| 2025-2026 ranking
America's 100 Greatest Golf Courses

Golf Digest has published America’s 100 Greatest Golf Courses since 1966, making it the oldest and most respected ranking in golf. Our 2025-2026 ranking is based on nearly 88,000 evaluations over our 10-year scoring cycle submitted by our course-ranking panelists, who judge courses on a 1-10 scale in the six below scoring categories (scroll down for our definitions).
Our statisician determines the rest. After panelists filed their evaluations, all outlier scores were removed, and each course's scores were age-weighted by year, so that more recent evaluations hold more value than older evaluations. That allows our rankings to more accurately reflect a layout's current state since courses are always evolving. Our formula involves doubling Shot Options and Layout Variety and adding our other category scores together to determine the overall score.
Courses must have a minimum of 50 evaluations over our 10-year scoring period to qualify for our 100 Greatest and Second 100 Greatest lists. Most courses have between 100 and 175 ballots submitted, so these rankings represent a strong consensus among a large number of panelists trained in our criteria.
This is our most data-driven set of rankings to date—and we're sure you'll enjoy digging deeper.
Scroll on for the entirety of our America's 100 Greatest rankings, listed from #100 down to #1. We urge you to click through to each individual course page for bonus photography, drone footage and reviews from our course panelists. Plus, you can now leave your own ratings on the courses you’ve played … to make your case why your favorite should be ranked higher. Explore Golf Digest's new Course Reviews feature here.


















Ladera breaks every "rule" of desert golf in Palm Springs and the Coachella Valley. The design does not incorporate unnatural water features, it’s not lined by palm trees, it's not criss-crossed by cart paths and it’s not hemmed in by housing, no matter how expensive. Instead, it is a beautiful and varied expression of what desert golf can be in its most natural form, though nothing about it is natural. The 300-acre site slopes 140 feet from the high point near the Santa Rosa Mountains across once-level land that was formerly lemon groves and mango farms. Gil Hanse and Jim Wagner propped up the low side of the property to reorient sightlines over the valley floor toward the eastern Mecca Hills and moved millions of cubic yards of earth to create each particle of golf.
Ladera’s fairways are generous, 60 to 100 yards wide with no formal rough, but strategy abounds with options to play to wide parts of the fairway—though the best approach angles and lines of sight are reserved for those who skirt the boundaries of the hazards. Even completely straight holes, such as the par-5 seventh, are full of options with staggered bunkers and a treacherous side slope short of the green. The greens reveal a tremendous variety of sizes and forms, some modestly contoured like the enormous saucer third and others a pattern of ridges and falling tiers (the 14th). But the most distinctive features at Ladera are the attractive dry gullies and arroyos that Hanse, Wagner and their team cut through the site emulating sandy, eroded vegetative lows that water would rush through during rare periods of heavy rain. The excavated sand was used to create sweeping elevation changes and to prop up greens like the par-3 fourth, the altar-like 15th, the par-3 16th and the par-5 17th that hangs over the edge of a deep barranca.



Our panelists evaluate courses based on the following six pieces of criteria:
Shot Options: How well does the course provide a variety of options involving risks and rewards, and require a wide array of shots?
Challenge: How challenging is the course for a typical scratch golfer playing from the normal back tees?
Layout Variety: How varied is the physical layout of the course in terms of length, hazard placement, green shapes and green contours? How distinctive is each hole, and how effectively do they connect to each other?
Aesthetics: How well do the scenic aspects of the course and architecture add to the pleasure of a round?
Conditioning: How firm, fast and rolling are the fairways, how firm yet receptive are the greens, and how true is the roll of putts?
Character: How well does the course exude ingenuity and uniqueness compared to other courses, or possess characteristics considered profound or outstanding for its era?

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Explore Golf Digest's new Course Reviews section where you can submit a star rating and evaluation on all the courses you’ve played. We've collected tens of thousands of reviews from our course-ranking panelists to deliver a premium experience, which includes course rankings, experts' opinions, bonus course photography, videos and much more. Check it out here!
























Explore Golf Digest's new Course Reviews section where you can submit a star rating and evaluation on all the courses you’ve played. We've collected tens of thousands of reviews from our course-ranking panelists to deliver a premium experience, which includes course rankings, experts' opinions, bonus course photography, videos and much more. Check it out here!














From Golf Digest Architecture Editor emeritus Ron Whitten:
I’ve been told Gil Hanse had first examined the site of Ohoopee Match Club as far back as 2006 considered it ideal for golf: gently rolling terrain with no severe elevation changes, and beautiful sandy soil deposited by the nearby Ohoopee River, perfect for drainage and firm, fast conditions.
The ground around tiny Cobbtown, Ga., is also perfect for growing onions—it’s just northeast of Vidalia, world-famous for the Vidalia onion. Indeed, Ohoopee’s logo is a freshly picked onion, although if you look closely, its roots are three writhing snakes.
Any symbolism pertaining to match play is uncertain; perhaps it simply suggests the sort of putts one will face. What’s the composition of a course meant for match play? One might think it would contain lots of penal hazards, because a triple bogey on any particular hole would not be fatal in match play.
Perhaps the targets would be smaller than normal, to level the playing field between big hitters and short-but-accurate golfers. That’s not the composition of the 7,325-yard championship course at Ohoopee. Hanse did produce dramatic visuals in this sandy locale that hark back to portions of Pinehurst and Pine Valley, from long expanses of sandy rough dotted with native plants to deep, foreboding pits of sand, but they’re mostly on the far perimeter of holes.
Explore our complete review here—including bonus photography and ratings from our expert panelists.

































From Golf Digest Architecture Editor emeritus Ron Whitten:
Cypress Point, the sublime Monterey Peninsula work of sandbox sculpture, whittled Cypress and chiseled coastline, has become Exhibit A in the argument that classic architecture has been rendered ineffectual by modern technology.
I'm not buying that argument. Those who think teeny old Cypress Point is defenseless miss the point of Alister MacKenzie’s marvelous design.
MacKenzie relished the idea that Cypress Point would offer all sorts of ways to play every hole. That philosophy still thrives, particularly in the past decade, after the faithful restoration of MacKenzie’s original bunkers by veteran course superintendent Jeff Markow.
Explore our complete review here—including bonus photography and ratings from our expert panelists.


Explore Golf Digest's new Course Reviews section where you can submit a star rating and evaluation on all the courses you’ve played. We've collected tens of thousands of reviews from our course-ranking panelists to deliver a premium experience, which includes course rankings, experts' opinions, bonus course photography, videos and much more. Check it out here!