Do you keep score?
The USGA does. As part of its year-end accounting, the governing body has tallied up the numbers from 2024 to produce its first report highlighting domestic golfer participation, drawing on information from the more than 77 million scores posted under the World Handicap System (WHS).
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but data can provide a vivid portrait, too. In this case, what do the numbers show?
For starters, like so much else in golf, participation in the WHS is up. More than 3.35 million golfers in the U.S. maintained a handicap in 2024, a 6 percent increase over last year and a nearly 30 percent jump since 2020. Of those golfers, a large and growing number played 9-hole rounds. In fact, they did so at a record rate, posting more than 13.7 million 9-hole scores, up 8 percent from last year and 40 percent since 2020.
Those 9-hole rounds were particularly popular among women golfers who established a handicap in 2024; they opted to play nine more than half the time (newly enrolled male golfers played nine roughly a quarter of the time).
Such figures support what you might suspect: Shorter outings are a good way to ease into the game.
They also reflect a wider trend. Short courses are all the rage, their smaller footprints appearing everywhere from local municipal facilities to destination resorts. Many of these compact layouts are par-3 courses, which this year became eligible to obtain Course and Slope Ratings, allowing scores from rounds played on them to be posted, too.
Changes of this kind are part of an ongoing effort by the USGA to make the WHS as faithful a reflection as possible of how the game is being played across the country.
“It’s been exciting to see year-over-year trends develop as the World Handicapping System has matured,” Steve Edmondson, the governing body’s managing director of handicapping and course rating, said in a statement. The data, he said, have been used to inform a spate of changes, “including updating how 9-hole scores are treated for handicap purposes.”
Data can also help bust myths. Maintaining a handicap is widely perceived as a practice reserved for hard-core golfers competing in elite events. Not so, the numbers show. Of the 77 million rounds posted in 2024, 94.5 percent were recreational. Playing — and posting — for fun is on the rise.
As for playing well, that depends on your standards. The year-end data-driven snapshot reveals the following about golfers in U.S: the average male player carries a handicap of 14.2; the average female plays to a 28.7. On average, male players posted more scores (23.8), compared to 19.6 for female players.
There’s more in the report, including little tidbits for cocktail-party conversation. The most popular month for posting scores? No surprise: June. The state where 18-hole rounds were prevalent? That would be Nevada, where such rounds accounted for 93 percent of posted scores. Maine, meanwhile, was the leader in the clubhouse for greatest percentage (32.6) of 9-hole rounds
The release of all this data coincides with technological changes aimed at making handicap-keeping easier and more engaging than ever. Those modifications include a newly redesigned GHIN mobile app, with an upgraded version of GHIN Rewind, a fun and informative feature that provides golfers with a personal year-in-review, replete with stats on Handicap Index changes, total rounds played, hardest and easiest courses, most-play courses, and more. As 2024 draws to a close, you can see a fleshed-out picture of your game over the past 12 months. Here, for reference, are a few stats from mine:
