Is Golf Becoming a Luxury?
I’ve been thinking about the price of golf recently. It came up during a round with a client who has been coming to Scotland every second year since 2001. He told me this could possibly be their last trip. Not because they’ve fallen out of love with Scotland or Scottish golf, but simply because it’s getting expensive.
I understood exactly what he meant. Every year I open another visitor green-fee page, see the new price and make the same noise every Fifer makes when somebody tells them a pint is £10.
Eh! How much?!
Scotland has some of the greatest golf courses on the planet. Golfers travel thousands of miles and spend thousands of pounds to experience them, and that’s brilliant. It keeps people like me busy and brings serious money into Scotland. Golf tourism supports hotels, restaurants, pubs, caddies, greenkeepers, golf shops, drivers, photographers and countless other businesses. We should absolutely encourage it.
But there’s another side to it, and I think it raises an uncomfortable question: is golf becoming a luxury?
Golf has never exactly been the cheapest sport. You need clubs, balls, shoes, clothing and somewhere to actually play. But there’s a difference between a sport being expensive and the very best experiences within that sport becoming completely disconnected from what the average working golfer can realistically afford.
Top 100 Golf Courses analysed the 2026 visitor prices across Scotland’s Top 100 courses, and the average summer green fee across the Top 10 is now £473. That’s not Turnberry. That’s not me deliberately picking the most expensive course I could find to make a point. That’s the average. The median is lower at £372, showing that a handful of extremely expensive courses drag the average upwards, but whichever figure you use, we’re talking about serious money for four or five hours of golf.
Now compare that with what people actually earn. Median gross earnings for a full-time employee in Scotland were around £773.80 per week in 2025, which works out at roughly £40,238 per year. Sounds decent enough until HMRC gets involved. After Scottish Income Tax and employee National Insurance, somebody earning around £40,000 is taking home roughly £32,400 per year, £2,700 per month or £624 per week.
And that’s before you’ve actually paid for anything.
Mortgage or rent, Council Tax, electricity, gas, food, car payments, petrol, insurance, broadband, phones, bairns, savings and all the other wonderful things adulthood invents to remove money from your bank account.
That’s the important part of this argument. Your salary isn’t your golf budget.
Golf comes out of whatever survives after everything else has been paid.
Suddenly £473 for a round looks considerably different. For someone taking home around £2,700 per month, that one green fee represents roughly 17.5% of their entire monthly take-home wage.
One round. Before petrol, before lunch, before a pint and before you inevitably walk into the pro shop and spend £90 on another quarter-zip because this one’s got a wee lighthouse embroidered on the front.
If you played one Top-10 Scottish course every month at that average price, you’d spend £5,676 per year on green fees alone.
That’s more than two full months of take-home pay for the median Scottish full-time worker, spent on twelve rounds of golf.
When you actually see it written down, I think it becomes difficult to argue that we’re still talking about an ordinary leisure expense. At that level, golf is becoming a luxury purchase.
And it isn’t just green fees. Memberships have increased, premium golf balls can comfortably cost £45–£50 a dozen, new drivers are pushing towards £600, golf shoes can easily cost £150 or more and a decent set of waterproofs can cost hundreds. Add lessons, travel, food, clothing and the occasional golf trip and the annual cost of being a golfer can become frighteningly high.
Of course, nobody actually needs a £600 driver or £200 golf shoes to enjoy golf. A shiny new driver isn’t going to magically turn your 18-handicap slice into Rory McIlroy. There are still plenty of affordable ways to play the game. But there’s no denying that a significant part of the golf industry is increasingly built around, premium equipment, premium experiences and premium pricing.
Scotland’s most famous golf courses are perhaps the clearest example of that.
I don’t think the answer is simply demanding that Scotland’s best courses slash their visitor prices. International demand for Scottish golf is enormous. A golfer coming from America for the trip of a lifetime might already be spending £8,000, £10,000 or considerably more. Flights, hotels, transport, caddies, restaurants and six or seven bucket-list courses all add up. For that golfer, paying £400 instead of £300 for a course they’ve dreamed about playing for twenty years might not change the trip.
And those visitors bring enormous value to Scotland. So if the international market is willing to pay premium prices, I completely understand why courses charge them.
The problem is what happens to everyone else.
For Davie from Kirkcaldy with a mortgage, two bairns and a wife who’s already discovered the new driver he told her he’d won in a raffle, that extra £100 absolutely matters.
That’s exactly why I’m such a supporter of Scottish and local rates. Some clubs understand that the golfer living 40 miles away is a completely different customer from somebody travelling 4,000 miles for the golf holiday of a lifetime.
Dumbarnie Links is a perfect example. Its pricing includes a Fife Resident Rate of £105,
a Scottish Resident Rate of £132 and a full visitor rate of £350. That, to me, is how you do it.
You’re not devaluing the golf course. You’re not stopping international visitors from paying a premium rate. You’re recognising that the local golfer and the international golf tourist are two completely different markets.
Charge the international market what it’s willing to pay. Use that revenue to maintain exceptional golf courses, pay staff properly, invest in facilities, support employment and contribute to the local economy. But at the same time, leave a door open for the golfers who actually live here.
I’m not arguing that every Scottish golfer should be able to play Turnberry for £50. That’s nonsense. These are premium golf courses with significant operating costs and huge international demand. But I strongly support Scottish resident rates, local rates, county rates, twilight golf, reciprocal arrangements and reduced off-season pricing.
Because there’s something fundamentally wrong if somebody can grow up beside some of the greatest golf courses in the world but realistically never be able to afford to play them.
And that’s where I think the wider golf industry needs to be careful. The problem isn’t that expensive golf exists. There will always be premium golf courses, luxury resorts and £600 drivers, just as there are luxury hotels and expensive cars.
The danger is when expensive golf starts becoming normal golf.
When £200 for a round starts sounding reasonable because another course charges £400. When £400 starts sounding reasonable because somewhere else charges £700.
Eventually we stop asking whether something represents good value and simply accept that this is what golf costs now.
Scotland should absolutely continue welcoming golfers from around the world. Come over. Play our courses. Stay in our hotels. Eat in our restaurants. Drink in our pubs.
Spend an absolute fortune. We’ll even try not to laugh when you call Saiyn Andrwws
Golf tourism is incredibly important to Scotland, and I want to see it continue growing.
But we shouldn’t forget about the people who live here.
When the average visitor green fee across Scotland’s Top 10 courses reaches hundreds of pounds, we’re no longer talking about an everyday round of golf. We’re selling a luxury experience.
And that’s absolutely fine, as long as luxury golf doesn’t become the only version of golf available.
Charge tourists tourist prices. Give local golfers realistic opportunities to play. Protect affordable clubs and courses. Make sure the next generation can actually experience Scotland’s greatest golf courses rather than simply watching people with deeper pockets play them.
Because the day we’re surrounded by some of the greatest golf courses in the world but need a payment plan to play them...
We’ve probably taken it too far.
What do you think?
Is golf becoming a luxury, or are these prices simply the reality of playing the world’s best courses?
Thanks for Reading
