Golf courses in North Carolina

North Carolina has the smallest nine-hole share of any state in our catalog. Yardage has 512 North Carolina courses mapped; 458 have eighteen holes and only 54 have nine, a 10.5% share that puts the state 50th of 50 in the Golf Course Census. Golf in this state was built as a destination, and destinations build eighteen.

Three regions do most of the drawing. The Sandhills around Pinehurst, where 15 courses are mapped in the village alone, six of them at Pinehurst Resort; the Brunswick County coast, where Sunset Beach has 14 mapped and the state tourism office calls the Brunswick Islands the state’s golf coast; and the mountains around Asheville, where summer play stays cool while the Piedmont bakes. The metros hold the rest: Charlotte 24, Raleigh 13, Durham 10.

The season runs all year on the coast and in the Sandhills, with warm-season turf going dormant and brown from December through February; the mountains lose a few winter months to cold. Public golf includes Duke University’s course in Durham and the municipal courses in Wilmington, Gastonia and Asheboro, all mapped. That works out to 4.57 courses per 100,000 people, 24th in the country, or a course for every 21,871 North Carolinians.

A traveling golfer here will play more first-time courses than most; our guide to playing a course you have never seen is the pre-round read. The national directory does the same for the other 49.

Most courses: Charlotte (24), Pinehurst (15), Sunset Beach (14), Raleigh (13), Durham (10).

Population: U.S. Census Bureau, Vintage 2025 Population Estimates (July 1, 2025) (11,197,968 residents). Counts are courses mapped in Yardage, not an official registry.

Courses by city

Is your course mapped?

Type the course name to see whether a North Carolina course, from Pinehurst to the coast, is mapped.

Missing a course?

If a North Carolina course is missing from the list, tell us the name and town and we will look into it.