Top 100 Courses in the U.S. for 2024-25: America’s finest designs, ranked

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Shinnecock Hills (Rank: 3) Jon Cavalier

Why rank golf courses? Well, because we love a good 19th-hole debate. We love to make bucket lists. We love to track trends in the sport. We love to know which architects are hot (or not). And nothing spurs healthy discourse about golf course architecture more than a good list.

For these reasons and plenty others, we at GOLF think Top 100 lists are important, so the responsibility is acute to do the best job we can with them. For that, we rely on our panel of design aficionados — 127 of them scattered across the globe. Their handicaps range from +5 to 15. There’s a 52-year gap between our youngest and oldest panelist. Some have teed it up at over 2,000 courses, others at merely several hundred. (For more on our rating methodology, click here.)

To hear our ratings experts break down our latest rankings, check out our all-new travel podcast Destination GOLF. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts: APPLE | SPOTIFY | IHEART | AMAZON

Because the nature of course rating is so intensely subjective, no one opinion carries the day. The only way, then, to build meaningful consensus is to incorporate this diversity of panelists and experiences into one ranking.

Or, in this latest iteration of GOLF’s riff on the best of the best, two: the Top 100 Courses in the U.S., which you’ll find below, and, as a bonus, the Top 100 You Can Play in the U.S., which we’ll publish a week from today on GOLF.com.

Course descriptions below were written by Hayes Jackson, Ran Morrissett and Josh Sens.

Homepage image: Cypress Point (Jon Cavalier). Lead image above, from left: The Lido (Brandon Carter); Bandon Trails (Evan Schiller); Philadelphia Cricket Club – Wissahickon (Evan Schiller)

GOLF’s other course rankings: Top 100 in the World | Top 100 You Can Play | Top 100 Value Courses in the U.S. | America’s Best Municipal Courses | America’s Best Courses for $100 or Less | Top 100 in the U.K. and Ireland | Top 100 in Asia-Pacific | Top 100 Short Courses in the World

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