About this guide

Splash Pads Guide is a free directory of splash pads and spraygrounds in the United States — free city park pads, water playgrounds, and paid water play. It currently covers 1,233 splash pads across 440 towns in 29 states, 1,118 of them free to use.

Why it exists

Searching for a splash pad usually turns up a city parks page listing addresses with no hours, or a blog post from four summers ago. Neither tells you the two things that decide the afternoon: whether the pad is actually open this week, and whether there is a toilet.

So we built the guide around those. Season dates and hours come from parks departments wherever they publish them — 459 of our listings are confirmed against an official source. Facilities come from the map: 963 listings carry what OpenStreetMap records on site, including toilets, drinking water, parking and step-free access.

What we add

Every town page carries local summer temperature normals from NOAA, because "go in the afternoon" is sound advice in Seattle and genuinely unsafe in Phoenix. Every listing shows the best-equipped pads nearby, ranked by shade and facilities, because the pad you drove to being closed for maintenance is the most common way one of these trips goes wrong.

The full detail is on our methodology page — where listings come from, what we verify, what we compute, and what we knowingly get wrong.

Who runs it

Splash Pads Guide is an independent site run by a single editor, not a media company. There is no newsroom and no sponsor. To reach a human about a listing, a correction or a takedown, email us — it goes straight to the person who maintains the database.

How it is funded

The guide is free and carries display advertising plus some affiliate links to gear. Nobody pays to be listed, and no listing is ranked, promoted or removed because of advertising. See the privacy policy for how ads and analytics work.

Season 2026

Listings carry the season they were last confirmed for. Season dates change every year and pads close early for maintenance more often than published schedules admit — if you spot something out of date before we do, let us know.