Is golf more expensive than ever? It’s complicated

How much did you pay for your last round of golf?

If you played Sharp Park, south of San Francisco — the only municipal beach course in the country designed by Alister MacKenzie — your green fees topped $86. That’s about a fifth of what it costs to play Pasatiempo, MacKenzie’s closest public building, 50 miles down the coast.

These two courses share a designer but are very different in context, setting, clientele and scale. The nearly $350 price gap reflects that. But for all that separates them, the properties represent just two points on a spectrum that stretches far in either direction, from as little as $5 in local munis to north of $1,000 at the very high end. That range is one sign of a game that’s booming like never before.

Between 2019 and 2025, golf participation in the United States has grown by 41 percent and is now close to 50 million participants, according to the National Golf Foundation (NGF), which counts participants as people who played on the green or on an off-course area such as a range or driving range. Annual rounds played reached record numbers. But that headline figure hides another statistic you should live with: market research shows that 7 to 8 percent of golfers account for nearly 80 percent of total spending on the game. The boom is real, but it’s not evenly distributed, an imbalance that helps explain what happened with prices.

Of course, growth is not necessarily bad news. But it has come with complaints, and not just from golfers who have to wake up early, or click early, to get a tee time on their favorite course. A common perception among consumers is that gaming costs have gotten out of hand.

The data, at least at the national level, tell a more balanced story. A recent NGF analysis of public access rates found that from 2019 to 2025, average green costs have increased by nearly 29 percent, which is a significant increase in line with inflation and limited by sports and entertainment standards. By comparison, the NGF reported, the cost of attending an NFL game has risen nearly 50 percent over the past six years. The price of a movie ticket dropped by about 60% during that time.

Such composite images can be useful. We can learn a lot from them. However, there are limits to what they show.

“The national numbers are good,” said Jon Last, founder and president of the Sports and Leisure Research Group, a New York-based advertising research firm. “But they only get you so far if you don’t have a good idea as a field worker of how your particular situation can carry you.”

The highly detailed portraits reveal what Last describes as a “hyper-local reality” — a picture that changes dramatically from one zip code to the next, and a mirror of the K-shaped economy that runs through American life. The rich get richer, and they spend money wisely. That is evident in the proliferation of high-end private clubs with small memberships and exorbitant fees. But public access numbers point to this trend, too. Since 2019, NGF reports, the average green cost of the resort has increased by 36 percent, with the average high season prices for those properties now exceeding 100 dollars. The figure does not account for a slate of variables, including seasonal discounts and replay rates. But no matter how you slice it, it’s a lot more than the average of just over $41 in municipal tuition and fees.

What’s true in other sectors from air travel to automobiles applies to golf: the price gap widens rapidly as you move up the spending scale.

As the gap between the haves and the have-nots widens, the middle market is in danger of shrinking. The subjects most at risk in this climate are private, pay-daily areas near major cities, where land and labor are expensive. Those are the ones that are likely to close, said Jay Karen, CEO of the National Golf Course Owners Association (NGCOA), and they won’t be replaced.

“I don’t know anyone who has built an 18-hole golf course in a densely populated area,” said Karen. “It doesn’t take a pencil out to do that.”

Distance learning is a different matter. The remote golf craze owes in part to the quality of the designs and the beauty of the settings. But it’s also inspired by something less than romantic: Those are the places where golf makes business sense. Location, location, location. Call it a new spin on an old rule.

Regarding green costs, Karen says the rising numbers need context. During the 15-year period from 2005 to 2019, when golf participation significantly slowed or declined, prices lagged behind the cost of living. In fact, the game is cheap. Just because courses now charge more doesn’t mean they are making a profit or increasing prices. Many are simply playing catchup, either pouring money into delayed development or putting it aside for a rainy day, like the day the irrigation system finally ends.

“A lot of golfers don’t understand how expensive it is to run a course,” says Karen. “The truth is, if you want your education to continue, you have to pay the right price for it.”

In past generations, golf course development was driven largely by real estate: subdivisions with buildings stitched together. Those days are gone, Karen says, and they’re not coming back, “unless we want to start building homes with lessons in the area, which I don’t see happening.”

What the supply might look like for future generations is high on Karen’s list of concerns. The affordable way forward, many in the industry agree, is going global. Karen and others see the municipal sector as the most viable area of ​​the game to keep traditional golf accessible to the average player. Not only does NGCOA have power over munis, but private sponsors have followed suit, in programs clearly aimed at keeping quality golf affordable and accessible. Projects like the Patch in Augusta, the Park in West Palm Beach and Cobbs Creek in Philadelphia have attracted capital and ambition.

That is the sunny side of the story. At the same time, Karen says, “we also feel the pain points” brought by the post-Covid boom: full sheets, for example, issuing small programs with a discount, and players who can’t book at all. No one wants to see their neighbor’s study become like the restaurant that Yogi Berra once destroyed: it’s so popular that no one goes there anymore. Access remains a stubborn problem. Different golf areas – short courses, simulation areas, gamified courses and the like – talk about it in the margins. The traditional game is working hard to keep up.

One of the strangest things about consumer patterns is the change in economics alone. Since the pandemic, and against a backdrop of global uncertainty, consumers across all income ranges are increasingly prioritizing leisure time now, says the Last of Sports and Leisure Research Group. Even golfers who have never studied Latin appreciate these words carpe diemand they work for it, regardless of whether their wages are equal or not. How long that will continue is impossible to know. But in the meantime, the industry keeps adding to its catalog of splurges.

The result is a different kind of bifurcation — not different rules and tools for pros and novices, but different experiences for golfers.

Does the cycle count as a transaction or an oddity? It’s complicated. But as Karen sees it, such problems are the industry’s strength.

“Golfers have all kinds of motivations for where they play and why, and the price tag is just one variable,” he says. “The intricacies of the golf economy have allowed it to survive over time. If we were a monolith, and all of a sudden prices fell off a cliff, we could see a disaster. But somehow for 150 years, we’ve had an industry that has ebbed and flowed and changed with the times and people. And I think that will continue.”