Certainly, the Covid boom has propelled golf to higher prices, and while the perception is that the effect of the top tier’s pricing has trickled down to impact the game’s cost at all levels. But according to a report this week from the National Golf Foundation, the facts say otherwise. Believe it or not, golf’s average green fees have increased since 2019 pretty much right in line with inflation.

There’s a lot of business being done on the golf course, and women are being left out. Here’s how to close the gap.

Total golf participation – both on course and off course – was at a record 48.1 million in 2025, according to data from the National Golf Foundation. That marked a 2% increase over 2024 and a whopping 41% jump over 2019. Over the past decade, the number has increased 55%, from 31 million in 2015.

Fairways of Life is joined by Greg Nathan, CEO of the National Golf Foundation, to learn about the numbers for golf participation in the United States. Spoiler: golf popularity is still on the rise after 2025.

From the floor of the PGA Show, Greg Nathan, President & CEO of the National Golf Foundation, breaks down the latest State of the Industry data.

For the sixth consecutive year, Americans played more than 500 million rounds nationally, a streak unmatched in golf history. The NGF cited this stat as “further evidence the post-pandemic surge has proven more durable than some initially expected.”

“The NGF in many ways is known for counting things — counting rounds, counting golf courses, counting golfers,” Nathan says. “But we’ve really been challenging ourselves to do more than being bean counters, to really be social scientists. We think it’s much more important to understand why people do what they do. What about psychology and behavior that drives what goes on in the golf business? That’s what we’re spending a lot more time looking at.”

It is especially telling that golf’s growth is even stronger off-course than on-course. Participation in golf entertainment venues like TopGolf and simulators rose to 37.9 million, eclipsing on-course play in each of the past four years, and more than doubling since 2014.

The NGF’s recently released The Graffis Report, its annual golf industry review, found that green-grass golf participation in the U.S. surpassed 29 million in 2025, short of the all-time record of 30.6 million in 2003 but marked an eighth consecutive year of growth and a net increase of roughly one million golfers year-over-year. Over the past eight years, on-course participation has risen by more than 5 million

Each January the National Golf Foundation (NGF) releases the golf industry Graffis Report and for 2025 several interesting facts popped out starting with the total number of participants reaching 48.1 million.