The best golf courses in Texas

Formerly known as Redstone Golf Club, the Golf Club of Houston hosted the PGA Tour’s Shell Houston Open from 2002 through 2018 until the tournament moved to the municipal Memorial Park. The 7,425-yard layout, just minutes away from downtown, was designed by Rees Jones and David Toms and features multi-tiered green complexes and a number of water hazards.

TPC Craig Ranch, located in the Dallas suburb of McKinney, is a Tom Weiskopf design that plays among gently rolling hills and on the limestone banks of Rowlett Creek, which crosses the course 14 times. In 2020, the course signed a five-year agreement to host the PGA Tour’s AT&T Byron Nelson. South Korean K.H. Lee captured the first two titles at TPC Craig Ranch, which surrendered low scoring in each of the three years it's held the event, 2021, 2022 and 2023.

Host of the Texas State Open on multiple occasions, this Hill Country course is a demanding test—so much so it used to be called “Challenger.” Designed by Robert Trent Jones Sr., the par 72 is built in a counter-clockwise circle, causing several of the doglegs to favor a right-to-left-shape. Rugged rock outcroppings throughout the course, as well as an island green on the par-3 fourth, make Ram Rock a memorable place to play at Horseshoe Bay Resort, which features four 18-hole courses.

The Rees Jones-designed Shadow Hawk Golf Club is situated just outside of Houston on 240 acres marked by tranquil pecan trees and shimmering lakes. The course opened in 1999 with the 41st President of the United States, George Bush, hitting a ceremonial opening tee shot, and since then, has become renowned for being a golfer's haven. The course is home to tight tree-lined fairways dotted with strategically placed bunkers and hazards, while small firm greens feature large slopes and challenging runoff areas. The highlights at Shadow Hawk are the opening and closing par 5s, featuring water down the left for the intimidating tee shot and then up the right for the approach on the opener, and the closing hole, which challenges players to carry a large hazard short of the green.

Fazio Foothills is another former member of America's 100 Greatest Public, and the favorite among many at the Omni Barton Creek, though the Canyons course ranks slightly higher in our scoring criteria. The Foothills course, which used to host a PGA Tour Champions event and hosted the 2003 U.S. Senior Women's Amateur, underwent an update in 2017 to the layout, which tumbles and undulates down the rolling hills and around and over creeks.

One of Texas' best golf resorts is the Omni Barton Creek, located just 25 minutes outside of Austin. The resort features four 18-hole designs, and the highest-ranked layout is the Fazio Canyons design, a former Golf Digest America's 100 Greatest Public winner. This signature Tom Fazio design, which offers scenic views of Austin’s Hill Country, recently underwent an extensive renovation.

Located 30 minutes from downtown San Antonio in the forested Texas hills sits Briggs Ranch, which opened in 2001 and was later purchased by the Dormie Network in 2017. The Tom Fazio design offers wide, undulating Zoysia fairways that lead to well-protected greens with penal false fronts. Fazio encourages risk-taking throughout the round, rewarding aggressive lines off the tee with scoring chances at multiple reachable par 5s and drivable par 4s. The greens at Briggs Ranch offer the course its best defense with firm and quick surfaces often running away from players and into deep collection areas or tricky bunkers.

In 2012, Horseshoe Bay Resort premiered the Jack Nicklaus-designed Summit Rock course, joining the three existing courses designed by Tom Fazio between 1971 and 1986. Set among the rolling oak-covered hills above Lyndon B. Johnson Lake, the Summit Rock course is unique in its routing and design as it traverses existing elevation changes while incorporating swathes of natural areas. The opening two holes and the final six are routed along flat lower terrain, while holes three through 12 play up and along dramatic elevated slopes. In typical Nicklaus style, players are offered plenty of room off the tee but soon find themselves facing dramatic and intimidating approaches into well-defended bentgrass greens. This can be seen at the short but demanding par-4 13th with an open fairway that narrows as it gets longer, followed by a green protected by a natural ravine.

Originally opened in 1922, Oak Hills Country Club is home to a spectacular A.W. Tillinghast design set among towering tall oak trees in San Antonio. The classic-style golf course is the 23-time host of the PGA Tour’s Texas Open and is known for its tight fairways often heavily defended by trees or bunkers in landing zones as well as challenging greens with extreme slopes and extensive bunkering. Oak Hills has long sought to maintain its inherent Tillinghast design, and since 1980 the club has commissioned renovations from Jay Morrish in 1980, and then Tripp Davis in 2018 who regrassed tees, greens and fairways, as well as recontoured greens and replaced bunkers with the goal of improving playability and challenge.

In 2006, The Clubs at Houston Oaks took over the land of Tennwood Country Club (formerly a Tenneco Oil & Gas Company recreational facility), and in 2017 tasked Chet Williams—designer of Whispering Pines, the top-ranked course in Texas, in transforming the layout. Williams extensively changed Ralph Plummer’s 1956 design, redoing every bunker and regrassing the entire property with Celebration and TifEagle Bermudagrass. The renovation also saw multiple holes rerouted to create the new signature holes at the par-3 fifth, now with an island green, as well as the par-4 11th, played to a fairway dissected by water. The new design takes advantage of the site’s naturally occurring undulations with wide fairways that snake their way around mature oak trees and play to large intimidating greensites with challenging runoffs.

After the celebrated debut of the original Ralph Plummer-designed Cypress Creek course in 1959, Champions Golf Club commissioned George Fazio to build the complementary Jackrabbit course in 1964. While the Cypress Course grabs most of the headlines, the Jackrabbit also hosted opening-round play at the 2020 U.S. Women's Open and features more subtle terrain with tight tree-lined fairways and small greens well protected by deep bunkers. The course is highlighted by a collection of challenging par 4s, including the second hole with a fairway placed between a water hazard and out of bounds as well as a raised green poised to repel mis-hit iron shots.

TPC San Antonio’s Oaks course has hosted the Valero Texas Open since 2010. Playing through the dry outlands north of the city, the Greg Norman design is one of the most strategically compelling courses on tour with aggressive bunkering, some wonderful short par 4s and several uniquely demanding par 5s, including the 18th, one of the most underrated and frustrating closing holes the professionals play.

In 2005, Boot Ranch commissioned Hal Sutton and Jim Lipe to design a breathtaking golf course in the undulating terrain of Texas hill country. Built over the existing harsh terrain, the course traverses canyons and natural waste areas with fairways bordered and dissected by the Palo Alto Creek, which spills out spectacularly into a natural waterfall at the par-4 10th. The course appears open off the tee, but driving space is quickly taken away by tall grasses, forced carries or strategically placed clusters of trees. In 2017, Heritage Links led a massive renovation of the bunkers and putting surfaces, changing from bentgrass to TifEagle Bermuda. The renovation also saw length added to the signature par-4 finishing hole, now a challenging par 5 with a tight fairway that gets shrunk by trees and bunkers forcing players to either go for it in two or layup to a much longer approach.

The 36-hole Champions Golf Club is one of the most appropriately named clubs in America. It was founded by Texans Jackie Burke, Jr. (who turned 100 in 2023) and Jimmy Demaret, and the two hold five major championships between them, including four Masters green jackets. A procession of the game's best professionals have tested their games at the vaunted Cypress Creek course (the club's second course, Jackrabbit, actually scored higher in our Best in State rankings), which has played host to the 1969 U.S. Open, a Ryder Cup, several PGA Tour tournaments including the TOUR Championship, and the 2020 U.S. Women's Open. When Cypress Creek opened in 1957, it was regarded as one of the finest new courses of the post-World War II era, ranked among the 100 Greaters courses from 1966 to 1988. It's a tight, treelined shotmaker's course with treelined fairways and big, well-protected greens--the fourth, bending around a crook of Cypress Creek, was long considered one of the toughest par 3s in the country. A 2018 renovation by Texan Chet Williams, designer of Whispering Pines, kept the features and shot demands updated and sharp without straying fromm Cypress Creek's noble heritage.

Beau Welling, the lead architect for Tiger Woods’ design company, was instrumental in building Bluejack National, ranked fourth in the state. He returned to Texas with his own design of Fields Ranch West Course at the new Omni PGA Frisco, headquarters of the PGA of America, a course designed to be a swashbuckling, playable alter-ego to the more tournament-oriented East Course. Welling accentuated the site’s gradual elevations to create a number of downhill drives to go along with large, roller-coaster greens and fairways that stretch 50 to 90 yards across. As one of our course-ranking panelists put it, “America definitely needs more courses like the West—fun to play, tough to lose balls and good birdie opportunities with well-executed shots.”

The Club at Carlton Woods’ championship course from Tom Fazio opened in 2005, a few years after its Jack Nikclaus course opened. The Fazio course at Carlton Woods is routed over steep and dramatic elevation changes with fairways set among the dense native woodlands of the Spring Creek bluffs. Fazio’s design is the harder of the two courses and features challenging green complexes guarded by an array of creeks, streams and ponds. Water comes into play on eight of 18 holes, with perhaps the most dramatic example guarding the front of the 445 yard par-4 18th. In 2016, the region was hit with intense flooding, which damaged many of the course's bunkers and led to their permanent removal as remediation for future damage.

Set among the rolling grass hills of Bryan, Texas is the Robert Trent Jones Jr.-designed Miramont Country Club. Opened in 2005, the course is home to gently rolling fairways dotted with strategically placed bunkers that snake between water hazards, creating risk-reward driving windows for longer hitters. The greens at Maramont offer stark defenses as putting surfaces are large and known to be firm and lightning quick with many featuring plenty of slope. Water is in play on 13 of the 18 holes, perhaps none more intimidating than the hazard protecting the entire left side of the fairway and green on the signature par-4 13th.

Located in the dry Hill Country south of Austin, Driftwood is another collaboration between the team of Tom Fazio and Discovery Land Company. Though located within an communitiy of large properties and luxury homes, the design feels spacious and part of the rugged, windswept prairies of southeast Texas. The fairways and greens are large and accomodating, with holes punctuated by large specimen oaks.

Robert Trent Jones designed Shady Oaks, best known as being Ben Hogan's home club in the decades after his retirement, in the mid-1950s for founder Marvin Leonard. The design of the course was state of the art and emblematic of the new style of design: heavily engineered; long, with narrow fairways thorugh treeliined corridors that placed a premium on driving accuracy; and large, sectioned greens. That mode prevailed until 2020 when the club hired the Australiian firm of Ogilvy, Cocking and Mead to remodel the course. The architiects infused it with a bigger, more sweeping style of bunker, removed trees, and shifted and extended greens. It's once again a course that reflects the popular architecture of the moment.

The Clubs of Cordillera Ranch is ranked 10th in Texas

Architect Steve Smyers and his associate Patrick Andrews transformed the old Columbian Club in designing Maridoe Golf Club outside Dallas, which earned third-place in Golf Digest's 2018 ranking of the Best New Courses. Smyers' design can challenge the best players in the world—with the plates tipping out at 7,800 yards—with shaved-off areas around the undulating green complexes but also tempting better players into taking aggressive lines off the tee. The course hosted charitable exhibition tournaments during covid to raise money for the club's charity.

The Club at Carlton Woods Nicklaus Course is ranked 11th in Texas

Spanish Oaks Golf Club is ranked 8th in Texas

Founded in 1899, Austin Country Club will be forever linked with the legendary teacher, Harvey Penick. Penick’s association with the club spanned 82 years, starting when he was eight years old and working as a caddie at the club’s original Hancock location. He rose to shop assistant and assistant professional before becoming the club’s head professional in 1923, when he was just 18 years old. Over the years, Penick taught and mentored many of the game’s best players, including Kathy Whitworth, Ben Crenshaw, Mickey Wright and Tom Kite, among many others. In 1984, the club moved to its present location on the banks of the Colorado River, just north of downtown Austin. Situated against the backdrop of the Pennybacker Bridge, the Pete Dye design hosted the WGC-Dell Technologies Match Play from 2016 to 2023.

Once a drab, treeless, 165-acre tabletop city dump perched above the tree-lined Trinity River, Bill Coore and Ben Crenshaw transformed it into one of the most interesting designs in modern architercture. When Coore first saw the site, he ignored the abandoned refrigerators and scattered tires to focus on the flow of the land. It was a series of ridges and ripples formed as parts of the closed landfill settled over time. "It needed a good ironing," Coore joked. In the end his construction crew, though capping the site with a thick layer of sand in which to grow grass and create wasteland roughs, took pains to preserve every dip, trough, hump and hollow. It hosted the 2019 and 2020 AT&T Byron Nelson. Trinity Forest was night and day from any other venue on tour. As Curt Sampson wrote for Golf Digest, Trinity Forest "was night and day from any other venue on tour -- this windswept, nearly treeless expanse of dunes, waving prairie grass, and fast, undulating turf, the new place has every attribute of a links except cawing sea birds and an ocean." Not too many players embraced the cerebral, pinball-ish ground game offered to access some of these greens and navigate the interesting humps and bumps here. Of course, tour winner turned architect Geoff Ogilvy: “I love it,” Ogilvy said. “Strategically, it’s so interesting. It’s got everything that’s missing from modern architecture. There are ways to challenge golfers besides long rough and narrow fairways.” There are also architectural marvels like a double green, great short par 4s and short par 3s. It's too bad the tour won't return to Trinity Forest, but golfers lucky enough to get an invite will continue to enjoy it.

The East Course at the Omni PGA Frisco is one of two courses to open at the new Fields Ranch Golf Club. Alongside the Beau Welling-designed West course is the East, built by Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner, which measures over 7,800 yards from the championship tees and puts a greater emphasis on driving than the West, demanding length, accuracy and the courage to take on cross-bunkers and central hazards. The greens, perched above bunkers and chipping runoffs, are smaller and require controlled approaches, and the holes of the second nine prowl the basin of Panther Creek. Both courses opened in May 2023, and the East has already hosted the KitchenAid Senior PGA Championship. It is set to host a number of other prestigious events, including the PGA Championship (2027, 2034), the KPMG Women’s PGA Championship (2025, 2031) and the KitchenAid Senior PGA Championship again in 2029.

Time, and previous renovations, tend to shrink and constrict golf courses. The mission of a major 2021 remodel by architect Keith Foster was to return Brook Hollow’s worn features to a better iteration of its first-generation A.W. Tillinghast design. Foster achieved magnificent results by accentuating the pedestal-like greens and bringing back their squared-off edges, installing steep-faced bunkers (as opposed to their previously flashed faces) and re-introducing several of Tillinghast's “great hazard” sand wastelands on holes like the par-5 15th. The result is a magnificent renaissance of one of Tilly's best courses and a first-time appearance in our Second 100 Greatest Courses ranking.

We give credit to Texas golf historian Frances G. Trimble for establishing the fact that Perry Maxwell, not John Bredemus, originally designed Colonial Country Club for Fort Worth businessman Marvin Leonard. Both architects submitted routings. Maxwell’s was used, while Bredemus supervised construction. Colonial sported the first bentgrass greens in Texas when it opened in 1936. In 1939, the USGA awarded Colonial its 1941 U.S. Open, the first ever in Texas, so Leonard brought Maxwell back to toughen the course. He added 56 bunkers and created the present par-3 fourth and par-4 fifth (two of the famed Horrible Horseshoe trio of holes) and a par-3 13th (since replaced following a 1968 rechanneling of the Trinity River). Keith Foster’s 2008 restoration wasn’t to everyone’s satisfaction. In 2023, Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner initiated a warp-speed, total renovation of the design using Maxwell's 1941 modifications as a roadmap, a similar treatment they implemented when remodelinig Maxwell's Southern Hills in 2018, on display at the 2022 PGA Championship. This ranking does not reflect the Hanse/Wagner work: Their changes will be revealed in the 2027-'28 results.

Many who’ve played Bluejack National have commented on its resemblance to Augusta National, particularly at the par-3 12th, which plays over water to a shallow diagonal green backed by a pair of bunkers. While some suspect this is Tiger’s homage to the 12th at Augusta National, where he has won five Masters, it could be based on the 12th at Muirfield Village, where Tiger has won eight times. Nonetheless, Bluejack is most likely an ode to Augusta. At the course opening, Tiger told reporters, “When I visited the site for the first time, I was blown away. It’s definitely not the kind of site that comes to mind when you think of Houston. The terrain features a number of elevation changes and lots of tall, mature trees, more like something you would find in Georgia.”

Architect Chet Williams has already set the standard for golf in Texas with Whispering Pines, the state’s top-ranked course in Trinity, north of Houston. The land he had to work with at The Covey, set within a 2,000-acre hunting club 75 miles west of Houston, was even better with hills, ridges and ravines cut by natural dry washes that have been reenforced as rushing-water streams. With no surrounding development, The Covey is a scenic journey through the Texas outback through groves of pines and hardwoods and cross-course views. Numerous specimen trees have been left standing in the fairways that must be maneuvered around, and Williams’ green complexes can be wicked, flanked and fronted with deep, staggered bunkers, with strong putting contours that create multiple internal levels and severe false fronts that eject any short approached 30 or 40 yards back down the fairway. The halfway house behind the ninth green on the property’s highest point is one of golf’s best with an upper level observatory deck and lounge that offers 20-mile views across the county.

It occupies some of the best golfing terrain in the Dallas Metroplex—rugged hills dotted with cedars—yet Tom Fazio still indulged in considerable shifting of earth when creating Dallas National. The par-3 17th, for instance, is countersunk into an excavated box canyon of rock, while a deep ravine in front of the 18th green was filled in to lessen the difficulty of the approach for average players. Major championship golf will return to the Dallas area in 2027 when the PGA Championship will be held on the recently opened East Course at PGA Frisco, built by Gil Hanse & Jim Wagner, but Dallas National members feel they already have a course worthy of the task. The course is poised to be even more polished when it reopens in 2025 following a major touch-up by Team Fazio.

Corby Robertson, who made a fortune in coal reserves, staked out the Whispering Pines course in the early 1990s, then brought Texas-based golf architect Chet Williams (at the time a design associate of Jack Nicklaus) to help him create strategies through bunkering and green contours. Williams refined the rough-hewn routing cut through east Texas piney woods into a dazzling romp across a gently rolling landscape, culminating in a final six-hole stretch along gator-infested Caney Creek and the headwaters of Lake Livingston. The club continues to make renovations, which has included tweaking greens, moving tee boxes and replacing its fairways with zoysia grass, which resulted in a #51 ranking (its highest) in the last ranking period.