The people raising your green fees are worried about raising your green fees.
That’s the most striking finding in the NGCOA’s 2026 Golf Business Pulse Report which surveyed more than 200 facility owners and operators. Ninety percent raised rates last year and 72 percent say they’re concerned the industry will push price increases too far.
It also adds a new angle to something my colleague Sean Fairholm wrote last month. He pointed out that most new courses are being built for private clubs and destinations, not everyday players. I spoke with Jay Karen, president and CEO of the National Golf Course Owners Association (NGCOA), to find out what it costs to run the courses that already serve those players and why owners say they can’t hold the line.
One note on the data before we go further. This is a survey. It captures what owners say they did and expect to do, not what golfers actually paid at the register. The report was published by the NGCOA, produced by Sports and Leisure Research Group and sponsored by PepsiCo. It’s a useful read on how the people running courses see the game.
Owners say they’re uncomfortable, too
That “72 percent concern” figure has climbed every year since 2023 when it was 55 percent. I brought that up with Karen and he didn’t dodge it.
“Cognitive dissonance is ringing in my head,” he said of the finding. “You know, our members, they’re the ones raising the prices but they’re concerned.”
He doesn’t think that makes owners hypocrites. He thinks it shows how tangled the issue is.
“There’s something in the DNA of the game that a lot of folks want it to be accessible to anybody,” he told me. But he was equally clear about the other side. “We’re not talking about gouging. Every business needs to maintain a certain amount of profitability to keep going.”
Why courses say they can’t hold the line
Karen’s explanation starts with a stretch most golfers have probably forgotten. From 2005 to 2015, he said, rates stayed fairly flat while everything else got more expensive. By his math, golf was arguably cheaper in 2020 than in 2005.
The cost of keeping rates the same for all those years was that most courses couldn’t build reserves. Karen put the average round at about $34 during that period and said that wasn’t enough to reinvest in facilities or pay decent wages. “It was tough just staying alive economically.” Over that time, he added, well over a thousand courses closed, mostly to redevelopment.
Then COVID arrived and demand surged which gave operators pricing power they hadn’t had in years. They used it.
The report’s numbers show what they were up against. Labor is the biggest driver of course maintenance budgets for 65 percent of owners and equipment now tops the list for 15 percent, up from eight percent in 2023. Wages are up, too. Average base pay is $15.20 an hour and nearly a quarter of facilities pay more than $17. For the first time, most owners who raised wages did so because of a local government mandate, not by choice.
Owners told the NGCOA the competition for workers is relentless. One described how hard it is to keep pro shop and maintenance staff when fast food chains pay around $20 an hour.
Ninety-six percent of owners expect operating costs to rise again this year.
The lower end is getting squeezed
The report points to a split. Owners say the high end is fine. Private club growth continues and new development skews toward bucket-list, high-end properties. The pressure is at the bottom.
Seventy percent of owners are concerned the lower end of the market could be priced out of an acceptable experience and 62 percent agree new facilities should target value rather than the high end. One owner put the gap bluntly: nobody is investing in the $50 to $75 public facility.
Karen sees the same thing and he links it to the broader economy. The report describes a K-shaped economy where golf lives mostly on the upper arm. “But because, like I said, we’re in the DNA of the game, we want it to be accessible to all,” he said. “It’s getting harder to meet that.”
He pointed to signs of strain beyond the green fee. Even high school golf teams are having trouble finding places to practice and charity outings are getting squeezed. When tee sheets are this full, operators can’t hand out open times the way they used to.
Rate hikes aren’t the only lever
Raising the green fee isn’t the only way courses protect revenue and some of the other options are less visible to golfers.
Take no-shows. Only 15 percent of owners currently require a non-refundable upfront deposit on tee times and another four percent plan to start this season. Thirty percent are considering it and 51 percent aren’t considering it at all.
Golfers, it turns out, may be more open to it than owners assume. In separate tracking research from Sports and Leisure Research Group, 74 percent of golfers said they’re comfortable putting down an advance deposit on a booked tee time. (That’s a survey of golfers, not owners, so it’s a different group than the rest of the report.)
Owners are starting to come around. About two-thirds believe prepaying for golf will become more of a necessity and nearly 40 percent now say dynamic pricing is very important to facility success.
The owners who’ve made the switch frame it as fairness. One compared it to canceling a hairdresser appointment since a missed slot is lost revenue that can’t be recovered. Another charges the full green fee for no-shows and short shows, the same philosophy as an airline or a concert ticket, and said the policy broke golfers of booking a threesome as a foursome and short showing it.
Whether golfers will like it as much in practice as they say they do in a survey is another question. But it’s a sign that owners are looking for ways to protect their margins that don’t involve increased fees.
The municipal bet
If affordability is going to survive, Karen thinks public courses owned by cities and counties are the key. He noted there are roughly 3,000 municipal courses in the U.S. “That’s government in the business of golf for their citizens,” he said. “That tells you this is a people’s game.”
That’s why he calls municipal golf “the big bet” for the next generation or two. His concern is what happens if public courses keep closing. “We like to say the dirt is worth more than the turf,” he said, and when courses get redeveloped and the only new ones being built are high-end private clubs, golf gets more inaccessible economically.
He doesn’t see the answer as only traditional 18-hole golf. Karen expects indoor simulators and screen golf to keep growing as a cheaper way to play.
What this means for golfers
I don’t think the takeaway is that courses are the bad guys or that rising prices are all just greed. The report shows real cost pressure on labor, equipment and infrastructure. It also shows that the owners themselves are uncomfortable about where this is heading.
Karen’s closing point is hard to argue with: “If owners and operators themselves are saying they’re concerned, then it really is a concern.”
Have you noticed rates going up at your home course? Would you be comfortable paying a non-refundable deposit to book a tee time? And is there still a public option near you that feels like good value?
CrashTestDummy
3 weeks ago
Before COVID, the courses were in much better shape, far less people on the golf courses, much lower green fees, and more golf courses to play on. COVID messed up a lot of industries.