Demand for golf has surged in the past few years. As a result, the expense to play the game has increased.
Are we starting to reach the point where the growing cost could slow the surge?
Golf’s well-documented pandemic boom has seen an upswing in all areas of the game in the United States. In the seven years following the Great Recession in the late 2000s, the American golf population shrank by 2.3 million. In the ensuing seven years, it grew by 2.8 million.
According to the National Golf Foundation, an estimated 26.6 million Americans played on a golf course in 2023, a net increase of about one million compared to 2022. That is the single biggest jump in on-course participants since 2001 when Tiger Woods held victories in all four majors at once.
Off-course golf participation—which includes simulators, Topgolf, Puttshack and other alternate forms of the game— is also seeing meaningful gains. There were 45 million Americans who played some version of golf in 2023. That is up nine percent from the previous year and more than 50 percent in the past decade.
