North In-Ground 17×12 Rectangle Trampoline Review (2026)

Full Review

PT Score: 65 / 100

North is the rare trampoline on this site that was designed for the hole from the start, not dropped into one as an afterthought. It is a Swedish brand, founded in Gothenburg in 2012, and its in-ground line carries the engineering heritage of Capital Play, the company widely credited as the first to bring in-ground trampolines to market. In the US it is sold through Superior Play Systems, and it connects to the safety-enclosure pedigree of JumpSport, whose founders patented the first trampoline net. That is a lot of names for one product, and we will untangle them below, but the short version is this: North is a designed brand, not a marketplace rebrand, and the 17×12 is the largest rectangle in its in-ground range.

This is our first North coverage, and it sits in an unusual spot for us. North is not on Amazon. There are no ASINs, no Prime, no 2,000-review star average to lean on. It is bought through Superior Play, which is exactly why the in-ground category is the one place where buying off Amazon is often the worse choice: a buried trampoline needs a retaining wall, real excavation, and ideally professional installation, and Superior Play handles all three. So we are reviewing this on what it is engineered to do and what it honestly documents, not on crowd-sourced reviews we do not have.

We score it 65 out of 100 under our weakest-component method, and the limiting factor is the enclosure. Not because the net is bad, but because the safety net is not included in any kit: it is a separate “North In-Ground Safety Net” product, priced at $585 for the 17×12, so the real out-the-door cost on this size is about $3,784 before install. On a product already at $3,199, a buyer should know the net is a required extra and not assume it is in the box. The frame, the retaining wall, and the double-vented mat are genuinely premium. The score is held down by the way that net cost lands on top of an already high sticker, which is a pattern you will see repeated through this review.

Key Specifications

A note on that price line, because it carries more weight here than on most of our reviews. At $3,199 on sale this is the highest-priced trampoline we cover, and it is the highest-AOV product Superior Play carries. That is not a typo or a premium for the brand name alone. You are paying for a purpose-built in-ground system: the double frame, the included retaining wall, the double-vented mat, and the option to have professionals dig the hole and set it for you. Whether that is worth roughly three to five times the price of a buyable Amazon above-ground trampoline depends entirely on whether you want an in-ground install in the first place. We come back to that math at the end. For now, hold one fact in your head: the net is a separate $585 purchase, so the real out-the-door number on the 17×12 is about $3,784 before install, not the $3,199 sticker.

Who Is It For?

Picture the buyer this was built for. Someone who has already decided they want a trampoline that sits flush, or nearly flush, with the lawn. They like the look, they like that there is no four-foot drop off the side of an above-ground deck, and they have the yard for it: a clear rectangle of about 27 by 22 feet with nothing overhead. They are not cross-shopping a $400 Amazon round. They are cross-shopping other premium in-ground systems and asking which one digs cleanest, bounces best, and lasts longest in the ground.

That is the North buyer, and the 17×12 is the version for a household that wants the most jumping surface North makes. 139 square feet is a genuinely large rectangle, enough that two kids are not stacked on top of each other (though one jumper at a time is still the rule that keeps people out of the ER, regardless of how big the mat is). If your yard and your budget are tighter, North makes the same system in 15×10 and 12×8 rectangles and a 14 round, all with the same retaining wall and double-vented design. The 17×12 is the one you buy when space is not the constraint.

What it is not for is the budget buyer or the buyer who wants to put it in the ground this weekend with a shovel and a Saturday. In-ground is a premium, install-heavy purchase. A 48-inch hole across a 17-foot footprint is real earthmoving with drainage to think about. North reduces the work with its retaining wall, but it does not erase it. If the words “professional install” make you wince at the cost, an above-ground premium round or rectangle is the saner spend.

The Brand: North, Capital Play and JumpSport

We will spend a paragraph here because North’s story is genuinely confusing, and a buyer who digs into it will find two different origin tellings on Superior Play’s own pages.

North Trampoline is a Swedish brand, founded in 2012 in Gothenburg, built around Scandinavian design and athlete-grade performance. Its in-ground line carries the heritage of Capital Play, the in-ground specialist often credited as the first to bring an in-ground trampoline to market; Capital Play co-developed its in-ground design with North’s R&D, and the in-ground kits now carry the North name. Worth knowing: Capital Play is not gone. Its own storefront still sells the same in-ground kits, so this is a shared-product situation, not a clean “rebranded and shut down” story. In the US, North is sold through Superior Play Systems, and the brand connects to the safety-enclosure pedigree of JumpSport, the company whose founders invented the first trampoline safety net in the 1990s.

The honest takeaway: North is a real, design-led brand with a genuine in-ground engineering lineage and a US safety-net heritage behind it. It is the opposite end of the spectrum from the anonymous Amazon OEM brands we usually review. But if you are a spec-driven buyer who likes a single tidy origin story, you will not get one here, and you will find some inconsistency between pages. We are giving you the clean version. We are also telling you the seams are there.

Frame and the Retaining Wall

The frame is where North earns its premium, and it is the single best reason to choose this over a cheap “in-ground” kit. North uses a Double In-Ground Frame: a low-profile, hot-galvanized dual-frame structure designed specifically to be buried. That matters more than it sounds. Most budget in-ground kits are just an above-ground frame dropped into a hole, which is a recipe for soil collapse, poor drainage, and a frame that rusts from the outside in. North’s frame is built for the environment it lives in.

The bigger differentiator is the included retaining wall. Every North in-ground kit ships with a pre-built, bowl-shaped retaining wall. That wall does two jobs: it holds the surrounding soil back so the hole does not slump and bury the frame, and its bowl shape means you remove less dirt than a flat-walled dig. The retaining wall is the hidden cost most in-ground buyers miss. On a lot of competing kits you either build your own wall or skip it and watch the hole degrade. North puts one in the box, and that single inclusion is a large part of what justifies the price.

Now the honest part. North does not publish the frame tube wall gauge on the US Superior Play page for the 17×12. Capital Play’s Australian site lists a 50mm diameter and 2mm wall on its 14 Round, but that is a regional figure on a different SKU, and we will not pass it off as the US 17×12 spec. So you are trusting North’s in-ground engineering reputation and the 10-year frame warranty rather than a printed gauge number. That gap keeps the frame score below where the design alone would put it, the same way it does on the ACON X and the BERG Champion InGround, both of which also keep that number off the page.

The Dig: How Deep Is the Hole, Really

This is the section that earns its place, because the in-ground decision lives or dies on the dig, and North’s own marketing can mislead here if you skim it.

North talks about a “7-inch double frame” and “less digging,” and both are true, but neither is the dig depth. The 7-inch figure refers to the low-profile height of the double-frame structure itself, which is what lets the retaining wall be shorter and simpler. It reduces wall complexity. It does not mean you dig a 7-inch hole. The actual excavation depth for the 17×12 is 48 inches. That is the number to plan around: a four-foot-deep hole across a 17-by-12-foot footprint, with drainage to manage at the bottom so the pit does not turn into a pond. Across North’s in-ground line the published hole depth runs from about 39 inches on the smallest 12×8 up to 48 inches on this 17×12; the bigger the trampoline, the deeper the dig.

What North’s retaining-wall design genuinely buys you is less total earth moved than a flat-walled install of the same depth, and a wall you do not have to source and build yourself. That is real and worth paying for. But “less digging” is relative to a worse install, not an absence of digging. If you take one thing from this review, take this: budget for a 48-inch excavation, plan your drainage, and price out professional installation, because this is not a shovel-and-an-afternoon job.

Bounce, Springs and the Double-Vented Mat

North’s signature is airflow, and it is a real engineering answer to the single biggest functional problem with in-ground trampolines: the thump. When you sink a sealed trampoline into a pit, the air under the mat has nowhere to go, so the bounce goes dead and every landing sounds like a drum. North’s fix is to vent both the pad and the mat. It calls the result the “World’s ONLY Double-Vented Trampoline.” That is a manufacturer superlative, so we write it as North’s claim rather than a fact we have independently checked, but the underlying mechanism, venting both the pad and the mat so air can move through the system, is real and is genuinely differentiated from a sealed-pit install.

The springs are described as “Long Dynamic Springs” with spring extenders, the in-ground arrangement that helps the mat sit and flex correctly in the bowl. And here is the spec gap that pulls the spring score down: North does not publish the spring count for the 17×12. The smaller models in the line do publish counts, 80 springs on the 12×8 and 100 on the 15×10, but the largest rectangle, the one you are spending the most on, leaves the number off the page. For a $3,199 trampoline, that is a number a buyer is entitled to, and its absence is why we score the springs conservatively rather than on the design story alone.

The bounce verdict, then, is split. The venting is a real, well-engineered advantage over a cheap sunken trampoline, and on airflow North has a genuine edge. But we cannot tell you the spring count on this exact size, so we cannot fully characterize the rebound before it arrives, and we will not pretend otherwise.

The Mat, Pads and No-Gap Edge

The jumping mat is vented, part of the TDU double-vented system, and the pads are vented too. Beyond “vented / airflow-optimized,” North does not publish the mat fibre or denier on the US page, so we cannot compare the material against a rival that prints a stated mat spec. The mat warranty is 5 years on the general North and Capital Play warranty table, though, fairly, the in-ground product page itself does not restate that figure, so we have noted it as a table figure rather than a product-page one.

The safety detail worth calling out is the Pad-to-Mat Mesh Connection. This closes the gap between the pad and the mat so fingers and toes cannot reach the springs, which is the in-ground equivalent of a no-gap edge and a genuinely thoughtful piece of safety design. It is the kind of detail that separates a designed product from a sourced one.

Safety, Enclosure and the Net Question

The usual caution first, because it stays true no matter how well a trampoline is built: trampolines carry injury risk, one-jumper-at-a-time and supervision are on you and not on the equipment, and an in-ground install lowers the fall-to-ground risk but does not remove the risk of jumper-on-jumper collisions or bad landings.

In-ground has a real, inherent safety advantage: the deck is at ground level, so there is no four-foot fall off the side the way there is with an above-ground trampoline. That alone is a reason a lot of safety-anxious parents look at in-ground in the first place, and North’s brand connection to JumpSport, the inventor of the trampoline net, is a legible trust signal on top of that.

But the enclosure is also where this review’s limiting factor lives, and it is a cost issue more than a quality one. The safety net is not included in the kit on any size. North sells it as a separate “North In-Ground Safety Net” product with a size selector, and the 17×12 net is $585. That is a material extra on an already-expensive product: it takes the real out-the-door cost on this size to about $3,784 before install. North also does not publish the enclosure pole count. So we score the enclosure as the weakest component, not because the net is poor, but because, on the priciest size in the range, it is a required $585 add-on rather than something in the box. Budget for it from the start.

Warranty

North’s warranty structure is 10 years on the frame and retaining wall, 5 years on the springs and the jump mat, and 2 years on the pads and the net, per the North US and Capital Play warranty tables. That is strong. It beats every Amazon-OEM brand we review, where 1 to 2 years is common, and it matches the structure of a premium brand like ACON.

It is not class-leading, though, and we will be precise about why. The 5-year mat cover matches ACON but does not match Springfree’s flat 10-years-on-everything, and the frame-and-spring cover does not match the lifetime frame-and-spring warranties on a Galactic Xtreme. And there is a documentation gap specific to in-ground: the definitive soft-good terms (springs, mat, pads, net) come from North’s general warranty table, not from the in-ground 17×12 product page itself, which does not restate them. So treat those soft-good years as table figures rather than product-page ones. The 10-year frame-and-wall cover is the confidently confirmed number, and on a buried frame that is the one that matters most, but the soft-good years on this specific in-ground SKU are worth confirming in writing before you buy.

Buying It: No Amazon, and Why That Is Fine Here

North is the rare product where not being on Amazon is a feature, not a bug. In-ground is the one trampoline category where the Amazon model, ship a box to the driveway and good luck, is genuinely the worse path. A buried trampoline needs a retaining wall, a properly drained four-foot hole, and ideally a professional to set it. Superior Play offers professional delivery and installation, priced at checkout or through its Find an Installer service, which is exactly the service an in-ground buyer should want. There is no Amazon /dp/ link for North because North does not sell on Amazon; every North link should run through Superior Play.

The flip side, in fairness: no Amazon also means no Prime, no easy returns, and no large public review corpus. We cannot point you at 2,000 verified-purchase reviews the way we can on an Amazon SKU, so part of the trust here rests on the brand’s engineering and Superior Play’s service rather than on crowd sentiment. That is a real transparency limitation, and we would rather say it plainly than pretend a star rating exists that does not.

Check price and availability at Superior Play

How It Compares

The honest in-ground cross-shop is short, because the category is thin. Here is where the 17×12 sits against the contenders we cover or have researched.

The cleanest cross-shop is North vs the BERG Champion InGround 14ft, which is the cheaper contender and the one you can actually order on Amazon US. The BERG comes in at roughly $1,795 against North’s $3,199 (and North’s $585 net on top), ships with its net, and has a class-leading 10-to-13-year frame warranty. What it does not give you is North’s included retaining wall or North’s professional-install option, and it is a 14-foot round rather than a 139-square-foot rectangle, so it is a meaningfully smaller jumping surface. If you want the most surface, the rectangle shape, the retaining wall in the box, and someone else to dig the hole, North is the answer and you pay for it. If you want a credible in-ground name, a net you know is included, and an Amazon purchase path at roughly half the money, the BERG is the smarter spend, and we score it 6.5 out of 10 in its own review.

If you are still weighing in-ground against above-ground at all, our trampoline buying guide walks through the size, shape, and install decisions, and the BERG Champion InGround review is the best single page to read alongside this one. For the full comparison, see our Best In-Ground Trampolines 2026 round-up, which lines all of these up side by side.

The Price: Is It Worth It?

Here is the value math, and it is simpler than the price tag makes it look. At $3,199 on sale, the North In-Ground 17×12 is the most expensive trampoline we cover, and with the separate $585 net the real out-the-door figure is about $3,784 before install. But you are not comparing it to a $400 Amazon round. You are comparing it to the real cost of a proper in-ground install: the trampoline, plus the net, plus a retaining wall, plus excavation, plus drainage, plus the labor to set it all correctly. North bundles the retaining wall into the kit and offers professional install through Superior Play, so a chunk of what would be separate line items on a DIY in-ground project is already accounted for. Seen that way, the premium is less about the brand name and more about everything the kit and the service include.

So the honest verdict on value is conditional. If you genuinely want an in-ground rectangle, want the largest jumping surface North makes, and value the included wall and the white-glove install enough to pay for them, the 17×12 earns its price. If you are price-sensitive, the BERG Champion InGround at roughly half the money is the better-value in-ground pick, and an above-ground premium would save you more again. And before you commit, do the full sum: the $3,199 trampoline plus the $585 net is about $3,784, and that is before excavation, drainage, and install. The separate net cost is the one number most buyers miss on this product, so price it in from the start.

Our Verdict

The North In-Ground 17×12 is a genuinely premium, purpose-built in-ground trampoline from a real design-led brand, and the things that make it special are real: a double galvanized frame built for burial, a retaining wall in the box that most rivals make you source yourself, a patented double-vented pad-and-mat system that answers the dead-bounce problem cheap in-ground kits suffer from, and a professional-install path through Superior Play that Amazon simply cannot match. For a buyer who has decided they want a large in-ground rectangle and wants it done right, this is a serious, credible pick, and the highest-AOV product we cover.

We score it 65 out of 100, and the limiting factor is the enclosure, specifically that the safety net is a separate $585 purchase rather than something in the box, plus an unpublished pole count. That sits alongside a wider pattern of gaps on the priciest size in the range: no published spring count for the 17×12, no published frame gauge on the US page, no mat fibre or denier, and soft-good warranty terms that live on a general table rather than the product page. None of those gaps means the product is poor. They mean North designs well and documents partially, and the real out-the-door cost lands higher than the sticker once the net is added. The frame, the wall, and the venting are premium. The score is held down by the net cost stacked on an already high price, plus what is left off the page.

If you want this trampoline, the move is straightforward: buy it through Superior Play (never an Amazon link, there is no Amazon listing for North), add the $585 net to your budget from the start, confirm the soft-good warranty years in writing before you pay, plan for a real 48-inch dig with drainage, and price out the professional install. Do that, and you have one of the best in-ground systems money can buy in your backyard. Skip the net in your sums, and you risk a surprise cost on a product that is already a premium spend.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: How deep do you have to dig for the North In-Ground 17×12?

A: The published hole depth for the 17×12 is 48 inches, so plan for a four-foot excavation across the 17-by-12-foot footprint, with drainage at the bottom so the pit does not collect water. North’s marketing mentions a “7-inch double frame” and “less digging,” and that is real, but the 7-inch figure is the low-profile height of the frame structure, which lets the retaining wall be shorter and simpler. It is not the dig depth. The dig is genuinely 48 inches. What North’s retaining-wall design buys you is less total earth moved than a flat-walled install of the same depth, plus a wall you do not have to build yourself, but it is not a shallow job, and we would not let anyone go into this purchase thinking it is.

Q: Does the North In-Ground 17×12 come with a safety net?

A: No. The safety net is not included in the kit on any size. North sells it as a separate “North In-Ground Safety Net” product with a size selector, and the net for the 17×12 is $585. That takes the real out-the-door cost on this size to about $3,784 before install, so add the net to your budget from the start rather than assuming it is in the box. We score the enclosure as this trampoline’s weakest component largely because, on the priciest size in the range, the net is a required $585 add-on on top of an already high sticker price.

Q: Is the North In-Ground 17×12 worth the price?

A: It depends entirely on whether you want an in-ground install. At $3,199 on sale it is the most expensive trampoline we cover, and with the separate $585 net the real out-the-door figure is about $3,784 before install. But the comparison is not to a cheap above-ground round; it is to the real all-in cost of an in-ground project, which includes a net, a retaining wall, excavation, drainage, and labor. North bundles the wall into the kit and offers professional installation through Superior Play, so the premium reflects what is included, not just the brand name. If you genuinely want a large in-ground rectangle done right, it earns its price. If you are price-sensitive, the BERG Champion InGround at roughly half the money is the better-value in-ground pick.

Q: Where do you buy a North trampoline? Is it on Amazon?

A: North is not sold on Amazon. There are no ASINs, no Prime, and no Amazon reviews for it. In the US it is sold through Superior Play Systems, which also offers delivery and professional installation. For an in-ground trampoline that actually works in North’s favor, because a buried trampoline needs a retaining wall, a properly drained hole, and ideally a professional to set it, none of which the “ship a box to the driveway” Amazon model handles. The trade-off is that you do not get Prime shipping, easy returns, or a large public review corpus, so part of the trust rests on the brand’s engineering and Superior Play’s service rather than on crowd-sourced star ratings.

Q: North In-Ground vs BERG Champion InGround, which should I buy?

A: It comes down to size, budget, and how much of the work you want done for you. The North 17×12 is a large 139-square-foot rectangle with the retaining wall in the box and a professional-install option, at $3,199 on sale, though the safety net is a separate $585 purchase, so budget about $3,784 before install. The BERG Champion InGround 14ft is a smaller 14-foot round at roughly $1,795, ships with its net, has a class-leading 10-to-13-year frame warranty, and you can order it on Amazon US, but it does not include a retaining wall or a white-glove install. If you want the most surface, the rectangle, the wall, and someone else to dig the hole, the North. If you want a credible in-ground name with the net included at roughly half the money, the BERG, which we score 6.5 out of 10.

Q: What is North’s “double-vented” mat, and does it actually matter?

A: It is North’s term for venting both the safety pad and the jump mat so air can move through the whole system, and North markets it as the “World’s ONLY Double-Vented Trampoline.” We write that superlative as North’s claim rather than a fact we have independently verified, but the underlying idea is real and genuinely useful for an in-ground trampoline. The single biggest functional problem with sinking a trampoline into a sealed pit is airflow: the air under the mat has nowhere to go, so the bounce goes dead and every landing thumps. Venting both the pad and the mat is a real engineering answer to that, and it is one of the clearest reasons North’s in-ground design is a step above a cheap above-ground frame dropped into a hole.