Everyone wrote Topgolf off. Texas bar tabs say otherwise.

The filings disagree with the narrative

The public story on Topgolf over the past year is grim reading. A valuation cut from roughly $2 billion at the 2020 Callaway merger to $1.1 billion in the Leonard Green & Partners deal that closed in January. Hundreds of layoffs this spring. A new CEO, David McKillips, brought in from Chuck E. Cheese in February to reset the business plan.

The Texas filings tell a different story.

Every Texas venue licensed to sell liquor reports its alcohol sales to the state monthly, and those filings are audited. We pulled them for all 15 Texas Topgolf locations, plus 95 competitor venues across nine eatertainment brands, through June 2026. Three findings stand out.

Thirteen for thirteen

Topgolf's 15 Texas locations posted $35.9M in alcohol receipts over the trailing twelve months through June, up 19.4% from the prior year. Some of that is footprint: New Braunfels opened in December and Grand Prairie in January.

So strip the new venues out. The 13 locations that reported in all 36 months grew 11.0% on a same-store basis, to $33.4M. And every one of them grew. Waco was the slowest at +2.9%. Webster, south of Houston, was the fastest at +21.5%. El Paso grew 19.0%, Pharr 18.3%, Spring 15.0%.

That breadth is the finding. Growth this uniform doesn't come from one hot market or one flagship's banner year. The fastest-growing venues sit in trade areas ranging from $55K median household income (Pharr) to $105K (Webster), so it isn't a premium-market story or a value-market story either. It's everywhere the brand operates in the state.

Austin, the largest Texas location at $4.38M, grew 7.7%. San Antonio, the second largest at $3.67M, was the slowest big venue at +3.7% and still sits about 8% below its receipts of two years ago.

The growth is volume, not price

McKillips gave D CEO the most useful sentence of his tenure so far: traffic is up in 2026, but average check is dropping. Discounting drives visits and compresses spend. So the obvious question about an 11% receipts gain is whether it's just price increases doing the work.

Two pieces of evidence say no.

First, Topgolf prices Texas as one market. Of the 70 items that appear on two or more Texas menus, 53 sit within a dollar of each other statewide and 15 are priced identically at every location. The median spread across venues is 70 cents, about 7% of the item price. The only structure we found is a DFW tier priced about 4% above the chain median and Waco about 3% below. Beer runs $5 to $7, cocktails $12 to $14, statewide. When prices are near-identical across venues, a sevenfold spread in growth rates between those venues (+2.9% to +21.5%) cannot come from pricing. That variation is traffic, market by market.

Second, the inflation backdrop is too small to explain the gain. Restaurant menu inflation is running +2.5% in Houston over the year through June 2026 and +2.5% in Dallas through May 2026, its latest print, per federal price data for food away from home. Those are the only two Texas metros the Bureau of Labor Statistics publishes a metro price index for, and they cover most of Topgolf's Texas footprint. Even if Topgolf's own beverage prices moved in line with its home metros, price would account for roughly a quarter of the same-store growth. The rest is more people ordering more drinks.

That matters beyond Texas because it lands on exactly the axis McKillips is being judged on. His value promotions are supposed to buy traffic without giving away the store. In the one state where the receipts are audited and public, the beverage line says the traffic is real and it's spending.

Best house in a rough neighborhood

The category context makes the number sharper. Across the nine competitor brands we track in Texas, same-store alcohol receipts fell at six of the nine this year.

Per comparable venue, Topgolf's $2.57M in annual alcohol receipts is more than double Dave & Buster's $1.14M and nearly four times Main Event's $686K. Punch Bowl Social is the nearest per-venue comp at $2.45M, though on just two locations, so read that one gently.

This is the same split showing up nationally. Dave & Buster's posted a 5.0% comp decline for its last fiscal year. Pinstripes filed for bankruptcy in September and was liquidated by late fall. Lucky Strike Entertainment, the renamed Bowlero, is barely comping flat nationally. Meanwhile golf participation hit a record 48.1 million Americans in 2025, per the National Golf Foundation, and Topgolf's Texas receipts look a lot more like the golf trend than the eatertainment trend.

The two newest Texas venues support the expansion case too. New Braunfels and Grand Prairie are each running about $150K a month in alcohol receipts in their first year, a pace that would already place them ahead of Waco and Bryan on an annualized basis. McKillips has said he wants three to five new US venues a year in smaller formats. The early Texas ramps suggest the smaller markets can carry them.

What this data doesn't say

Honest limits, stated plainly. These figures are alcohol receipts only. No food, no bay fees, no events revenue, no memberships. They're Texas only, and Texas is Topgolf's home state and densest market, so it may flatter the national picture. Against two years ago, same-store receipts are up just 3.7%, which makes this a recovery year following a soft 2024-25, not three years of uninterrupted growth. And because Topgolf went private in January, there are no public national same-venue sales figures to test any of this against. The last disclosed quarter showed the inflection to roughly +1%. What happened since is management commentary.

But that's precisely why state filings are worth reading. When a company goes private, the audited paper trail in Texas keeps talking. Right now it's saying the turnaround McKillips is selling showed up at the bar first.

Methodology

Alcohol receipts are drawn from audited monthly filings that every Texas venue licensed to sell liquor submits to the state, covering July 2023 through June 2026, the most recent fully reported month. Same-store figures include only venues that reported in all 36 months. Menu prices are verified snapshots collected August 2026 across 14 Topgolf Texas locations with published menus. Menu inflation figures are the federal food-away-from-home price indexes for the Dallas-Fort Worth-Arlington (BLS series CUURS37ASEFV) and Houston-The Woodlands-Sugar Land (CUURS37BSEFV) metros; BLS does not publish a metro price index for Austin or San Antonio. Cohort sizes are printed on every comparison. Receipts are alcohol sales only and are not total venue revenue.

Pourcast is a Texas hospitality intelligence platform. All Pourcast analysis is derived from public records. pourcast.ai