9 things to know about the best U.S. courses you can play for $100 or less
The Senator course on the RTJ Golf Trail at Capitol Hill.
Courtesy Photo
GOLF’s latest collection of courses that belong on your must-play list has arrived.
On Wednesday, we published our first-ever list of America’s best golf courses for $100 or less, which doesn’t include bucket-list gems like Whistling Straits and Bandon Dunes but does boast dozens of enjoyable and affordable spots more accessible to the larger population of golfers. To qualify for the list, courses needed to be (1) accessible to the public, (2) the kind of golf experience you’d recommend to a friend and (3) offer peak-season weekend walking rates that do not exceed $100.
You can check out the full list here, but for a quick rundown of what you should know about it, scroll below.
1. Legendary architect Donald Ross has the most course-design credits on the list with 10, among them George Wright, Jeffersonville and Triggs Memorial. The other architects who appeared the most were Robert Trent Jones Sr. (nine courses), A.W. Tillinghast (five courses), Pete Dye (five courses) and Robert Trent Jones Jr. (four courses).
2. The cutoff for this list was $100, so any course that came in on that number is obviously the highest-priced among the group. Six fit that description, and four of them are on the uber-popular RTJ Golf Trail in Alabama: Capitol Hill (Senator), Highland Oaks (Highlands/Magnolia nines) and both the Lake 18 and Links 18 at Grand National. The other two $100 courses are Bethpage Red in Farmingdale, N.Y., and Wailua in Lihue, Hawaii.
3. There are also eight courses on the list that can be played for under $40. The least expensive are Buffalo Dunes in Garden City, Kansas, and Fort Myers County Club in Fort Myers, Fla., both of which you can play for just $30 peak walking rate. The other six are Palatka ($34, Palatka, Fla.), Aiken ($35, Aiken, S.C.), Pines Crossing ($35, Auburn, Ala.), Cedar Crest ($35, Dallas, Texas), Wolf River Golf Park ($37, Bear Lake, Mich.) and Kearney Hill ($38, Lexington, Ky.).
4. Quick plug: If you are looking for an affordable golf course near you, visit our new Course Finder tool and search for all the options in your area. You can also filter by things like price and course type.
5. Wild Horse Golf Club in Gothenburg, Neb., made the list, which should be no surprise. It’s also one of the few (and the highest-ranked, at 49th) on GOLF’s latest Top 100 Courses You Can Play ranking.
6. While a few of these courses hosted majors decades ago, one was recently used for the marquee amateur event of 2024. Chaska Town Course in Chaska, Minn., was the stroke-play co-host (along with Hazeltine National) for the 2024 U.S. Amateur last month.
7. You may or may not know, but you helped create this list. To form it, we sourced recommendations from GOLF raters, editors, industry experts and, yes, even you.
8. Roughly 40 percent of the courses on this list are owned by municipalities, and many appear on our ranking of the 30 best municipal golf courses in America that we published three years ago. George Wright in Hyde Park, Mass., was an easy pick for this recent list, and it was also third on that aforementioned top-30 muni ranking.
9. California has the most courses represented with seven, and Alabama and North Carolina have six each. Michigan, Florida, Ohio and New York all have five apiece. Thirty-five states were represented.
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