Golf enters the back stretch of 2026 in its healthiest position in decades. The more useful question now is whether we are converting that strength into resilience.
By Jay Karen, NGCOA CEO
One of the useful things about watching golf’s business data over several years is that you eventually stop reacting to every monthly rise and fall. You begin to see the shape of the market underneath it.
And as we close the third quarter of 2026, two things can be true at once: golf is remarkably healthy, and operating a golf course is not getting any easier.
The health story is real. The National Golf Foundation’s latest longitudinal work suggests nearly three-quarters of public facilities now describe their financial footing as good or excellent. In 2009, and again in 2016, roughly one in four public courses said they were in poor financial health. Over the past five years, that figure has fallen to 5% or less.
That is not simply a pandemic afterglow. It is the product of stronger participation and play, smarter pricing, renewed investment, better attention to the customer experience and a long supply correction. More than 2,000 U.S. courses came out of the market between 2006 and 2020. Since 2020, the net decline has been fewer than 60 facilities. Supply and demand have moved much closer to equilibrium, and the marketplace is healthier because of it.
NGCOA’s very own 2026 Golf Business Pulse Report research tells a similar story. Mean annual starts among participating facilities rose from 30,946 in 2022 to 37,141 in 2025 – about a 20% increase. Average reported green fees moved from $69 in 2023 to $93 in 2026. Capital spending remains elevated. Half of operators said they were fully staffed last season, compared with only 20% three years earlier.
If we stopped there, this would be a victory lap. But Q3 offered a useful reminder: a strong industry can still have vulnerable operators, and a full tee sheet can still conceal a fragile business model.
Consider August. Pellucid’s preliminary weather analysis showed Golf Playable Hours down 6% nationally from a year earlier. Weather is always local, and one month is not a trend. But playable hours are golf’s inventory. We cannot store a Tuesday afternoon and sell it in October. When extreme heat, smoke, storms or excessive rainfall take inventory away, the revenue disappears while most of the cost structure remains.
That makes the industry’s stronger financial footing more important, not less. Prosperity should be a window in which we build shock absorbers: healthier balance sheets, irrigation and drainage investment, more precise labor models, better yield management, diversified customer touchpoints and a clearer understanding of which parts of the business actually create margin.
This is where some of the numbers popping off the page become caution signs. Labor availability has improved, but labor economics have not. Wages reset higher. Insurance, equipment, agronomic inputs and fleet costs remain stubborn. Seventy-eight percent of operators in our Pulse research worry golf is becoming too expensive, and 70% worry the lower end of the market could be priced out of an acceptable golf experience.
Golf has earned pricing power. It has not earned unlimited pricing power.
That distinction matters because the financial recovery has not been distributed evenly. Premium private and resort golf may continue to flourish while value-oriented daily-fee courses and municipal facilities wrestle with aging infrastructure and thinner reinvestment capacity. Yet those facilities are not peripheral to golf’s future. They are often the front door. NGF reports that about 70% of Core golfers had some of their earliest experiences at municipal courses.
So one of the great strategic questions of this moment is not merely how much revenue the market will bear. It is whether we can preserve an acceptable, welcoming version of golf at several price points while still producing the returns necessary to care for the asset.
The same tension appears in technology. Sixty-four percent of operators now believe AI will be a net positive for golf, up meaningfully from two years ago. Seventy-five percent see robotics making a significant impact. At the same time, nearly two-thirds worry rampant technology adoption could weaken relationships with their best customers, and 96% say exceptional customer service remains the most important differentiator.
That is not a contradiction. It is a design instruction: automate the friction, not the relationship. Use technology backstage to improve decisions, reduce repetitive work and help scarce labor become more productive. Then use the capacity it creates onstage – where recognition, hospitality and human connection turn a transaction into a memory.
The next chapter will also require us to measure more than rounds. Since 2020, millions of Americans have tried on-course golf, but only about one in four beginners becomes a committed golfer. The first visit makes a participation headline. The second, fifth and twentieth visits make a healthy business.
That means knowing who returned, who disappeared, who brings guests, who uses the range, who takes lessons, who joins a league and who stays for dinner. Golf captures millions of transactions, but many facilities still cannot see one continuous customer relationship across the tee sheet, shop, range, instruction and food and beverage.
For years, the industry’s biggest question was whether the boom would last. We have enough evidence now to say that golf reset to a higher plane. The more important question is what we do with it.
We can treat today’s demand as permission to keep raising prices and filling tee sheets. Or we can treat it as capital – capital to reinvest, modernize, protect access, deepen customer relationships and prepare for the weather, cost and capacity shocks that will surely come.
That is exactly the conversation we should be having together at the upcoming Golf Business Conference. It will not be a victory lap. It will be an opportunity for owners and operators to compare what is working, confront what is changing and learn from people wrestling with the same questions in different markets.
Golf is healthier than it has been in decades. Now is the time to turn that health into resilience. If you are responsible for the future of a golf facility, I hope you will join us at NGCOA’s Golf Business Conference 2027 and help shape what comes next.
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Jay Karen, CAE
Chief Executive Officer
