First, there was a memo. Then came a proposal. Next up is an official vote by the highest rung of PGA Tour government.
What do we know right now? Changes are coming to the PGA Tour.
The Tour’s middle level of player leadership — the Player Advisory Council (PAC) — sent out a 23-page document to the rest of the Tour membership Tuesday morning, detailing major changes to go into effect in 2026. The topics of change: field sizes, pace of play, Monday qualifying tournaments and — perhaps most importantly — the number of pros who can call themselves fully exempt members.
The document follows an Oct. 16 memo from PAC Chairman, Camilo Villegas, who informed the membership that meetings had taken place, changes were in order, and to be prepared for them. Tuesday’s document, then, shouldn’t come as a surprise, but rather as a look at the likely future of the PGA Tour.
GOLF.com received access to the document via a player. While the changes are technically only a proposal, they are incredibly likely to be approved in full. The Tour’s Policy Board, headed by Tiger Woods, five fellow Tour veterans and six businesspeople, will officially vote on the proposal Nov. 18.
Below is a rundown of the biggest changes, who they would affect, and why they’ve been pushed forward.
What’s the biggest change?
The future PGA Tour would have just 100 fully exempt players, down from 125. One-hundred PGA Tour cards — a very round number of those able to access nearly every tournament in a given season — has been discussed by players for months. For years, the Tour’s 125 fully exempt players have changed the sport’s arithmetic. When the FedEx Cup Playoffs came around, it was always Who is Mr. 125 on the inside? And, Who is Mr. 126, sweating on the outside?
Under the new system, the standard of play would rise on the PGA Tour. Nos. 90-99 would not be able to feel like their job is fully safe, while nos. 100-110 will feel like they’ve got serious work to do to land job security for the following season. The Tour would be shifting its goalposts by 20%, making it even more cutthroat to maintain status from year to year.
Right now, 2023 Ryder Cupper Nicolai Hojgaard — who has largely struggled in 2024 — is ranked 100th. Matt Kuchar, who saw a run of decent form in the late summer, is ranked 105th. Sam Stevens, a 2024 rookie, has made 22 of 27 cuts, but just hasn’t done better than a team T4 finish at the Zurich and an individual T10 finish at the Rocket Mortgage Classic. A future year like the one he’s compiled this season puts him right on the edge of maintaining full status.
Importantly, finishing outside the top 100 won’t mean players lose their PGA Tour status entirely. Conditional status has long existed for those finishing outside the sweet spot. Pros who finish 109th, for example, will still be able to enter tournaments, but they’ll just have to wait and see how many spots are available. Oftentimes they’ll be left on the outside looking in.
How about the second-biggest change?
Field sizes will decrease. The Tour has spent the last few years opening its doorway a little wider to accommodate for the competitive threat posed by LIV, adding Tour cards for additional graduates from the Korn Ferry Tour and for the top finishers on the DP World Tour. But just because more people were allowed into the restaurant didn’t mean everyone had a seat.
Those lower-ranking Korn Ferry Tour and DP World Tour graduates found it difficult to enter tournaments early in the season, when demand was at its highest, which raised the question of whether their status had been devalued. After all, it’s one thing to have Tour membership, but then you need to do something with it. Like play well!
But the Tour has been battling forces like weather, daylight, and pace of play to simply finish tournament days (or whole tournaments) on time. If the Tour is going to make cuts on Fridays while battling limited daylight hours, field sizes will have to decrease at almost every tournament. For the events in the early spring, like the WM Phoenix Open, the proposed field size is now 120 players (from 132). As the year goes on and the days get longer — like at the Valspar Championship in March — field sizes will be capped at 132 instead of the typical 144. And by the time summer arrives, the typical field of 156 players will be capped at 144.
In short, the Tour’s events will have about 10% fewer players and the Tour itself will have 20% fewer fully-exempt members. Both moves heighten the importance of each spot, each tournament … each shot.
Why is this necessary?
Multiple reasons. For starters, the wicked combination of pace of play and daylight. In 2024, according to the document, 28% of tournaments have seen at least one round not finished due to darkness. Because of struggles with tournament pace of play, the Tour starts as close to sunrise as possible usually finished at or near (or often after) sunset. That means practicing in the dark, either before or after your round. These changes are partly to make tournaments run more efficiently.
One natural response would be: Make them play faster!
The Tour has instituted and altered pace of play regulations in serious fashion over the past few years, but when it comes to making a tournament finish on time, the easiest path they see is clearly limiting the number of players in the field rather than readjusting the time constraints for expected play.
Anything else changing?
Yes! Qualification is set to change, too, across all categories. That includes those coming from the Korn Ferry Tour, year-end Q-school and those weekly Monday Qualifying tournaments that give non-exempt players a chance to play their way in.
We’ll start with the Monday Qualifier events. For all regular season events with 120 players or less — largely the events in the spring with increased demand for entry — Monday qualifiers will be eliminated. In the past, most of them have offered four positions to players who shoot the lowest scores on that week’s Monday, but with 12 fewer spots in the tournament, a Monday Q would counter-act the decrease in field size by offering four spots back to lower-ranking members. Evidence shared in the document sent to players states that 65-70% of players who enter the field via Monday qualifying end up missing the cut.
Monday events are not being eliminated entirely, however. Regular season events with fields of 132 players will see Monday qualifying spots halved from four to two. Monday qualifiers in fields of 144 will stay the same, as will those in the FedEx Cup Fall.
Graduating to the PGA Tour is also set to get trimmed down. In 2024, 30 players from the Korn Ferry Tour earned full status, with 10 others coming from the DP World Tour, as well as the top five and ties from the year-end Q-School. Moving forward, according to the proposal, those numbers would be 20 players from the KFT, 10 from the DPWT, and simply five from Q-School, not top five and ties.
How did we get here?
The PGA Tour has long had a membership of roughly 200-250 players with different levels of status. Each year, when the FedEx Cup rankings are finalized, one player from each subsection of the membership is voted into the Advisory Council to have monthly meetings on the status of the Tour. The PAC for 2024 included the likes of Justin Thomas, Scottie Scheffler, Keith Mitchell, Mackenzie Hughes, Josh Teater, Adam Schenk, and 10 others.
In essence, those players are the local representatives with whom other members can speak to elevate concerns. Each year a new group of 16 is assembled, and sometimes they don’t have much work to do, but this year’s group was put to work. For the first time, the PAC enlisted its 16 players into four subcommittees: Competitions and Regulations; Pathways; Tournaments, Fans and Sponsors; Business.
While it may feel extremely formal for professional golfers in a non-paid position, PAC meetings have been instrumental to making changes to the Tour business model, according to those involved. Putting Justin Thomas on, say, the Tournaments, Fans and Sponsors subcommittee has been more efficient than asking JT to gather thoughts from the membership on all aspects of the Tour.
Nearing the end of the first year of this new PAC formation, this is the most thorough reassessment of the infrastructure of membership on the PGA Tour in a very long time. It will no doubt be championed by some and reviled by others.
Is LIV Golf to blame?
Sort of! The Tour was cruising along in the early 2020s, dealing with thorny issues of COVID protocols and simply scheduling tournaments. But in the rise of LIV Golf and guaranteed contracts that conflicted with PGA Tour regulations, a sizable chunk of the Tour’s best and most marketable players left. That forced the Tour’s hand to boost purse sizes, invite more players from Europe to play in America and also work seriously on altering its product.
While the moves to decrease field sizes and membership opportunities may come across as a stiff-arm to the middle ranks of pro golf, they effectively make the Tour a more meritocratic system — a point of pride its players and executives have long argued for in the battle against competing golf leagues.