Golf courses in Illinois

Public golf in Illinois is run by park districts and forest preserves as much as by anyone. The Chicago Park District operates six regulation courses, and Jackson Park, Marquette Park, Columbus Park, South Shore and Robert A. Black are mapped in Yardage; the Forest Preserves of Cook County list twelve golf facilities, and Billy Caldwell, Edgebrook, Indian Boundary, Chick Evans, George W. Dunne, Joe Louis, Highland Woods and Burnham Woods are among the mapped.

Yardage has 629 Illinois courses mapped, 452 eighteen-hole and 177 nine-hole, a 28.1% nine-hole share that ranks 19th. Chicago proper shows 14, but the suburbs carry the metro; Wheaton alone has 10. Downstate, Springfield has 11, Peoria and Rockford 9 each, and the university courses are mapped, the Orange and Blue at the University of Illinois in Savoy and Illinois State’s course in Normal. Of 350 postal cities, 229 have a single mapped course.

Illinois has 4.95 courses per 100,000 residents, 20th in the Golf Course Census and above the national figure, one course for every 20,221 people; the state holds 4.2% of the catalog. The season runs from roughly April to November. Wind off the lake in the city and open prairie layouts downstate are the two things that make an Illinois round play longer than the card suggests.

For a round at an unfamiliar club, our guide to playing a new golf course comes first; the national directory covers every state.

Most courses: Chicago (14), Springfield (11), Wheaton (10), Peoria (9), Rockford (9).

Population: U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 Population Estimates (July 1, 2025) (12,719,141 residents). Counts are courses mapped in Yardage, not an official registry.

Courses by city

Is your course mapped?

Type the course or the town, Naperville, Champaign or Quincy, and see whether your Illinois course is one of the 629 in the catalog.

Missing a course?

Give us the course and the town and we will look at mapping it; park district nines are the kind of course that gets missed.