Courses
Best golf courses near Augusta, GA
Below, you’ll find a list of courses near Augusta, GA. There are 31 courses within a 15-mile radius of Augusta, 15 of which are public courses and 13 are private courses. There are 20 18-hole courses and 11 nine-hole layouts.
The above has been curated through Golf Digest’s Places to Play course database, where we have collected star ratings and reviews from our 1,900 course-ranking panelists. Join our community by signing up for Golf Digest+ and rate the courses you’ve visited recently.
No club has tinkered with its golf course as often or as effectively over the decades as has Augusta National Golf Club, mainly to keep it competitive for the annual Masters Tournament, an event it has conducted since 1934, with time off during WWII. All that tinkering has resulted in an amalgamation of design ideas, with a routing by Alister Mackenzie and Bobby Jones, some Perry Maxwell greens, some Trent Jones water hazards, some Jack Nicklaus mounds and swales and, most recently, extensive rebunkering and tree planting by Tom Fazio. The tinkering continues, including the lengthening of the par-4 fifth in the summer of 2018, the lengthening of the 11th and 15th holes in 2022, and the addition of 35 yards to the famed par-5 13th in 2023.
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At one time, Augusta Country Club was perhaps the only place in the U.S. that had courses designed by Donald Ross and Seth Raynor side-by-side. The club considered the Ross course the stronger of the two--Bobby Jones played and competed here frequently in 1920s, and while building neighboring Augusta National in the early 30s--and the Raynor course was eventually sold off in the 1940s. As is often the case, the Ross course underwent many well-intended but transformative modernizations over the decades, but in 2002 archtitect Brian Silva used Ross's hole-by-hole sketches and field notes to restore as much of what had been lost as possible. He rebuilt the greens, squaring them off and following contour details, recreated Ross's grass-face coffin bunkers, stacking them and turning them perpendicular to the line of play, and even revived a very Raynor-like punchbowl green set above a field of bunkers at the short par-4 16th. The club made news in 2018 when it sold a portion of its property--most of its ninth hole--to Augusta National for what would eventually in 2023 become the new back tee for that club's famous 13th hole. Silva subsequently built Augusta Country Club a new ninth, a par 4 that now bends gently to the right. At last report the club is renovating again, this time using architect Tripp Davis to implement a new multi-year masterplan.
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Golf in Aiken began over a century ago with two in-town courses, Palmetto Golf Club and Aiken Golf Club. Palmetto, founded in 1892, was primarily designed by Herbert Leeds, the builder of Myopia Hunt Club near Boston, with major amendments in 1932 by Alister MacKenzie who was working on Augusta National (just 30 miles away). Ranking comfortably inside our Third 100 Greatest Courses, it’s a polished, jewel-box design draped over up and down topography with one of the country’s great sets of greens full of slick interior movements that slip away into a variety of undulous chipping areas.
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Built just down I-20 from Augusta National, there's no mistaking Sage Valley's resemblance to its neighbor. The pine straw, the perfect conditioning and symmetric mowing paterns, the perfect bunker sand—it's all an ode to Augusta, where Tom Fazio, the architect at Sage Valley, served as the consulting architect for many years. Sage Valley has plenty of room off the tee, similar to its counterpart, but less drastic green complexes, characteristic of Fazio's approach—giving higher-handicappers a chance to run balls up on the ground in some spots—actually similar to how Augusta was originally designed by Dr. Mackenzie. Sage Valley fell off our Second 100 Greatest rankings in 2019 due to a lack of ballots—but it returned in 2023-'24.
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Champions Retreat was originally going to be called "The Big Three" club. It was the idea of a South African developer who brought together Gary Player, Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer (the original Big Three of golf) during a Masters in the 1990s to discuss the prospect of each of them building a course at his proposed club. The idea worked. Each contributed nine holes at the more enduringly-named Champions Retreat west of Augusta on the Savannah River. The composite 18 for this ranking includes the Bluff Nine (Nicklaus), playing in the pines where it climbs a series of forested ridges that demand precise drives and several demanding uphill approches, and Palmer's Island Nine, more gracious in its width featuring artistically-shaped bunkers, a scenic five-hole foray onto a secluded island along the river and two par 3s that plays across watery inlets.
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Just outside Augusta, Ga., and about an hour from Columbia, S.C., Aiken Golf Club is a short, old-school public layout that dates to 1912 when the first 11 holes were laid out as an amenity to the Highland Park Hotel (closed during the Depression), with several running parallel to the rail line that transported guests in and out of town. Owned by the McNair family since 1959 and just steps from the historic downtown, it possesses the many of the same assets as nearby Palmetto though in less refined form with ocean-surge greens, sporty length, eccentric bygone shaping, tantalizing short par 4s and significant fairway movements across the hilly terrain. Very few places have more eclectic or expressive golf packed into a $26-48 green fee. Jim McNair, who operates Aiken Golf Club, is also responsible for locating and building The Chalkmine, a nine-hole short course and practice area for The First Tee of Aiken on a defunct sand and chalk mining site that might have some of the most exciting holes in the county.
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Known locally as “The Patch,” Augusta Municipal sits next to Daniel Field Airport, just two miles from Augusta National. Postage stamp greens and turf that tends to be firm and fast, errant second shots are often punished with vigor. The Patch welcomes all walks of life, and for years it was the only golf course that would allow Augusta National’s mostly Black caddies a place to play. Last year Augusta National announced it would fund a restoration of both the Patch and the nearby First Tee facility that will provide affordable pathways into the game. —Joel Beall
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