses like Playtomic.

This shift from traditional racket sports toward more accessible games like pickleball reflects the broader direction of current hobby trends, where social connection and ease of entry are key.

This shift is happening so quickly that Novak Djokovic, the most decorated male tennis player of all time, recently described his sport as “endangered.”

In Europe, the local equivalent to pickleball is padel. This tennis-squash hybrid is a popular participation sport, with over 52 million Instagram and Facebook accounts following padel-related content, and spectacular clips from the Premier Padel Tour regularly attracting attention region-wide.

Startups like Padel Smash are capitalizing on the trend with a portable outdoor game combining elements of padel and roundnet (Spikeball), offering a beginner-friendly and mobile alternative to the courts. This two-person company shot to fame on the popular TV show Shark Tank in 2023 when it raised $250,000. Just over a year down the line, the business is worth $3 million.

F1 fandom drives product sales

In 2017, a Private Equity firm bought the entire sport of Formula One for $4.6B, thinking the sport had huge untapped potential. One strategic change they made, to expand to a younger demographic, was simple: adding shorter races.

The new races are 1/3rd the duration of a traditional Grand Prix and have driven a surge in interest among the youth: F1 is now the fastest-growing large-scale sport on social media in terms of follower count and therefore one of the top leisure trends.

The industry has also been pushing for more Hollywood marketing. The popular Netflix series “Drive to Survive”, in partnership with F1, was seen as a move to help sell the European sport to an American audience.

Unlike most other sports though, a surge in viewership doesn’t mean a corresponding surge in participants, as racing is prohibitively expensive for nearly everyone who watches it, especially the newly adopted youth demographic. This has led to a rise in driving simulators, a top gaming trend, which cost just a few hundred dollars; equivalent to the average price to race on a track for just a few hours.

Racing simulator products, including motorsport shoes, and racing hoodies have consequently taken off. Even when racing in a simulator, many say the shoes are necessary – their thin and flexible soles help maximize the driver’s feel of the petals and give them better control.

Some reviewers even say they bought it because they drive long hours for Uber and the shoes help them extend their comfortable working hours, letting them earn more in a given day.

Seniors fuel pickleball’s rapid rise

Pickleball, the fastest growing sport in the U.S., is most popular among a surprising demographic: the elderly.

Unlike many other sports, pickleball – a mashup of badminton, tennis, and ping pong – doesn't give much of an edge to age or experience. It also takes far less time to play a full match than with other sports, so couples will schedule regular pickleball dates as a way to establish friendships within a community.

As pickleball grows in popularity among the 60+ demographic—especially as the population ages, something driving significant shifts in healthcare trends—retirement homes are increasingly adding the sport to their offerings and featuring it in their marketing.

While the volume is low for such long-tail keywords, searches like "pickleball retirement community" have as high as $10 CPCs on Google, meaning that retirement homes are paying up to $10 for every click they get on their ads shown to users in Google search results. Because the elderly don't switch retirement homes as frequently as younger generations switch housing, the retirement homes are willing to spend more on acquiring those customers.

Golf simulators win new players

Golf simulators were originally intended to help players practice, especially when weather made golfing less pleasant, but they’ve since evolved into one of the most accessible new hobby trends, even attracting players who’ve never hit a real ball. In fact, half of the users of golf simulators have never played the actual game. In this way, golf simulators were born as a training tool but turned into their own game.

Golf simulators offer simulated access to famous courses, some of which may be inconvenient to get to for players, or too expensive for them to visit. And simulators also offer fictional courses, which aren’t bound by the limits of geography.

The real-world course simulations mean better retention for companies that operate real-world courses; during the golf season, a golf simulator is a partial substitute for golfing, but over the course of a year it’s a complement, since it keeps players in the game even when they’re not on the course. Players can pay a virtual visit to their favorite course even in the middle of winter. When a product is unusable for a long period of time, maintaining users’ routines in the short term is key to retaining them over the long term.

Golf simulators have existed long enough to show seasonal trends in search and online discussion, which tend to be the inverse of the golf season. This indicates that a healthy share of usage still comes from golfers who want to hone their skills off-season. Simulators are offered at a variety of price points, from minimalist products for under $300 to room-sized rigs that cost over $20,000. Recent usage accelerated thanks to the pandemic, which shut down some golf courses and also caused people to move away from cities and to more spacious suburbs and small towns, where they have enough indoor space for a golf simulator, making them one of the latest hobby trends.

Golf is considered a rich person’s sport and, in contrast to many membership-based golf clubs, low-end golf simulators can help expand the market. In fact, golf’s high-end status originates, in part, from real estate. According to Census data, urban areas make up just 3% of land in the US, yet hold more than 80% of the population and a large proportion of the wealth. In order to carve out land for a golf course in an urban area, golf course companies must pay high costs which are then passed on to wealthy urban customers in the form of high membership fees.

Simplified surfing fuels foil boom

Part of why high-performance water sports products have had relatively small markets is they require such high skill—a product like a wingfoil can help grow the market, introducing people to these sports in an easier context.

Windfoiling, a variant of windsurfing, is similar to pickleball–the fastest growing sport in the US– in the sense that by lowering a game’s difficulty to play, the market can be significantly grown.

Pickleball doesn't offer a big edge to people who are at a particular level of fitness or experience. Wingfoiling also benefits from having a larger available market than kitesurfing; since it needs less wind, there are more beaches where it can work and more days when it's an option.