Which states have the most pole studios?

California has the most studios in our directory: 92 venues across 65 cities. Colorado is second with 56. Washington and Texas tie for third with 54 each, and Florida is fifth with 51. Those are counts of what we have found and listed as of 24 September 2026, across all 50 states plus Washington DC.

Before the table, one caveat that changes how you should read it. A directory ranking measures two things at once: where studios actually are, and where the directory has done its homework. We can separate those two a little, and further down we do, because the split is more interesting than the ranking.

Quick answers

Which state has the most pole studios? California, with 92 venues across 65 cities in our directory as of 24 September 2026.

What are the top five states? California 92, Colorado 56, then Washington and Texas tied at 54 each, and Florida 51.

Does this ranking reflect where pole is most popular? Only partly. It also reflects where we have searched hardest, and our home state of Washington is over-represented for exactly that reason.

Which state has the most cities with a studio? California, with studios listed in 65 separate cities, well clear of Texas at 34, Florida at 32 and Washington at 31. Note that this is a different question from which state has the most studios, and California leads both.

Are these counts verified? Each state's count includes both verified and unverified-but-listed studios, and the verified share varies a lot by state, from 74 percent in Washington to 27 percent in Colorado.

The ranking

Counts are total listed venues per state, including studios that teach aerial arts without pole. "Cities" is the number of distinct cities with at least one listing. "Verified" is how many of that state's listings we have confirmed live on a stated date.

Rank	State	Studios	Cities	Verified
1	California	92	65	61
2	Colorado	56	23	15
3	Texas	54	34	31
3	Washington	54	31	40
5	Florida	51	32	35
6	Illinois	49	26	22
7	Georgia	46	28	30
8	Pennsylvania	45	25	17
9	New York	44	30	19
10	Oregon	37	16	23
11	North Carolina	34	16	23
11	Virginia	34	23	21
13	Ohio	30	14	19
14	Arizona	28	11	17
14	Massachusetts	28	23	18
14	Tennessee	28	14	17

Washington and Texas tie at third, North Carolina and Virginia tie at eleventh, and Arizona, Massachusetts and Tennessee tie at fourteenth. We rank ties equally rather than breaking them on something arbitrary, so the state below a two-way tie for third is fifth, not fourth.

Why Colorado is second, and why that is suspicious

Colorado sits second with 56 listings, ahead of New York, Texas and Florida, all of which are far larger states. Taken at face value that makes Colorado one of the densest pole states in the country.

We are not confident that is true, at least not at that size. Look at the verified column instead. Colorado has 15 of 56 verified, which is 27 percent. Washington has 40 of 54, which is 74 percent. Georgia has 30 of 46, which is 65 percent.

What that gap describes is the order we did the work in. A state we have swept for discovery but not yet re-checked carries a lot of rows that came out of research and have not been confirmed one at a time. A state we have re-verified carries fewer rows, because verification removes things. Colorado is in the first group. Washington, our home state and the first one we ever built, is in the second.

So the honest reading of this table is that the top of it is a reasonable guide to where pole studios cluster, and the verified column is a guide to how much you should trust any individual row.

Which states are thin, and is that real?

Some low counts are real. A state with under a million people and one metro area genuinely has few pole studios, and no amount of searching invents more.

Other low counts are ours. Where our verified share is low and our city count is low at the same time, that usually means one research pass and no follow-up. We would rather say that than let a thin state read as a fact about pole.

The clearest signal is the ratio of cities to studios. Texas has 54 studios spread across 34 cities, close to one and a half per city, which is what genuine statewide coverage looks like. Arizona has 28 across 11 cities, and half of those 28 sit in just Phoenix and Tucson, with the remainder thinly spread through places like Chandler, Flagstaff and Prescott. Neither pattern is wrong. They are different states and different sweeps, and the ratio tells you which you are looking at.

Does this tell you where to move for pole?

Not on its own, and be careful with per-capita reasoning here.

Studio counts follow metro areas, not state lines. California's 92 studios are concentrated in a handful of metros, and there are large stretches of the state with nothing listed for a long drive. A state ranking hides that completely. If you are actually choosing where to live, the useful unit is the city, not the state.

What a state ranking is genuinely good for is a sanity check on our coverage, and for answering the question people actually type, which is the one in the title of this post.

Where these numbers come from

Every count here was counted from our own studio dataset on 24 September 2026, not estimated, and the same dataset feeds the directory and our statistics page, which always show the current numbers. If you are reading this later, those pages are the fresher count.

Counts include venues that teach aerial arts without pole, which is 361 of our 1,139 US listings. If you want the pole-only figure, we wrote about that separately.