Read Schedule A
By-law, PDF, 87 pages (Schedule A begins on page 46)
By-law, Word
What the rest of the by-law contains
Free under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence. Take all of Schedule A or a single row of it.
The short answer
There is no single number. Setbacks are decided municipality by municipality, and the Ontario examples examined here give very different figures, built on different assumptions and measured to different points.
Ottawa's 2025 strategy runs from 45 metres for one court on hard ground to 175 metres for fourteen. Vaughan's 2025 strategy recommends a default of 50 metres. A 2022 Burlington staff memorandum mentions 500 feet, about 152 metres, as a best-practice suggestion. None of them should be copied into another municipality's rules without an assessment of the actual site.
What has been published
Each entry below was checked against the source document itself, at the page given. Nothing here rests on a news report, a summary or a municipal homepage.
| Municipality | Document | What it sets |
|---|---|---|
| Ottawa | Outdoor Tennis and Pickleball Strategy, 2025, p. 8, Figure 3 | Distances by court count and ground type, from 45 m (hard) or 35 m (soft) for one court to 175 m (hard) or 120 m (soft) for fourteen, against a 50 dBA target |
| Vaughan | Tennis and Pickleball Strategy, 14 February 2025, pp. 9 and 10 | A recommended default of 50 m from dedicated courts to the nearest residential property line. Anything closer requires further on-site review |
| Burlington | Outdoor Pickleball, staff memorandum, 22 July 2022, p. 2 | Refers to a best-practice suggestion of 500 feet from a residence. A suggestion recorded in a memorandum, not an adopted design standard |
| Halton Hills | Court Sports Strategy: Outdoor Tennis and Pickleball Review, November 2021, p. 27 | Calls for adequate buffers without prescribing a distance |
Ottawa's figures in full
Of the examples examined here, Ottawa's is the most detailed table, and the only one that distinguishes hard ground from soft.
| Courts | Hard ground | Soft ground |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 45 m | 35 m |
| 2 | 65 m | 50 m |
| 4 | 90 m | 75 m |
| 6 | 105 m | 85 m |
| 8 | 120 m | 90 m |
| 12 | 160 m | 115 m |
| 14 | 175 m | 120 m |
Source: City of Ottawa, Outdoor Tennis and Pickleball Strategy (2025). Screening distances with no mitigation, measured from the perimeter of the court lines to the nearest residential property line, based on a 50 dBA design target. The City describes them as reflecting current technology and subject to review. Barriers are considered site by site and are stated not to form part of the City's base level of service.
Why the figures differ
Take four courts. Ottawa's table gives 90 metres on hard ground. Vaughan's general default is 50 metres. Burlington's memorandum suggests about 152 metres from a residence. That is a spread of roughly 50 to 152 metres, but the three figures cannot be compared as equivalent standards. Each municipality did real work and answered a slightly different question, because four things change the answer.
1. How many courts
More playing surfaces mean more impacts in the same minute. On hard ground, Ottawa's distance rises from 45 metres for one court to 175 metres for fourteen, nearly fourfold.
2. What the ground is made of
Grass, loose soil and planted ground absorb sound that pavement reflects. On larger installations the difference runs to tens of metres. At fourteen courts, Ottawa's own figures differ by 55 metres between hard and soft ground.
3. Whether anything stands in the way
Ottawa's distances assume no mitigation at all. A barrier changes the arithmetic, but only for a listener who cannot see over it.
4. Where the measurement ends
A distance to a property line, a distance to a house and a distance to an upper-storey window are three different distances. Ottawa measures to the nearest residential property line. Apply its figures to a window and they no longer mean what Ottawa derived them to mean.
Read the reference point before you read the number.
Before a municipality borrows a figure
A municipality should have a qualified acoustic practitioner, licensed in Ontario, assess its own sites and complete any setback table it proposes to enact, working from its own ground and its own reference point. Another municipality's table is good for giving a committee an order of magnitude to react to, and should go no further than that.
One caution about Ottawa in particular. The consultant report behind its strategy also contains distances for courts with barriers, and they are not reproduced here. A council that wants those figures should obtain the report from the City and put it in front of its own practitioner rather than copy them into a by-law.
How the model by-law handles setbacks
Schedule A of the model by-law is a setback table deliberately left blank for a licensed Ontario practitioner to complete. It is built so that none of the four variables above can be hidden.
- Rows for 1, 2, 4, 6, 8, 12 and 14 courts, each on hard ground and on soft ground.
- Four columns: the distance with no mitigation, the distance below which reduced hours of play apply, and the distances with a 3 metre and a 4 metre barrier.
- One stated reference point: from the nearest court lines to the nearest lot line of the nearest noise-sensitive property.
- Sites with more than fourteen courts, or where a listener can see over the top of a proposed barrier, require site-specific modelling and cannot rely on the table.
The provisions that depend on the table do not come into force until Council adopts a completed version. Ottawa's figures are reproduced beside it, on page 49, marked as Ottawa's and not proposed for enactment.
If a court near you is the problem
For a noise complaint about a specific court, please contact your municipality. In Toronto, call 311.