Golf courses in California

California has more people per golf course than almost any state. Yardage has 1,026 California courses mapped, the second-largest state total in our catalog, yet that works out to 2.61 courses per 100,000 residents, 48th of 50 in the Golf Course Census, or one course for every 38,358 people. The weekend tee-time scramble is not your imagination.

The split is 804 eighteen-hole courses and 222 nine-holers, a 21.6% nine-hole share that ranks 35th. Palm Desert’s 35 mapped courses and La Quinta’s 22 come from the Coachella Valley, where golf is a winter business and summer belongs to locals who tee off at dawn. San Diego has 28, including the city’s three municipal courses, Torrey Pines, Balboa Park and Mission Bay. San Jose shows 19 and Los Angeles 17, with Rancho Park and Griffith Park’s Wilson and Harding courses among the mapped.

Along the coast the season never really closes; the marine layer decides whether a morning round is played in fog or sun. Inland, the Central Valley runs hot from June through September, and the Sierra and Lake Tahoe courses shut under snow and reopen in late spring. California’s courses are 6.85% of the national catalog, spread across 433 postal cities, 251 of which have a single mapped course. Stanford University’s course is mapped, and so are military courses such as Seal Beach Navy and the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey.

Traveling golfers get more out of this state by reading our guide to playing a new golf course before the first tee, and the national directory covers the other 49 states city by city.

Most courses: Palm Desert (35), San Diego (28), La Quinta (22), San Jose (19), Los Angeles (17).

Population: U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 Population Estimates (July 1, 2025) (39,355,309 residents). Counts are courses mapped in Yardage, not an official registry.

Courses by city

Is your course mapped?

Search by course or by city, Sacramento to San Diego, and see whether your California course is one of the 1,026 in our catalog.

Missing a course?

Tell us the course and the town and we will look at mapping it; with 433 California cities already in the catalog, there is room for more.