Have golf course green fees in the United Kingdom gotten out of hand?

One of the most interesting yearly discussions in golf's social media spheres surrounds an annual survey of green fees across top-tier golf courses in the United Kingdom put together by David Jones, a longtime golf blogger and golf trip organizer based in Scotland who goes by UK Golf Guy online.

Jones surveys a ranking of the top 100 U.K. golf courses and researches peak summer green fees for each course, also furnishing year-over-year percentage increases for added context. In 2021, the crop of courses surveyed had an average green fee of £161. In 2026, that average is £265 - a five-year increase of nearly 65%.

From a pure business perspective, golf's post-pandemic boom has been a boon for these courses. In addition to golf's general popularity spike, courses in England, Scotland and Wales well beyond just the biggest established names are seeing unprecedented demand for visitor tee times. A flood of media has introduced dozens of hidden-gem courses that used to have stunningly low green fees to new and entrenched generations of avid traveling golfers. Market forces have conspired to send green fees soaring.

The chart, associated thread and full report on Jones' site are all worth a look.

Jones observes that the most recent annual rate of green fee increase has outpaced inflation by more than three times. That fact alone is enough to make any golfer dreaming of an overseas trip wince. Of the current golf courses listed, there are only two with a sub-£100 green fee: Seacroft Golf Club (£90) on England's relatively quiet Lincolnshire coast and Shiskine Golf Club (£42), a rustic 12-hole stunner on the Isle of Arran, which sits across the Firth of Clyde from the likes of Royal Troon, Prestwick and other courses on Scotland's west coast. The difficulty of the journey to Arran explains its modest green fee, but nearly everyone who makes the effort to go there comes back thrilled to have done so.

Eight golf courses on the list chose to stand pat with their green fees from 2025 to 2026, while just one course - Notts Golf Club (Hollinwell), a perennial Final Qualifying site for The Open Championship in Nottingham, England, actually exhibited a 20% drop in peak green fees, down to £120 for 2026.

For decades, the attraction of a transatlantic golf trip was the allure of not just playing golf in its original links mode, but often getting to do so for much less money than at America's highest-ranked public and resort courses. The days when a round at The Old Course at St. Andrews was just £80 (2000) or as low as £15 (in the early 1980s, reportedly) are light-years gone.

The positive spin on this is that the rush to play the top names has given dozens of second- and third-tier clubs across the U.K. (whose courses are still well worth seeking out) a shot in the arm via increased revenue from visitors. This typically has helped keep dues reasonable and subsidize improvement projects - both nice benefits for these courses' memberships. But these changing circumstances have also forced some clubs to severely restrict non-member times, which has begun to complicate the historical notion of the U.K. as far more open to visitor golf than the U.S.

How close are we to the consumer's breaking point? If the reaction to Jones' recent report is any indication, golfers are starting to get overwhelmed by the radically increased expense of golf in the U.K. Oil price increases, reduced jet fuel reserves and broad market uncertainty due to the Iran War are threatening to push airfares significantly higher, which will further increase costs of all fly-to-play golf trips, especially overseas.

Perhaps now more than ever, the answer may lie in the knot that ties most of golf-obsession's many threads together: competition. In the U.K., Ireland, Australia and many other countries, competition is far more deeply ingrained into golf culture than it currently is in the United States. Virtually every club holds various types of open competitions throughout the year - men's and women's, senior, individual, two-person team events (four-ball and alternate-shot), single- and multi-day. Take note: these events have gained in popularity and can be trickier to get into than they used to be.

But if you can successfully sign up and time your travels to coincide with one or more of these open competitions, the perk is that the entry fee is often a fraction of the prevailing visitor's green fee. What's more, you get the opportunity to experience a great golf course and immerse yourself in the local golf culture. Even managing to play in one of these competitions can help defray the cost of the other rounds on your trip. Buy the right folks a post-round beer and you might find yourself invited to their course as a guest; guest fees also tend to be significantly lower than typical visitor green fees.