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Links Magazine · Annual Survey

Courses &
Rankings

The definitive guide to the world's greatest golf courses — ranked, reviewed, and celebrated

Annual Survey

World Top 10 · 2025

Our annual rankings survey canvasses 240 expert panellists — former Open Champions, leading golf architects, course superintendents, and serious amateur players across six continents — to determine the world's finest golf courses. Design, conditioning, setting, and the quality of the overall experience are weighted equally. This is the 2025 result.

  1. No. 1 in the World

    Royal County Down

    Newcastle, Northern Ireland

    Links · Par 71 · 7,218 yards

    Majestic natural links in the shadow of the Mountains of Mourne, with blind tee shots and fairways that seem to have been placed by the landscape itself. Old Tom Morris laid out the first nine holes for four pounds in 1889. The result is, 135 years later, widely regarded as the most beautiful golf course on earth.

  2. Pine Valley

    Pine Valley, New Jersey, USA

    Heathland · Par 70 · 7,057 yards

    George Crump's masterwork — set in a pine forest and built on principles of absolute severity — remains the most demanding examination golf can provide. Every shot must be precise; there is no recovery from a serious mistake.

  3. Cypress Point

    Pebble Beach, California, USA

    Links/Parkland · Par 72 · 6,536 yards

    Alister MacKenzie's most celebrated work combines woodland, coastal scrubland, and three extraordinary ocean holes into a routing that many consider the most beautiful ever conceived. The 16th, playing 233 yards over the Pacific, is golf's most daunting par-3.

  4. St Andrews Old Course

    St Andrews, Fife, Scotland

    Links · Par 72 · 6,721 yards

    Six centuries of continuous play. The Road Hole. The Swilcan Bridge. Thirty Open Championships. The Old Course is not the most technically demanding in the world, but no other place in sport carries comparable weight of history and meaning.

  5. Augusta National

    Augusta, Georgia, USA

    Parkland · Par 72 · 7,555 yards

    Bobby Jones and Alister MacKenzie's vision of a perfect course, now refined over 90 years of Masters Tournaments into something between sport and spectacle. The conditioning is without parallel in world golf.

  6. Pebble Beach Golf Links

    Pebble Beach, California, USA

    Links · Par 72 · 7,075 yards

    Six US Opens, and every one produced drama. Pebble Beach is America's answer to the great Scottish links — a course where the Pacific is not backdrop but participant, its mood determining everything about how the course plays on any given day.

  7. Shinnecock Hills

    Southampton, New York, USA

    Links/Heathland · Par 70 · 7,445 yards

    The closest America comes to links golf without standing at the sea's edge. William Flynn's masterwork sits on the Long Island scrublands, exposed to Atlantic wind, its fairways rumpled and its greens as demanding as any in the US Open rota.

  8. Royal Melbourne (West)

    Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

    Sand Belt · Par 72 · 6,589 yards

    Alister MacKenzie's only trip to Australia produced the finest course in the Southern Hemisphere. The sand belt turf is unlike anything in the northern world, and the bunkering — deep, precise, uncompromising — represents the architect at his most severe.

  9. Featured This Issue

    Turnberry (Ailsa)

    Turnberry, South Ayrshire, Scotland

    Links · Par 70 · 7,461 yards

    Post-renovation, the Ailsa Course has reclaimed its position among the game's great links. Four Open Championships and a setting of almost theatrical beauty — the lighthouse, the Ailsa Craig, the cliffside holes of the back nine — make Turnberry an essential experience.

  10. Oakmont

    Oakmont, Pennsylvania, USA

    Parkland · Par 71 · 7,255 yards

    Nine US Opens. The fastest greens in championship golf. A course designed on the principle that par is not a right but a privilege. Oakmont is the American game at its most unforgiving, demanding ball-striking of championship quality on every hole.

In Depth

Course Reviews

Royal County Down with Mountains of Mourne

Newcastle, Northern Ireland

Royal County Down

98 / 100
Design99
Setting100
Experience96

There are no weak holes at Royal County Down. There is no moment when the pressure relents, when the landscape forgives you, when the course stops demanding your very best. The 9th, played to a green tucked beneath a dune with the Mountains of Mourne behind, may be the most beautiful short par-4 in the world.

The blind tee shots require local knowledge that must be earned over multiple rounds — a deliberate design decision that rewards familiarity and punishes impatience. Royal County Down is not a course for one visit. It is a course for a lifetime.

Full Review
St Andrews Old Course with Swilcan Bridge

St Andrews, Fife, Scotland

St Andrews Old Course

96 / 100
Design94
History100
Experience98

You can argue about the quality of certain holes — the par-5s that now yield easily to modern equipment, the shared fairways that create unusual strategic puzzles — but the argument becomes irrelevant the moment you stand on the first tee with the town curving around you and feel six centuries settling onto your shoulders.

The Road Hole 17th remains the finest par-4 in the world: a hotel blocking the ideal line from the tee, a bunker that swallows ambition on the approach, a road behind the green that claims anything hit firmly. Golf's most beautiful problem.

Full Review
Turnberry Ailsa Course with lighthouse

Turnberry, South Ayrshire, Scotland

Turnberry — Ailsa Course

96 / 100
Design97
Setting99
Challenge95

Holes 9 through 12 along the Ayrshire cliff tops — on any calm summer's day — represent the most beautiful four consecutive holes in world golf. The lighthouse stands sentinel, the Ailsa Craig floats on the horizon, and the fairways press against the sea with the confidence of something that knows exactly what it is.

Martin Ebert's renovation has produced a course harder and more exacting than the one Watson and Nicklaus played in 1977. Whether the additions fully integrate remains a minor debate. The experience, overall, is extraordinary.

Feature Article

Full Rankings Inside

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