Press pack

In one paragraph

Every golf club in Britain publishes what a visitor pays to play. Almost none publish what a member’s guest pays, even though it is a different and usually far lower figure set by the same club for the same round. The Member’s Guest Rate Index is a continuing attempt to collect that second number, club by club, from published rate cards and from the clubs themselves by telephone. It currently covers 264 clubs, of which 263 can be compared directly against a visitor fee confirmed against a source, with figures to 23 September 2026.

Headline findings

Written as standalone sentences so they can be quoted without rework. All figures are medians unless stated.

1. The typical member's guest rate at a British golf club is £35, against a typical visitor green fee of £95 at the same clubs. Being signed in by a member costs 63% less, a difference of £55 a round.
2. 51% of clubs in the index charge £25 to £39 to sign in a guest, whatever the golf course. The visitor fee at those same clubs runs from £35 to £400. A club's guest rate says very little about its course and a great deal about what its committee thinks is fair to charge a member's friend.
3. The gap is widest at the best courses. At clubs ranked in Britain's top 100, the median guest rate is £45 against a median visitor fee of £222.50, a difference of £182.50. At every other club the same two figures are £35 and £85.
4. Regionally, an introduction is worth most in Scotland, where the median saving is £125 a round, and least in the North East, at £30.
5. At the widest, the difference between the two prices runs to £350 a round. The clubs where the gap is largest are ranked in the index.

Quotes

Attributable to Alex Greenwood, founder of Hosted Rounds. Use whole or in part.

“I wanted to play the courses everyone wants to play, and I kept coming back to the same answer. The way on is to know a member. Not a booking site, not a deal, a person. Once you notice that, you start wondering how many golfers are one introduction away from a course they have wanted to play for twenty years, and have no idea it would cost them forty quid.”

Alex Greenwood, founder of Hosted Rounds

“The rate in this index is not one you can go and book. It only exists when a member signs you in, and that is the whole point of it. And when they do, you are not just getting the price. You are getting somebody who knows where not to go on the third, who tells you the greens run away from the hill, and who introduces you in the clubhouse afterwards. Cheaper golf, better golf, and one more person you know in the game.”

Alex Greenwood, founder of Hosted Rounds

“The courses at the top of the British game are not really pricing for British golfers any more. They are pricing for somebody flying in, and more and more that is an American with a bucket list and a feed full of golf content telling them where to go. On the north west coast especially, visitor fees have gone somewhere no ordinary club golfer recognises. What has not moved is the guest rate. That is why the gap is widest exactly where you would most want it to be, and why knowing a member has quietly become the only affordable way onto the best courses in the country.”

Alex Greenwood, founder of Hosted Rounds

“We rang the clubs and asked, one at a time, a hundred and seventy five of them. Where a club would rather not give the figure, we left it out rather than guess at it. That is a great deal slower than estimating, and it is the only reason the numbers are worth anything.”

Alex Greenwood, founder of Hosted Rounds

Method, in short

We rang the clubs and asked, one at a time, which is where most of this comes from (176 clubs). Where a club publishes the rate on its own website we took it from there (81 clubs). Members give us the rate at their own club when they join. All of it goes into our database against the club it belongs to, with the date and where it came from, and the index is built from that.

Every visitor fee carries a source and a date, and anything without both is left out of the comparisons rather than estimated. Summer and peak figures throughout. Regional and course-type findings only where at least five clubs sit behind them.

These are the clubs in the Hosted Rounds directory rather than every club in Britain. It is the first and largest collection of member’s guest rates we know of, and it grows every week.

The index is updated continuously as rates are confirmed, and re-checked from scratch every April, when clubs set the new season’s prices. That April edition is when the year-on-year movement becomes available.

A club only enters the index once it holds a guest rate, so clubs that give a guest no discount, or decline to give a figure, are absent. The saving quoted is the saving among clubs that offer one. “Top 100” means a course listed in the Top 100 Golf Courses ranking for Britain and Ireland (top100golfcourses.com); that ranking includes Ireland, this index does not, so these are its British entries only. We publish no ranking of our own.

The full methodology, including what the figures do not tell you, is set out on the index itself.

Available on request

• An interview: what Hosted Rounds is, why we started it, and what has happened to guest pricing.
• Charts from the index as images, sized for print or web.
• Confirmation of a figure you are quoting, if you want it checked before you print.

What we do not send out is the data itself. It was built one phone call at a time and it is the only thing here that cannot be looked up somewhere else, so it stays on this site, where anybody can read it and nobody has to pay for it.