Average golf swing speed by handicap and gender

Where you sit on TrackMan's table

110 mph and 92 mphScratch and bogey male amateurs, TrackMan Combine driver averages

TrackMan publishes driver club speed for male amateurs in five rows. Scratch or better, 110 mph. Five handicap, 101. Ten handicap, 95. The row it labels the average golfer, at 14.5, sits on 94. Bogey golfer, 92. The female table has four rows: scratch or better 90, five handicap 87, ten handicap 83, fifteen handicap 79.

Both tables carry the same heading, Combine averages. A Combine is TrackMan's own standardised test, so every golfer in those rows took that test on a TrackMan unit: a population with access to a launch monitor and a reason to book time on one, which is not the population on your Saturday tee sheet.

Read each row as the centre of a spread, not a target. TrackMan gives one figure per band and no range around it, so nothing on the page says how far from the row a golfer can sit and still belong in it.

The gaps between the rows are not even

Subtract the rows and the table stops being a ladder. Scratch to five handicap costs nine miles an hour. Five to ten costs six. Ten to 14.5 costs one. On TrackMan's own figures, driver speed separates good players from very good ones far more sharply than it separates a mid-handicapper from a bogey golfer.

The female table falls more evenly, roughly three-quarters of a mile an hour per stroke across its four rows. Set the two beside each other and the most useful line in either is this: a scratch woman swings at 90 mph, slower than the male bogey golfer at 92, and scores far better.

Speed and scoring are still linked. Fradkin, Sherman and Finch filmed 45 male golfers holding handicaps from 2 to 27, ten swings each, on a high-speed camera, and found club head speed correlated with handicap at r = 0.950. Their paper set out to validate club speed as a laboratory measure, not to publish population averages. The tables everyone quotes are not that study.

The tour end and the far end

117.02 mphPGA Tour club head speed average, 2026 season to date

The PGA Tour keeps its own club head speed table, filed under off the tee. Through the week ending 7 September 2026 the tour average sits at 117.02 mph. Gary Woodland leads it at 127.60 across 295 measured attempts, with Rory McIlroy on 123.85.

TrackMan's published tour figure is 115 mph for the PGA Tour and 96 for the LPGA. Its note on how those are built covers most of the two-mile-an-hour gap: the male data spans more than 40 events and 200 players across the PGA Tour and the DP World Tour, and includes range shots as well as competition.

One recorded number sits above all of it. TrackMan puts the fastest club speed it has measured at 169.6 mph, by Seb Twaddell in late 2023: about 45 per cent quicker than the tour average, and some 80 per cent quicker than the average amateur male.

Four datasets, four different answers

Golf.com printed TrackMan's handicap chart in February 2021, under Luke Kerr-Dineen's byline: scratch golfers around 106 mph, tour players upwards of 110, an overall average of 93.4, and more than 40 per cent of those measured swinging between 91 and 100 mph. TrackMan's current page has scratch at 110. One source, four miles an hour apart at the scratch line.

The two largest amateur datasets cannot settle it, because neither measures speed. Arccos analysed 26 million shots from 300,000 users between 2017 and 2019, collected by sensors in the grips during real rounds. Shot Scope's blog puts its database past 200 million shots. Both publish driving distance. Neither publishes a club speed figure. That narrows what the table at the top of this page honestly is: one company's measurement of the golfers who chose to take its test.

What five miles an hour is worth

Up to 15 yardsTrackMan's figure for five extra mph of driver club speed

TrackMan's own conversion is that adding 1 mph of club speed can increase driver distance by up to 3 yards, which makes five miles an hour worth up to fifteen. The words carrying that are up to: the ceiling for a centre strike leaving at a sensible launch, not the average outcome of swinging harder.

Run the conversion across TrackMan's own table and the arithmetic overshoots. Scratch to bogey is 18 mph in the male Combine rows, which at three yards a mile an hour predicts 54 yards. Arccos, measuring drives on golf courses, found 33.6 yards between its 0-5 and its 16-20 handicap bands: 242.6 yards against 209.

The bands are not identical and the two yardages are not the same measurement, one being launch monitor distance and the other where the ball finished on a real hole. The distance between 54 yards and 33.6 is roughly what a golf course takes back, and Shot Scope's distribution says the same thing from another angle: nearly 70 per cent of amateurs average under 250 yards off the tee.