Marina Demand: Registration Data and Water Access

Marina demand analysis usually opens with the water and this article opens with a filing cabinet. Every mechanically propelled recreational vessel in America, and in most states much of the paddle fleet besides, carries a state registration, renewed on a schedule, filed with an agency, and reported annually to the Coast Guard, which compiles the state tables into the closest thing any leisure asset class in this library has to a title plant for its demand base. A marina's customers are boats; the boats are registered; and the registration file, read by length, by propulsion and by state, answers the demand questions a slip pro forma usually borrows from trade surveys: how many boats, of the sizes that rent slips, whose owners live within trailering or mooring distance. This article reads that file end to end, alongside the marina industry's own payroll census, its measured season, and the national accounts' valuation of the activity, and then does what the series always does at the shoreline, hands the supply count to permits and parcels. The family collision the research log records is handled the standing way: this is a methodology article, and the feasibility genre it deliberately is not can be found wherever it already ranks.

The fleet, counted: 11.7 million boats and a 2005 shadow

The states registered 11,674,073 recreational vessels in 2024, up 1.1% on the year (U.S. Coast Guard, Recreational Boating Statistics 2024, COMDTPUB P16754.38, 2025). The long series behind that figure is the asset class's honest context: 10,777,370 registrations in 1989, a peak of 12,942,414 in 2005, 11,804,002 in 2014, and the current level roughly 10% below the peak two decades on. The American fleet is large, mature and no longer growing secularly, which reframes the demand question the way the childcare chapter's shrinking base did: marina demand is not riding a rising national tide, and a slip project's case must therefore be local, structural, or both. The registration series says so plainly, and it says it before a single trade statistic has been consulted. The peak's date matters too: 2005 precedes the financial crisis, so the fleet's plateau is a two-decade structure, not a cyclical dip awaiting reversion, and every demand claim downstream inherits that base case.

A one-year jump, read with the scope column

The 2024 state table carries a worked example of the discipline this article keeps preaching. Florida's registrations printed at 1,171,432 against 922,915 a year earlier, a 27% one-year jump no behavioral story supports; the movement is administrative, a registration-scope or reporting change of exactly the kind the Coast Guard's scope notes exist to flag, and the analyst who annualized it into a boating boom would be modeling a filing cabinet's reorganization. The general rule costs one sentence: before any registration trend enters a memo, its state's scope history is checked against the source's own notes, and a discontinuity is stated as one. Administrative series are this library's favorite instruments precisely because their artifacts are documented; the documentation only works if it is read.

The length structure: which boats rent slips

The fleet's composition is the slip market's segmentation, and the 2024 table gives it exactly. Of 10,852,992 mechanically propelled vessels, 3,731,822 run under 16 feet, trailer boats that touch marinas mainly at launch ramps and fuel docks; 6,480,886 run 16 to under 26 feet, the heart of the recreational fleet, splitting between trailering and seasonal slips by geography and habit; 552,622 run 26 to under 40 feet, the wet-slip core that cannot practically trailer and must moor somewhere; 76,407 run 40 to 65 feet; and 11,255 exceed 65 feet (USCG, Recreational Boating Statistics 2024, Table 37, 2025). The unpowered fleet adds 821,081 registered craft, 628,507 of them paddlecraft, users of launches and racks rather than slips. The demand arithmetic for a wet-slip marina therefore starts from a base of roughly 640,000 vessels of 26 feet and over nationally, allocates them by the state and county registration files, and treats the 6.5-million-boat middle band as the convertible margin whose slip take-up local factors decide. A pro forma that quotes the 11.7 million headline as its demand base has overstated the wet-slip market by a factor of nearly twenty, and the correction was one table away.

The geography: Florida's fleet, Minnesota's habit

The state table rearranges the industry's mental map twice in one reading. By count, Florida leads as expected: 1,171,432 registered vessels in 2024, ahead of Minnesota's 865,379, Michigan's 795,494, Ohio's 630,288 and Wisconsin's 602,849, with California (596,703) and Texas (552,138) behind them (USCG, Table 38, 2025). Per resident, the order inverts: Minnesota registers 149.3 boats per 1,000 residents, Wisconsin 101.2, Michigan 78.8, Arkansas 70.2 and Iowa 68.2, against Florida's 50.3 and a national 34.0 (MMCG computation from the Coast Guard table and Vintage 2025 populations). Boating as a household habit belongs to the lake states at rates triple the Sun Belt's; Florida's fleet is vast because Florida is vast, and its marina economics differ structurally, a year-round saltwater season against the five-month freshwater calendar the payroll series below will measure. One caveat the Coast Guard itself prints: registration scope varies by state, several states register paddlecraft or documented vessels differently, so cross-state comparisons should be read with the source table's scope column open, the kind of footnote this library quotes rather than hides.

The per-capita inversion also rewrites the competitive geography. In the lake states the marina competes for a mass habit, the constraint is shoreline and season, and the demand file leans on the band counts; in the Sun Belt it competes for a large but proportionally thinner boating population with year-round water, the constraint is basin capacity and price, and the file leans on income and the wet-slip core. Same asset, two demand regimes, and the state table said which regime a market runs before anyone booked a flight.

Above the state files: the documented fleet

One tier of the fleet sits outside the state tables and belongs in a footnote that occasionally becomes the story. Larger vessels may be federally documented with the Coast Guard instead of state-registered, five net tons and up, which sweeps in much of the 40-foot-and-over market a premium slip basin actually serves, and the documentation database is public and searchable by hailing port. For most catchments the tier is small enough that the state bands carry the analysis; for the yachting harbors it is the market, and the analyst working one queries the documentation file for the harbor's hailing-port fleet the way the rest of this article queries the state file. The two systems overlap at the margins and the scope notes, as always, adjudicate; the method point is that the biggest boats are not missing from the public record, they are simply filed federally.

The marina industry, censused

The operator layer is counted the way this series always counts it. County Business Patterns records 3,739 marina establishments with paid employees in 2023, employing 32,549 people on a $1.67 billion payroll, 54.5% of establishments under five employees, the familiar small-operator signature (U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023, NAICS 713930, 2025). The payroll series adds a half-decade arc of quiet strength: 3,965 reporting units in 2019 grew to 4,020 in 2024, employment rose 9.0% to 40,848, and average pay rose 30.1% to $47,261 (BLS, QCEW annual averages, NAICS 713930, 2020 and 2025). Employment up 9% against a fleet up hardly at all is the intensity story the ORSA valuation confirms from the spending side: boating and fishing carried $38.4 billion of value added in 2024, the largest conventional activity in the outdoor recreation account (BEA, ORSA, 2026). Fewer new boats, more spent per boat, more service labor per slip: the industry's demand grew inside the fleet rather than with it, which is exactly the pattern a registration-flat, revenue-rising asset class should expect its lender to understand.

The size structure adds the tier map every chapter of this series draws. A 54.5% under-five-employee share marks the family boatyard tier; the 245 establishments of 20 to 49 employees and the handful above are the full-service and resort basins where the consolidation the trade discusses actually operates; and the reconciliation habit applies unchanged, roll of establishments against parcels against imagery, because a marina is the rare business whose entire capacity is visible from the air, slip by slip, rack by rack, which makes its supply census the cheapest in the library. The nonemployer tier below the census, the one-person boatyard and the mooring-field caretaker, files where this series always finds it, in the Nonemployer Statistics, and matters most in exactly the small-lake markets where the employer count runs thinnest.

The season, measured: 1.67 and the two coasts of it

The hospitality family's seasonal league gains its fourth member. Marina employment ran from 31,992 in January 2024 to 53,344 in July, a peak-to-trough ratio of 1.67 (BLS, QCEW quarterly files, 2024, NAICS 713930, 2024 to 2025), between the caterers' 1.26 and the campgrounds' 2.06, and for the same physical reason as the campground: much of the inventory closes with the water. The national curve again averages two different businesses: the freshwater marina whose docks come out in October and whose ratio runs far above the national, and the Florida or Gulf operation whose season is flat and whose winter is the peak for some segments. The state QCEW rows separate them in fifteen minutes, and the lending consequence repeats the campground chapter's: debt service is annual, the cash calendar is not, and the measured local ratio, not the national average, prices the mismatch. The shoulder work is where operators win the year, spring commissioning from April's climb and fall haul-out in October's step-down, service revenue the employment curve carries in plain sight, and a pro forma whose service line ignores the curve's shoulders has left the yard's best weeks unmodeled.

The storage adjacency: racks, yards and the winter business

Half of a northern marina's revenue model is a storage business wearing deck shoes, and the analysis should treat it with the storage chapter's tools. Dry-stack racks, winter yards and covered sheds hold the trailerable middle of the fleet through the off-season and increasingly through the season itself, the rack replacing the slip for boats under the crane's limit; the demand base for that business is the 16-to-26-foot band the registration file counts, crossed with the housing stock's declining tolerance for driveway boats, a zoning and HOA fact readable in local code. The economics rhyme with the self-storage article deliberately: recurring revenue, low labor, demand measured in stored units per qualified household, and the same honest gap, no public occupancy series, bridged the same way, by counting the racks from imagery and the competitors from parcels. A marina memo that models slips and forgets the yard has usually missed the property's steadiest line.

The safety file, read as an exposure meter

The Coast Guard compilation is, formally, an accident report, and its safety series doubles as the only public proxy for how intensively the fleet is used. Recreational boating recorded 556 deaths, 2,170 injuries and 3,887 reported incidents in 2024, a fatality rate of 4.8 per 100,000 registered vessels, down from 4.9 in 2023 and from 697 deaths as far back as 2005 (USCG, Recreational Boating Statistics 2024, 2025). Read as demand data, with the caveat stated plainly that incidents track exposure imperfectly, the long fatality decline against a flat fleet suggests a boating population that is older, better equipped and more instructed, consistent with the spending-deepening story the payroll and ORSA series told. The analytical use is directional and disciplinary: a demand narrative of surging casual participation should show up in this file's exposure indicators, and when it does not, the narrative, not the file, needs the footnote.

Public access: the competitor that is an amenity

As with campgrounds, the public sector supplies the asset class's largest alternative: state and county ramp systems, municipal docks and public mooring fields serve the trailer fleet free or nearly so, and their capacity is published in the states' own access inventories. The competitive reading is two-sided in a way the private-only analysis misses. A dense public-ramp network suppresses paid launch and transient demand while feeding the storage, service and fuel lines every trailer boat still needs; a thin one pushes the middle band toward slips. And the busiest public accesses are the market's turnstiles: counties that publish launch counts or lot occupancies have handed the analyst the local participation series, the water's equivalent of the park visitation the campground chapter reads. The inventory habit follows: the catchment table carries public accesses beside private basins, each with capacity and distance, because the customer's choice set does, and the sources are agency lists rather than surveys.

Water access: the supply side the permits gate

The manifest title's second phrase, water access, is the supply side's defining constraint, and it is legal before it is physical. A marina occupies the land-water boundary, and construction there passes through the federal permit gates of Section 10 of the Rivers and Harbors Act and Section 404 of the Clean Water Act (33 U.S.C. 403 and 1344), plus state coastal and lake-bed regimes layered above them. The demand consequence is the asset class's structural scarcity: slips are hard to add, existing basins carry grandfathered footprints new entrants cannot easily replicate, and the supply inventory is therefore unusually stable and unusually knowable, from the permit dockets, the parcel roll's water-adjacent use codes and imagery's literal slip count. The catchment method assembles as usual: registered vessels by county from the state file, sliced by the length bands that rent slips; the drive-time and trailer-distance geography of the trade-area method; household income from the regional accounts, since boat ownership is income-elastic and the origin field's trend is the fleet's; and the competing basins counted slip by slip from records and imagery. Where the water itself is the destination, the corridor logic of the campground article applies with oars: the lake's public accesses, ramps and state-park counts are the anchor's own turnstiles.

Reading a state registration file

Because the method leans on one instrument, its mechanics earn a section. State registration files are public records administered by natural-resources or motor-vehicle agencies, most queryable in aggregate and many published as county tabulations; the Coast Guard's annual compilation standardizes the national and state totals a year in arrears. Three habits keep the reading clean. Use the length bands, because demand for a slip is a length, and a county's registration count without its band structure is the 11.7-million error in miniature. Watch renewals rather than stock where the state publishes flows, because a registration lapse is the demand-side early warning a slip waiting list conceals. And respect the scope column: a state that registers paddlecraft inflates its small-band counts against one that does not, and the analyst comparing counties across a state line checks the two regimes first. None of this is arcane; it is the same courthouse discipline this library applies to deeds and permits, pointed at boats. The county grain deserves the last word: most states tabulate registrations by the owner's county of residence, which is the demand-side address the catchment method wants, and the minority that publish by county of principal use have handed the analyst something better still, the demand mapped to the water it actually floats on. Which regime a state runs is in its file documentation, and the memo says which one its counts mean.

The two catchments: mooring range and trailer range

A marina serves two geographies at once, and the method draws them separately. The mooring catchment is the wet-slip market's: owners of 26-foot-and-over vessels berth within a tolerable drive of where they live or summer, and the county registration bands map it directly, with the seasonal-home stock from the housing tables adding the second-home owners whose boats live where their lake houses do. The trailer catchment is wider and shallower: the 16-to-26-foot band travels at highway speed, its radius is a towing hour rather than a driving quarter-hour, and its demand lands on ramps, fuel, service and storage rather than slips. The two catchments respond to different variables, slip demand to the banded fleet and second-home stock, trailer demand to the origin metros' fleets and the route network, and a memo that draws one polygon for both has blended two businesses the registration file keeps apart. The overlay is an afternoon in the same tools every chapter of this series uses, and it is the difference between pricing a dock field and pricing a fuel pier.

The income gate, stated from the accounts

Boat ownership is the most income-elastic demand base in this pillar, and the honest model states the gate rather than assuming the tide. The regional accounts publish the origin counties' income levels and trends, and the elasticity works in both directions with a lag: the fleet's 2005 peak and long plateau track the household balance sheet's cycles, and a catchment whose real incomes have compounded for five years will show it in the registration bands a season or two later, upgrades first, the 26-foot line crossed second. The discipline is to pair the fleet trend with the income trend in the same exhibit, because together they distinguish a market pausing from a market retiring, the two conditions a flat local count can conceal, and which lead the fleet by the gap between a bonus season and a boat order; and where the pair diverges, income rising while registrations thin, the likeliest explanation is demographic, the owners aging out faster than heirs replace them, which the age structure of the same counties, from the tables this pillar always uses, confirms or refutes in one pull.

The water itself, measured

Freshwater marina demand floats, literally, on lake and reservoir levels the federal water agencies gauge continuously, and the demand file for an inland basin should say so in one sourced line. Reservoir operating levels, drawdown schedules and multi-year stage histories are published by the operating agencies, and a marina on a flood-control pool whose autumn drawdown strands the dock field has a season set by an engineering manual, not by weather; the manual is public. Coastal basins swap the gauge for the charts and the dredge cycle: controlling depths, shoaling and the maintenance-dredging dockets that keep an entrance usable are matters of public record with budgets attached. Neither layer is demand in itself; both gate whether the demand the registration bands count can physically arrive, and the one-line habit, name the gauge, state the constraint, date the last dredge, keeps a nautical asset's file honest about the medium it operates in.

What the lender reads

Marinas sit on the special purpose side of the ledger by name: the reported examples from SOP 50 10 8 include marinas among the property types carrying the 15% borrower contribution on 504 projects, with 20% for a new business (504 Capital Corporation, guidance on SOP 50 10 8, 2025; NAGGL, 2025), and the classification reads straight off the asset: a dock field, a travel lift and a fuel pier serve no alternative user. The credit therefore concentrates on the demand file this article built, the banded fleet in range, its trend, the income base behind it, the measured season, and the competitively frozen supply, plus the operating layers a marina adds: fuel margins with underground-tank diligence as in the travel-center chapter, storage revenue that behaves like the storage chapter's, service labor priced by the payroll series. The public SBA 7(a) and 504 datasets, which MMCG Analytics' SBA layer is built on, carry the marina code's lending history, subject to the standing rule that no performance rate is shown for any cohort of fewer than ten loans. MMCG Analytics supplies the data and the analysis; the credit decision rests with the lender.

Method: the five numbers a marina memo should carry

First, the banded fleet: registered vessels by length band for the catchment counties from the state file, with the 26-foot-and-over wet-slip core stated separately from the trailerable middle. Second, the trend: five years of the same counts, because a flat national fleet makes the local direction the whole story. Third, the income base: the origin counties' household income levels and trends from the regional accounts, the elasticity variable for every discretionary asset in this series. Fourth, the season: the state marina-employment ratio from the quarterly files, set against the national 1.67, with the property's own operating calendar beside it. Fifth, the frozen supply: the competing basins' slip counts from imagery and records, with the permit docket checked for the rare expansion, because scarcity claimed is scarcity to be demonstrated. Each carries a source and a date; the slip-rate and occupancy assumptions above them are the operator's, benchmarked to nothing in this article because no honest public benchmark exists for slip rates or occupancy, and the provenance standard would rather say so than borrow one, here as across the pillar.

A worked sequence for one basin

Run for a 240-slip freshwater marina with a service yard, the sequence goes as follows. The state file's county tabulations put 41,000 registered vessels within trailering distance, 2,600 of them 26 feet and over, with the wet-slip band up 6% over five years while the total fleet held flat, the local structure beating the national tide. The regional accounts show the origin counties' real incomes compounding. The state's marina-employment ratio runs 2.3, a hard five-month season, and the property's calendar matches it. The competitive count from imagery and parcels finds nine basins and roughly 1,900 wet slips within the same range, none expanded in a decade per the dockets, and one municipal ramp system whose launch counts the county publishes. The memo that results states: a banded fleet with a growing slip-relevant core, an income base trending with it, a season measured and priced, and a supply frozen by the permit gates, four measured layers under the operator's stated rate assumptions. The exhibits run to six pages and the field work to two site walks, one of them by boat, which the analyst should not pretend was a burden. The protective case inverts on the first number: a catchment whose 26-foot-and-over band has thinned for five years is retiring its slip demand no matter how full this summer looks, and the registration file said so before the waiting list did. A second protective check reads the bands against the racks: where the under-26 fleet grows while the wet-slip core thins, the market is telling the operator to build storage, not docks, and the capital plan that ignores the split is arguing with its own customers' filings.

The 2026 read, and the reserve queue opened

Read in August 2026, the marina asset class shows the pattern this pillar keeps finding at the mature end of leisure: a flat fleet a decade past its peak, spending and payrolls compounding inside it, a season the government measures to the month, and a supply side whose constraint is law rather than land. The cadence: registrations annually through the Coast Guard compilation and continuously at the state agencies, payrolls quarterly, the spending accounts each spring. The file that results holds the reserve queue's standard shape: one great administrative instrument at the center, the familiar federal censuses around it, and the local records closing the supply side, a template each of the six following niches will refit to its own cabinet. This article opens the reserve queue that extends the pillar beyond its core twelve, and it makes the extension's method point on arrival: the niche asset classes are not data deserts, they are simply markets whose one great instrument, here the registration file, nobody bothered to read as real estate demand. Six more niches follow on the same terms, each keyed to its own instrument: licensing rolls for care formats, retailer authorizations for grocery, interconnection queues for data centers, shipment counts for manufactured housing, the agricultural census for rural facilities. The pillar's core proved the method on the big classes; the reserve queue proves it generalizes, and the cadence of this file, annual compilation, continuous state records, quarterly payrolls, is the reserve's template.

Frequently asked questions

What public data measures marina demand?

State boat-registration files, compiled annually by the Coast Guard (11,674,073 registered vessels in 2024), read by length band and county; the marina industry's payroll census (QCEW, NAICS 713930) for the operator layer and season; BEA's outdoor recreation account for spending ($38.4 billion of boating and fishing value added); and permits, parcels and imagery for the slip supply.

How many boats actually need wet slips?

Roughly 640,000 nationally: 552,622 registered vessels of 26 to under 40 feet plus 87,662 of 40 feet and over in 2024. The 6.5-million-boat band from 16 to 26 feet splits between trailering and seasonal slips by local habit, and the 3.7 million under 16 feet are ramp users. Quoting the 11.7 million total as slip demand overstates the market roughly twentyfold.

Which states have the most registered boats?

By count (2024): Florida (1,171,432), Minnesota (865,379), Michigan (795,494), Ohio (630,288) and Wisconsin (602,849). Per 1,000 residents the lake states dominate: Minnesota at 149.3, Wisconsin at 101.2 and Michigan at 78.8 against Florida's 50.3 and a national 34.0.

Is the recreational fleet growing?

No. Registrations peaked at 12,942,414 in 2005 and stood about 10% lower in 2024 (11,674,073, up 1.1% on the year). Industry payrolls and spending grew anyway, employment up 9.0% and pay up 30.1% from 2019 to 2024, demand deepening inside a flat fleet, which makes local band-level trends the decisive evidence.

How seasonal is the marina business?

Nationally 1.67 to 1: employment ran from 31,992 in January 2024 to 53,344 in July. The average blends a hard freshwater season with flat or winter-peaked saltwater markets, and the state rows of the same QCEW files measure the local version directly.

Why is marina supply so hard to add?

Construction at the land-water boundary passes federal permit gates (Rivers and Harbors Act Section 10; Clean Water Act Section 404) plus state coastal and lake-bed regimes, and marinas are named special purpose property in reported SOP 50 10 8 examples (15% borrower contribution). Existing basins hold grandfathered footprints, making the competitive slip count unusually stable and countable.

Sources

1. U.S. Coast Guard, Recreational Boating Statistics 2024 (COMDTPUB P16754.38), 2025: registrations by year (Table 36), by propulsion and length (Table 37) and by state with scope notes (Table 38). https://www.uscgboating.org/statistics/accident_statistics.php
2. U.S. Census Bureau, County Business Patterns 2023, NAICS 713930 (marinas), released 26 June 2025. https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/cbp/datasets/2023/cbp23us.zip
3. U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Quarterly Census of Employment and Wages, annual averages 2019 and 2024 and 2024 quarterly files, NAICS 713930, private, United States, 2020 to 2025. https://data.bls.gov/cew/data/api/2024/a/industry/713930.csv
4. Bureau of Economic Analysis, Outdoor Recreation Satellite Account, U.S. and States, 2024 (boating and fishing value added $38.4 billion), released 5 March 2026. https://www.bea.gov/data/special-topics/outdoor-recreation
5. U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 Population Estimates, state totals (2024 populations for the per-capita computation), 2026. https://www2.census.gov/programs-surveys/popest/datasets/2020-2025/state/totals/NST-EST2025-ALLDATA.csv
6. 33 U.S.C. 403 (Rivers and Harbors Act, Section 10) and 33 U.S.C. 1344 (Clean Water Act, Section 404): the federal permit gates for construction at the land-water boundary (citation). https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/33/403
7. 504 Capital Corporation, SBA 504 Loans for Special Purpose Properties and Real Estate (guidance on SOP 50 10 8 classifications, marinas among the named examples), 2025. https://504capital.com/blog/financing-special-purpose-properties-sba-504-loans/
8. National Association of Government Guaranteed Lenders, SBA Notice Revising SOP 50 10 8 (Procedural Notice 5000-872764), 2025. https://www.naggl.org/sba-notice-revising-sop-50-10-8/
9. MMCG Research, SBA 7(a) Performance Series: MMCG analysis of the public SBA 7(a) loan register, 2026. https://mmcganalytics.com/sba-default-rates/
10. U.S. Census Bureau, Nonemployer Statistics 2023 (the no-payroll operator tier), released 15 May 2025. https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2025/2023-nonemployer-statistics.html