It’s a milestone year for NGF and our tracking of America’s golf courses. For 90 years, our world-class team has maintained the definitive database of golf facilities and courses – an amazing resource that catalogs the supply side of our game’s economy. The NGF database is the gold standard, relied upon by the industry’s leading companies and organizations and beyond.
This database is a critical resource for our members and clients who license it as the ultimate foundation for their CRM, to conduct market analyses, business strategy and sales development efforts. By studying the changes, the NGF identifies trends in America’s courses and reports the findings to our members and the industry. For those whose businesses depend on growth outside the U.S., NGF built and perpetually maintains the most accurate and comprehensive list of every course in the world. 208 countries and territories have at least one course.
In the U.S., the number of golf facilities and courses has held steady for five years at around 14,000 and 16,000. This period of stability is a sign the market has found equilibrium following a prolonged correction that re-balanced and reshaped the industry during much of the past two decades.
In recent years, course closures have fallen to their lowest counts since 2004. 2006 was the first year with more closures than openings… and that was just before the collapse of the housing market triggered the Great Recession and led to a cumulative 13% reduction in U.S. courses over 20 years. Meanwhile, substantial renovation and reconstruction projects, course resurrections (where a long-closed facility, presumed to be gone forever, rose from the dirt back into operation), and a modest uptick in new development have all contributed to today’s state of equilibrium and the unprecedented financial health of golf’s supply.
While modest in volume, we’ve seen more openings the past few years than at any time since 2010. Simultaneously, new course projects have climbed to the highest levels in more than a decade. At the start of 2026, more than 140 new courses were in planning or under construction across the country – the majority of those tied to private destination clubs, high-end real estate communities and resort properties. And the current and recent development activity is far from evenly distributed from a geographic standpoint as well.
Three warm-weather (and already golf-rich) states – Florida, Texas and South Carolina – have accounted for half of all new course openings the past three years.
The geographic imbalance extends to the development side of the pipeline as well. More than one-third of new course projects that are in-planning or under construction are in those same three Sunbelt states. Just over half of those are private, a proportion higher than found in current U.S. supply (28% private).
Overall, existing supply trends underscore a market that’s stabilized. It’s hard to see a future where this would be de-stabilized or diluted (as happened in the 1990s) through significant opening of new courses in or near America’s cities. Availability and cost of land and construction are simply at too high of a premium for this to happen. Perhaps the best news is that the quality of U.S. courses has never been better.
Please reach out to Kevin McLendon to license the NGF’s domestic or international databases. NGF members can find more supply information and research in the newly released Golf Facilities in the U.S. Report, a 40+ page overview of the best-supplied golf market in the world. Click HERE for the Facilities report.
