About this guide

The Playgrounds Guide is a free directory of playgrounds in the United States, currently covering 699 playgrounds across 226 towns in 20 states.

Why it exists

Searching for a playground gets you a council page listing names and addresses, or a blog post from three summers ago. Neither answers the questions that actually decide the afternoon: is it fenced, is there a toilet, is there any shade in July — and can a wheelchair get to the equipment.

So the guide is built around those. 57 playgrounds here are fully fenced. 208 are confirmed against the parks department that runs them. 562 carry mapped detail from OpenStreetMap — toilets, drinking water, shade shelters, benches, parking.

Accessibility comes first

214 playgrounds here are recorded as wheelchair accessible, and every listing that sits near one shows it before it shows anything about distance. For a family who needs step-free access, the nearest playground is irrelevant if they cannot use it.

For 481 listings we have no confirmed accessibility information, and we publish that as "unknown" rather than leaving it blank. A blank reads as a no, and that is not what we mean — it is a gap in the public record. More on why we do that, and please tell us if you know one of them.

What we deliberately don't do

We do not try to list every playground. A big city has hundreds, most of them a swing and a slide, and an exhaustive dump helps nobody. We collect the ones that are named, notable, or on a city's own destination-playground list. The long tail arrives through reader submissions.

Who runs it

An independent site run by a single editor, not a media company. 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

Free to use, funded by display advertising and 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.

2026

Listings carry when they were last confirmed. Playgrounds close for refurbishment with little notice — if you find something out of date before we do, let us know.