2026 Platinum
Table of Contents
- The numbers
- More people now play golf off the course than on it
- Where the new golfer comes from
- What is driving the growth
- What it means for clubs
- What it means for etiquette
- What it means for dress codes
The numbers
11.83 million scores were submitted through the World Handicap System in England in 2025. That is a 16% increase on 2024 and the highest total since the system was introduced. Club membership rose from 730,602 to 750,071, a 2.66% year-on-year increase and the highest figure in at least thirteen years. England Golf has added more than 100,000 club members since 2021.
Scotland is growing faster still. Total playing membership at Scottish clubs reached 220,210 in 2025, a rise of 11,176 and an increase of 5.4%, the biggest year-on-year growth in four years. Junior boys’ membership rose 28.2%, a gain of 6,075 players.
Globally, the 2025 R&A Global Participation Report records 112.2 million adults and juniors playing golf in all its forms outside the United States and Mexico, up 4.2 million in a year. Registered golfers rose from 8.4 million to 8.7 million, a 16% increase since 2020. In Great Britain and Ireland, club membership bottomed out at just over a million in 2019 and now stands at 1.35 million, the highest since 2010.
Those are the headline figures, and every golf publication in Britain ran them. The number underneath them is more interesting.
More people now play golf off the course than on it
The R&A counts 68.3 million adults and juniors playing golf off-course worldwide, through driving ranges, simulators, adventure golf and short-format venues. On-course play across nine and eighteen holes accounts for 43.9 million.
Off-course golf is not a feeder stream any more. It is the larger sport. For most of the people the R&A counts as golfers, golf is a bay with a screen, a bucket of balls and a table for four, and it may never be anything else.
That is worth sitting with, because it reframes what the participation boom actually is. The game is not simply getting bigger in the way clubs recognise. It is getting bigger somewhere else, and a proportion of those people are then arriving at the first tee.
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Where the new golfer comes from
The R&A’s pathways research puts a number on it: 36% of on-course golfers in England played alternative formats before they played on a course. In Canada the figure is 37%.
Consider what that means for a Saturday morning at a members’ club. Better than a third of the newer faces in the queue for the first tee learned the game somewhere with music playing, a food menu, no dress code and no starter. They learned to strike a ball before they learned any of the conventions that surround striking a ball at a golf club.
They are not arriving ignorant. They are arriving with a different set of assumptions, formed in a venue that was designed to have none.
Most of the friction around golf’s growth traces back to that single fact. Not to bad manners, and not to a decline in standards, but to a generation entering the game through a door that did not exist twenty years ago.
What is driving the growth
The pandemic. Golf’s advantages in 2020 were obvious: outdoors, distanced, no shared equipment. What was less obvious at the time is that the surge would hold. Six years on, England Golf has retained and built on those numbers rather than watched them recede, which is more than most sports that enjoyed a lockdown bounce can claim.
Online instruction. The largest golf channels now command audiences in the millions, and a beginner can grasp grip, stance and ball position before ever meeting a professional. This lowers the cost of entry and removes the intimidation of a first lesson. It also means people turn up with a swing they built themselves and opinions about it.
Short formats. Nine-hole score submissions in England rose 28% in 2025, against 14% for eighteen holes. Shorter formats suit beginners and they suit experienced golfers with less time, which is most of them. The direction of travel here is not subtle.
The weather. 2025 was the UK’s warmest and sunniest year since records began, with 1,648.5 hours of sunshine. Spring was England’s second driest since 1836. Conditions like that pull people onto courses who would otherwise have stayed at home, and some of them stay.
Driving ranges became social venues. Bays with seating, food service, evening opening and TopTracer or TrackMan technology have turned practice facilities into places people go for an evening rather than places people go to work on a fade. This is where a large share of the 68.3 million sit, and it is the primary entry point for players under thirty.
What it means for clubs
Broadly, the boom has been good for clubs, and it is worth remembering how recently the opposite was true. English club membership fell consistently through the years after the 2008 financial crisis. Clubs with ageing memberships and thin waiting lists were closing. Some of those same clubs now have waiting lists again, with the revenue and financial stability that brings.
The costs are real too. Tee sheets are fuller, pace of play is under more pressure than it was, and the demands on greenkeeping rise with rounds played. These are better problems than the ones clubs faced in 2013, but they are still problems, and pace of play in particular is now a live subject in most clubhouses in Britain.
What it means for etiquette
Golf’s conventions are not decoration. Keeping pace, standing still while someone plays, repairing a pitch mark and raking a bunker exist because the game is played by four groups sharing the same ground at once, and they fall apart without agreement.
None of that is going anywhere, and none of it is under threat. What has changed is that a meaningful share of new golfers were never told any of it, because the venue where they learned had no reason to tell them. A TopTracer bay does not need a pace-of-play policy.
The practical implication for clubs is that etiquette now has to be taught rather than assumed. Clubs that handle the boom well are the ones treating it as induction rather than enforcement.
What it means for dress codes
Dress codes are softening, not disappearing, and the two are frequently confused.
Most British clubs still expect a collared shirt and tailored trousers on the course, and most still apply a stricter standard in the clubhouse than on it. What has changed is the range of garments that satisfy those expectations. A technical quarter zip is now unremarkable at clubs that would have raised an eyebrow at anything but a lambswool sweater fifteen years ago. Hooded midlayers have moved from contentious to commonplace in about five years.
The useful principle for anyone coming into the game through a range or a simulator is this: dress codes are about the shape of a garment rather than its technology. A collar, a trouser with a proper waistband, and no visible branding across the chest will clear the great majority of clubs in Britain. Fabric has moved on enormously. The silhouette has barely moved at all.
That is a large part of why Glenmuir has been able to make golf clothing continuously since 1891 without the fundamental shapes changing much. A performance polo such as g.Deacon solves the technical problem while satisfying a dress code written decades before the fabric existed. A quarter zip like g.Wick covers the temperature range a hoodie covers without inviting a conversation at the first tee. A merino sweater such as g.Knox does a job in the clubhouse that no fleece has yet managed.
