How many people scuba dive?

Three different things get counted

Figures about the size of scuba diving measure different things, and they cannot be added together or compared directly:

• Participants: people who dived at least once in a given year, estimated from surveys.
• Members: people who belong to a club or association, such as BSAC.
• Certifications: cards issued by an agency over its whole history. One person can hold several cards, so a certification total is not a count of people.

Every number below carries its year and its source. Agency totals are the agency's own claim.

United States participation surveys

The independent figures in our research come from the Sports and Fitness Industry Association (SFIA), as reported by others.

Both reports split participants into two groups. DAN's post gives 2014 figures of 2.252 million casual divers (one to seven dives a year) and 893,000 core divers (eight or more). It says men made up 66 percent of casual and 74 percent of core participants that year, and describes the SFIA survey as 10,778 online interviews projected to the US population aged 6 and over. Divernet reports that in 2022 casual participation rose 12.1 percent while core participation fell 5.1 percent, and that about 7.4 million Americans went snorkelling at least once.

SFIA released a single-sport scuba report in its 2024 series, with the final batch published on 11 September 2024, but its figures are behind a paywall and we have not seen them.

An older estimate shows how hard counting is. Undercurrent (June 2007) put active US divers at about 1.2 million, plus or minus 15 percent, and in the same piece representatives of SSI and DAN said there was no way to track the total number of divers.

Worldwide

There is no reliable worldwide count of active divers. Estimates found online come from secondary statistics aggregators and blogs, with no primary study behind them, so we do not repeat them here.

UK club membership

BSAC said it had 13,000 members in 1969. For recent years, search summaries of BSAC documents give 22,890 members at the end of 2022 and 23,447 in 2023, about 2 percent growth (2024 AGM report), and 23,214 fully paid members in 2024 (2024 annual report), which the report says is in line with a downward trend of roughly ten years. We could not open those documents, so the figures are not confirmed here.

What the agencies say about themselves

PADI's own figures do not line up

PADI's totals appear in three forms. A search summary of its 2021 Worldwide Corporate Statistics, covering 2015 to 2020, gives more than 28 million certifications since 1967, counting entry-level and continuing education cards and excluding introductory experiences; we could not read the document itself. Wikipedia (secondary) says that as of 2024 PADI claimed 30 million certifications since 1967. PADI's 2026 history page claims more than 30 million certified divers. Certifications and divers are different measures, because one diver can hold several certifications, so these figures should not be read as a count of people.

Related

Accident and fatality reporting is covered on what the accident data shows.