The Bay Area Golf Report

What golf costs: by region, hour & course

The price picture is fixed as a citable snapshot — 35,385 bookable tee times at 119 public courses, collected July 5, 2026 straight from the booking systems the courses use. Not rack rates: the real prices you could book.

• The median 18-hole round costs $57 across 119 public courses — but the spread is enormous, from $14 to $445. The priciest bookable round (Pasatiempo Golf Club, $445) costs about 26× the cheapest (Diablo Creek Golf Course, $17).
• Time of day moves prices more than anything else — the median peaks at $72 mid-morning and slides to $37 by 7pm.
• Twilight is the biggest discount in golf: at the same course, afternoon slots run a median 35% below morning rates.
• Geography is destiny: the median round in Lake Tahoe ($139) costs 3.1× the median in Sacramento ($45).

Median 18-hole price by region

Lake Tahoe's resort courses top the table and the coastal counties carry the famous-name premium. The value belt runs inland: Sacramento, Napa's municipal side, and the North Bay all post medians under $50.

Median price of an 18-hole tee time, July 6–11, 2026.

The shape of a golf day: price by hour

Prices climb to a mid-morning peak, hold through lunch, then fall off a cliff after 2pm as twilight rates kick in. The 7pm median is roughly half the 8am median.

Median 18-hole price by start hour, all courses pooled, July 6–11, 2026.

The biggest twilight discounts

Comparing each course against itself — median afternoon (3pm-on) vs. median morning (7–11am) — the median course discounts twilight 35%. These discount hardest:

Among 85 courses with enough inventory in both windows. Live afternoon availability on our deals feed below.

What Saturday actually costs

Same course, same morning hours (7–11am), different day: the median course charges 25% more on Saturday than midweek. 3 of 39 charge no premium at all; these raise weekend rates the most:

Morning-to-morning comparison; 39 courses had enough inventory in both windows.

The cheapest rounds in the Bay Area

Median bookable price across the whole week — everyday rates, not one-off deals (for live markdowns, see the deals feed):

Browse short courses on the 9-hole and par-3 pages.

How fast tee times disappear

Frozen August 2026 edition · 577,100 inventory snapshots over 30 days (July 12 – August 10, 2026) · 6,906 complete booking series

Every other chapter here is a photograph. This one is the film: since July we have logged what every course’s tee sheet looked like at each scrape, so we can follow the same Saturday morning as it fills up and answer the only question that actually decides your weekend — how long do you have to decide?

Across every course and daypart, bookable 18-hole inventory falls −15.2% between six days out and the night before. What is striking is the shape: it is almost a straight line, roughly −3% a day, with no cliff. There is no magic hour when the tee sheet suddenly goes — it drains steadily, which means every day you wait costs you about the same slice of what is left.

The average hides the only number that matters

That gentle −3%-a-day slope is an artifact of averaging a scarce product with an abundant one. Split the weekend by time of day and the two behave nothing alike: weekend prime time (7–11am) loses −38.7% of its inventory over those five days, while twilight loses just −8.8%.

Put plainly: of the weekend prime slots on offer six days out, only about 61 in 100 are still there the night before. Twilight is a different market — it is still there when you are, which is exactly why it stays cheap (see the −34.5% twilight discount in the price chapter). Weekends drain faster than weekdays overall (−19% vs −13.9%), but the daypart split is the far bigger effect.

Waiting does not get you a better price

The obvious counter-strategy is to hold out for a late discount. The data says do not bother. Following the same tee sheets over the same five days, the median price barely moves at any daypart — the largest swing anywhere is −0.7% (twilight (3pm+)).

Bay Area public courses do not appear to discount into the week, and they do not surge either. The number you see six days out is essentially the number you will pay — so waiting buys you nothing but a thinner tee sheet.

Where the weekend goes first

Course by course, weekend prime time empties at wildly different rates. These 12 tee sheets are effectively gone by the night before — if one of them is your course, six days out is not early, it is late.

And the mirror image — courses where a weekend prime slot is still there the night before. Some genuinely stay open; a few of these gain inventory as the date nears, because the course releases more slots or takes cancellations back onto the sheet.

42 of 124 tracked courses cleared the sample floor (at least 6 weekend days observed and 40 prime slots six days out). This is net change in bookable inventory, not a fill rate — see methodology.

Best value: most course per dollar

The cheapest round isn't the best value — a flat muni at $30 and a championship layout at $55 aren't the same purchase. So we rank courses by how much course you get per dollar: USGA course rating (an objective measure of the golf itself) against live median 18-hole price. Deliberately not a cheapest list. Diablo Creek Golf Course tops it — a 73.3 rating for a $17 median round.

Bar length = value score (higher is better value). The bold number is the score; the smaller grey figure is that course's median green fee. Full ratings in the table below.

Value = USGA course rating ÷ median 18-hole price × 10 ("rating points per $10"). Top 20 of 97 scored courses.

Hardest tee times to book this weekend

Live snapshot as of September 2 at 7:05 AM PT · weekend of Sat, Sep 5 & Sun, Sep 6 · books up as the week goes on

Every public course we track, ranked by how little prime weekend inventory is left — bookable 18-hole slots 7–11am on Sat, Sep 5 & Sun, Sep 6, the window everyone wants. Shorter list, harder to get on. Chardonnay Golf Club is tightest right now with just 1 slot left; 21 of 79 courses are down to three or fewer.

Scarcest 20 of 79 courses with weekend prime inventory. This is a remaining-availability proxy, not a fill rate — see methodology.

Deals right now

Live snapshot as of September 2 at 7:05 AM PT · same-day & twilight slots · changes every scrape

The best-priced tee times on the board — same-day and twilight (3pm+) 18-hole slots priced at least 15% below what each course normally charges this week. Compared against each course's own median, so a "deal" here is a genuine markdown, not just a cheap course. Biggest right now: −71% at Incline Village - Championship Course. Updates with every scrape.

Each course's biggest live markdown — 25 of 89 courses with a deal (7,414 qualifying slots). Availability changes constantly; a slot may be gone by the time you click.