Naples, Florida has more golf courses than any other US city, with 56 mapped in the Yardage course catalog. Scottsdale and Houston tie for second with 50 each, Las Vegas has 40 and Tucson 38. Los Angeles, with 17, is the only one of the five largest US cities to make the top 50 at all.
The full top 50 is below (55 rows, because 8 cities tie at 15 courses), with links to every city’s course list. It is a count of courses mapped in Yardage, grouped by the city in each course’s address, so it reflects both how much golf a place has and where the postal boundaries fall. Both matter, and the second one explains most of the surprises.
On this page
The top 50 US cities by number of golf courses
The table counts courses, not facilities. A 36-hole club counts twice. A city appears under its mailing-address name, so Sun City West and Sun City are separate rows even though they share a fence. The last column shows how many of each city’s courses are nine-hole layouts.
What these 50 cities have in common
Together these 55 cities hold 1,282 courses, 8.6% of the 14,987 mapped nationally. Florida supplies 13 of them, Texas and California 5 each, Arizona 4, and South Carolina, Ohio and Georgia three apiece. 21 states place at least one city.
Read down the list and a pattern shows up fast. These are not the biggest cities. They are retirement markets (Naples, Venice, Delray Beach, Sun City is just outside the cut), resort markets (Scottsdale, Myrtle Beach, Hilton Head Island, Palm Desert, La Quinta) and sprawling Sun Belt metros with cheap land and twelve-month seasons (Houston, San Antonio, Phoenix, Las Vegas). The Northeast barely registers: no city in New York, Massachusetts or Connecticut makes the top 50, and New Jersey’s entry is West Orange, a suburb with 14 courses inside a few square miles of Essex County.
The reason is land and when it was developed. Courses built since 1970 were built where subdivisions were going up, and subdivisions went up in Florida, Arizona, Texas and the California desert. A city laid out before cars, like Boston or Philadelphia, pushed its golf out to suburbs with different mailing addresses. Philadelphia has 10 mapped courses inside its city line; the suburbs of Ambler and Huntingdon Valley have 9 each. The golf is there, it just does not say Philadelphia on the scorecard.
Whichever city you are standing in, the thing you need on the tee is the same: a distance to the middle of the green you can trust. Yardage shows that one number, live GPS distance to the center of the green, on your iPhone Lock Screen, for all 14,987 courses in this catalog. It makes a new course feel a lot less new.
The big-city problem: why LA is 17 and NYC is missing
Los Angeles has 17 mapped courses, Chicago has 14, Philadelphia 10, and New York City does not make the list. Each of those metros has well over a hundred courses within an hour's drive. They are filed under suburbs like Wheaton, Illinois (10 mapped courses) and Old Westbury, New York (9).
So a city count is a rough proxy for metro golf, and a bad one for old cities. For a fairer picture of a region, you have to add up the towns. We did that for three metros: Orlando, Phoenix and Scottsdale and Dallas–Fort Worth. Phoenix the city has 27 courses; Phoenix the metro, counted town by town, has 218.
Naples: how one Florida city got to 56
Naples sits at the top because almost every residential community built in Collier County since 1980 came with a golf course attached, often two. The city's mapped count of 56 includes just one nine-hole layout; the rest are full 18s, and many are private, bundled into home ownership. That is the Naples model: the course is an amenity first and a business second. The catch for visitors is that a large share of those 56 are not open to the public, so the raw number overstates what a traveling golfer can book. The city page at Naples golf courses lists every mapped course with its hole count.
The same pattern holds down the Gulf coast: Fort Myers (25), Sarasota (21), Venice (21) and Bradenton (16) all run on residential golf. Florida's full city ranking is in Florida's golf cities ranked by course count.
Scottsdale and Houston: two different ways to reach 50
Scottsdale's 50 courses are resort and club golf in the desert north of the city: multi-course properties where one gate leads to four or six layouts. Eight of the 50 are nine-hole courses, several of them executive layouts inside older communities. Scottsdale's number is also inflated by the mailing address itself, which stretches 30 miles north from the Phoenix line and swallows clubs that are nowhere near downtown.
Houston gets to 50 the other way: it is simply enormous. The city covers more than 600 square miles, so municipal courses, daily-fee tracks and country clubs that would be separate suburbs anywhere else all carry a Houston address. Eight of its 50 are nines. Texas's statewide picture is in how many golf courses are in Texas.
Nine-hole courses in big golf cities
The nine-hole column is worth a look if you have two hours instead of five. Albuquerque has 11 nine-hole courses out of 26, the highest share in the top 50 by a wide margin. Omaha has 10 of 27, Cincinnati 9 of 28, and just outside the table, Duluth, Minnesota has 8 of 14. At the other end, La Quinta (22 courses), Fort Worth (20), Birmingham (20), Virginia Beach (16) and Tampa (14) have no mapped nine-hole courses at all.
Nationally, nine-holers are 24.7% of all mapped courses, but across these 55 cities they are 16.6%. Big golf cities are 18-hole cities. If nine is your game, the states with the most 9-hole courses will point you somewhere flatter and colder.
What the ranking does not measure
- Public access. Naples and Boca Raton are heavy on private clubs. Myrtle Beach and Las Vegas are mostly open to anyone with a credit card. The count treats them the same.
- Quality. Pinehurst, with 15, has more courses worth a plane ticket than some cities with 30.
- Metro area. Address city only. Scottsdale benefits from a huge mailing area; Chicago and Boston suffer from small ones.
- Completeness. This is a count of courses mapped in Yardage, not a census of all American golf. The National Golf Foundation publishes its own facility counts, and counts differ by method (facilities vs courses).
Treat the table as a map of where the courses are stacked, then click through to the city page before you book. For the national picture, see how many golf courses are in the US, and for the per-person view, golf courses per capita by state. A city with 56 courses is a fine place to be a golfer. A city with 14 where you can get on at 8 a.m. on a Saturday might be better.
Questions
What US city has the most golf courses?
Naples, Florida has the most golf courses of any US city, with 56 mapped in the Yardage course catalog. Scottsdale, Arizona and Houston, Texas tie for second with 50 each, followed by Las Vegas (40) and Tucson (38). Naples's total is built on residential golf communities, so many of its courses are private.
Is Scottsdale or Phoenix the bigger golf city?
By mailing address, Scottsdale has 50 mapped courses and Phoenix has 27. But the Scottsdale address covers a huge area stretching north into the desert, and the metro as a whole has 218 mapped courses when you add up all the towns. Phoenix proper is mostly older municipal and club courses; Scottsdale has the resort and multi-course clubs.
Why does New York City have so few golf courses on the list?
New York City does not appear in the top 50 because its golf lives in the suburbs under other mailing addresses. Old Westbury alone has 9 mapped courses. Dense, pre-automobile cities like New York, Boston and Chicago (14 courses) pushed golf outside their borders, so a city count understates how much golf is within an hour's drive.
Which golf city has the most nine-hole courses?
Among the top 50 cities, Albuquerque has the most nine-hole courses with 11 of its 26 mapped layouts. Omaha has 10 of 27, Cincinnati 9 of 28 and Scottsdale, Houston and Indianapolis 8 each. Several big golf cities, including La Quinta, Fort Worth, Birmingham and Tampa, have no mapped nine-hole courses at all.
Is Myrtle Beach the golf capital of the world?
Myrtle Beach calls itself that, and with 30 mapped courses in the city limits plus 11 more in neighboring Longs and 14 in Sunset Beach just over the North Carolina line, the Grand Strand as a region has one of the densest clusters of public golf anywhere. By city-limits count alone it ranks eighth, behind Naples, Scottsdale, Houston, Las Vegas, Tucson, Palm Desert and Indianapolis.