A handicap without the need for competitions? For some of you that shift has felt like sacrilege. You didn’t just get a handicap. You earned it. It was battle tested – forged under pressure and proved your game was up to the challenge.
Then the World Handicap System arrived in Great Britain & Ireland. Five years on, anyone can have a handicap. You don’t have to grind in a medal or stick it out in a Stableford. You don’t even need to be a member of a club.
Now you need nothing more than a low-cost subscription, an app, and a desire to track your progress.
If that’s the measure by which we judge the WHS – and one of the R&A and USGA’s stated intentions with it was to improve accessibility to the sport – then the system has done what it set out to do.
It has opened a door to people who may otherwise have never visited a clubhouse. And the numbers alone suggest it may be changing the game.
It’s timing couldn’t have been odder. Launched on November 2, 2020, England went straight into a Covid lockdown. Courses were closed – and would be again – as the globe struggled to get to grips with the impact of a pandemic.
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But when they reopened, interest in golf exploded. Lots of people found their way to the fairways for the first time, others grabbed their old clubs out of the garage and dusted them off. They arrived at clubs to find the World Handicap System waiting.
What about those numbers? In England alone, more than 10 million scores have been submitted so far this year. That’s two million more than the entirety of 2021.
General Play scores – the source of so much angst for those concerned about WHS – are now on a near equal footing with competition scores in England. It’s almost a 50-50 split for men.
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Is that simply golfers trying to cheat their handicaps, or the reality of a golfing populace that appreciates flexibility? Not everyone can play in a Saturday medal. Some can’t play competitions at all.
Those players want to engage with meaningful golf on terms that suit them, not when a calendar says they should.
England Golf’s iGolf programme, which allows non-club members to gain a handicap, has now passed 70,000 subscribers. In the four years since its launch, 20,000 more have used the scheme as a platform to jump into membership.
And membership, often teetering between steady decline and stagnant drift in the years before the post 2020 participation boom, remains very strong. More than 720,000 people in England alone are committed to clubs in 2025.
In the United States, the figures are equally large. Some 3.4 million golfers have a handicap index – 800,000 more than when the WHS began over there. Over 80 million scores were posted last year.
We do need to listen to what golfers are saying about WHS
There are many of you reading this who will profoundly disagree with me. Plenty of you aren’t just unconvinced, you’re angry about the system.
You are concerned about manipulation, indifferent about Course Rating, and frustrated that parts of it are not open to review.
You believe general play scores have made cheating easier. You are irritated at some of the scores posted in competitions. You reckon the WHS has robbed golfers of the desire to improve.
I have lamented the loss of buffer zones. I’ve questioned Course Rating, railed against the static Playing Conditions Calculation, and asked whether scores at away clubs can be too easily used to raise indexes.
All these criticisms and constructive suggestions matter. I believe more could be done to acknowledge them.
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Complaints against the system can sometimes be dismissed as the views of people resistant to change. If players don’t trust the system, though, it can never truly succeed.
And accepting it doesn’t mean not being able to challenge it.
But we also need to recognise what it was designed to achieve. It wasn’t meant to replace club traditions. It was made to make golf more open. If you judge it on that alone, it is making progress.
We can track participation more accurately than ever before. We can see how, when, and where people play. And, crucially, lots of golfers have chosen to stick around.
The World Handicap System is still bedding in. There is much to improve and there will undoubtedly be tweaks to come.
Five years on, though, it does now seem counterproductive to simply be screaming for its replacement. As Sarah Barter, England Golf’s head of handicapping told me, it’s going nowhere. Surely the work ahead is to try and make it perform better for everyone.
But in the here and now, and on those numbers alone, the WHS hasn’t broken golf. It is helping to open it up.
Now have your say on WHS
What do you think? Are the complaints about WHS going to keep coming, or will handicapping in GB&I settle down in the near future? Let me know in the comments or contact us on X.
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