Editorial Standards

Play Private Golf is published by a small independent editorial team. We are golfers, not club employees or industry insiders, and we are not affiliated with, sponsored by, or endorsed by any golf club, course, or charity listed in this directory. Everything published here is written and reviewed by our editorial team under the byline Play Private Golf Editorial Team. We do not publish guest posts, sponsored articles, or paid placements in the directory.

Our scope is narrow on purpose: charity golf outings held at private clubs in the United States, and the practical question of how a member of the public can play those courses. We do not cover equipment, instruction, or tour golf, because we have no particular expertise there.

Listings come from three places: publicly posted charity and foundation event pages, club tournament calendars that are visible to the public, and direct submissions from organizers and players through our event submission form.

We only list outings that are genuinely open to public registration. If an event is invitation-only, member-guest, or restricted to a company's employees, it does not belong in this directory and we leave it out — even when we know about it.

When a listing is marked as a verified course, it means we have confirmed two specific things: that the course named in the listing is the actual venue, and that a public registration path existed at the time we checked. It does not mean we have inspected the event, vetted the charity's finances, or guaranteed availability.

Entry fees, dates, formats, and availability change frequently and often without notice. For that reason every event page sends you to the organizer's own registration page as the authoritative source, and we ask you to confirm details there before making travel plans or payments. We take no commission and never process registrations or payments ourselves.

Course details such as par, championship yardage, architect, and year opened are drawn from published, checkable references — club histories, championship records, and governing-body course information — and are recorded in a curated internal dataset rather than generated automatically.

Because of that, we would rather show nothing than show a guess. If we do not have verified figures for a course, the “Course at a Glance” panel simply does not appear on that page. We never estimate a yardage, invent a slope rating, or attribute a design to an architect we cannot confirm. Championship history is limited to events we can document.

Our guides are written in-house to answer the questions we actually get asked: how to play a private course without a membership, what an outing costs, and what to expect on the day. Each guide is checked against primary sources for any factual claim, and cost ranges are described as ranges rather than false precision, because they vary widely by club and region.

Every guide carries a published date and a last-reviewed date. We re-read guides on a recurring basis, and any guide that mentions pricing or seasonal timing gets reviewed at least once a year, since those are the details that go stale fastest. When we make a substantive change, we update the review date rather than quietly editing the page.

Where we are uncertain, we say so in the text. Where a number depends on your situation — tax deductibility, for example — we point you to a qualified professional instead of pretending to give advice we are not qualified to give.

If something on this site is wrong, we want to fix it, and we would rather hear about it from you than leave it published. Email us through the contact page with the page URL and what is incorrect.

We aim to review correction reports within a few business days. Factual errors are corrected directly on the page. If an event has been cancelled, moved, or closed to the public, we update or remove the listing. If a correction materially changes the substance of a guide, we note the change and update the last-reviewed date.

This site may display third-party advertising, including ads served by Google. Advertising is kept separate from editorial: advertisers have no input into which events we list, which courses we cover, or what our guides say, and no listing can be bought. We do not accept payment for inclusion in the directory or for a “verified” label.

Details on the data collected in connection with advertising, and how to opt out of personalized ads, are in our privacy policy.

If anything here is unclear, or you want to know how we arrived at a particular figure, ask us on the contact page. We are happy to share our sourcing for any claim we publish.

This page was last reviewed on August 1, 2026.