The best golf courses in South Carolina

Wexford in Hilton Head Island is one of the best courses in South Carolina. Discover our experts' reviews and where Wexford ranks in our rankings

Fazio's entry at Barefoot Resort will challenge the best players—with the routing constantly changing direction to account for the seemingly ever-present wind—but is playable for the resort player. The par-5 fourth hole stands out—lined with bunkers and a sentinel pine up by the green. The 18th hole is a great finish, playing up to the clubhouse with a huge porch, perfect for watching players come in.

In 2016, Jack Nicklaus led the renovation of Turtle Point, regrassing the course with Paspalum, reconstructing all of the bunkers, and improving the irrigation efficiency. This Kiawah Island resort course now features increased shot variety and requires strategic play with several hidden water hazards.

Grande Dunes reopened in September 2022 after a complete greens and bunker renovation over the summer. Spectacular views of the Intracoastal Waterway and Grande Dunes Marina make this links-style golf course well worth the visit. Designed by Roger Rulewich Group, the course was built on a high bluff—the ideal setting for a picturesque sunset round. Expansive fairways littered with penalty areas throughout define Grande Dunes as a difficult, yet enjoyable resort course.

Daniel Island Club: Beresford Creek is one of the best golf courses in South Carolina. Discover our experts' reviews and course information.

Berkeley Hall: South Course is one of the best golf courses in South Carolina. Discover our experts' reviews and course information.

Renovated in 2014 by Tom Fazio, several holes at Osprey Point run parallel to water hazards, and deep bunkers provide ample defense against greens of varying sizes. Nestled in the natural Lowcountry salt marsh, this track’s stunning classic-style clubhouse also adds appeal.

Callawassie Island, formerly the Country Club of Callawassie and located northwest of Hilton Head Island, was among the first generation of courses Tom Fazio designed in the mid-1980s following his longtime partnership with George Fazio, his uncle. The club is set on a ubiquitously named island and features two nines that comprise the main course that our panelists evaluate for the Golf Digest rankings. Both circle out through the Lowcountry development with the last hole of the Magnolia nine running along the tidal marshes of the Colleton River and Callawassie Creek, and the last four holes of the Dogwood nine skirting tight along the marshes from the opposite direction. Both nines have undergone extensive renovations over the previous few years.

Formerly known as Hampton Pointe, this property was renovated and rebranded in 2021 as an upscale residential community called Riverton Pointe, with a golf course completely overhauled by Nicklaus Design. The layout shows off the Lowcountry setting with holes that twist through forests of native pine and oak and bend around lagoons, studded by large, ornately sculptured bunkers and rippling greens with short-grass runoffs.

Wachesaw Plantation Club in Murrells Inlet is one of the best courses in South Carolina. Discover our experts' reviews and where Wachesaw Plantation ranks in our rankings

Berkeley Hall's North Course is one of the best golf courses in South Carolina. Discover our experts' reviews and where Berkeley Hall ranks in our latest rankings.

Overhauled by David Love III, Atlantic Dunes is the reconstruction of The Sea Pines Resort’s Ocean Course, Hilton Head’s first golf course. This lowcountry track features water on almost every hole, beautiful Spanish moss-draped oaks and lurking gators, if you look close enough. The seaside feel of the course is accentuated by the native grasses and coquina shells scattered throughout.

When Ken Tomlinson set out to build this Grand Strand course, he looked to world-famous designs, such as Merion and Pine Valley. The architect wanted to ensure that his venue would harmonize seamlessly with its natural surroundings. Tidewater does just that: sitting atop a peninsula, the golf course is nestled between the tidal marsh and forest lands in North Myrtle Beach.

Daniel Island Club consists of 36 holes—the Ralston Creek course, designed by Rees Jones, and the Beresford Creek course by Tom Fazio—that weave through the lowcountry north of Charleston. Both layouts have been in Golf Digest's Best Courses in South Carolina rankings, but the Ralston Creek is currently ranked higher than the Fazio design. Both courses co-hosted the 2023 U.S. Junior Amateur.

Once the host of the Senior PGA Tour Championship and now home to Dustin Johnson’s annual World Junior Golf Championship, TPC Myrtle Beach is designed to challenge even the pros. Numerous water hazards, strategically placed trees, and forced carries make this track a tough, but enjoyable test.

Strantz returned to Pawley’s Island just a few years after Caledonia opened, nearly to the exact same place, in fact. True Blue is Caledonia’s sister course, located on an inland property that sits just across the street, though sequestered from any marsh views. But what it lacks in scenery it makes up for in volume. Everything at True Blue is bigger and more heroic. Greens erupt out of sand barrens, fairways are 60 to 90 yards wide and holes take on the form of ambling caterpillars. The abrupt, hi-contrast shaping, made possible by the sandy terrain, is a not-so-subtle nod in the direction of Pine Valley.

Greenville Country Club's Riverside course is one of the best courses in South Carolina. Discover our experts' reviews and where Greenville Country Club ranks in our rankings

The highest-ranked of the four courses at Barefoot Resort, the Dye course features classic Dye bunker complexes with risk/reward opportunities for low-handicappers with playable options from forward tees for higher handicappers.

Caledonia was Strantz’s first solo design in 1994, and his creativity shines on this golf-only, oak-dotted, sand-dune parcel abutting the marshes and rice paddies of Pawley’s Island. The design is ordered and composed, twisting low through the heavy tree canopy while setting up classic hole strategies into angled greens. There are touches of Pete Dye and just enough quirk to suggest something more intense and experimental brewing under the surface. Two musts: The chowder at the turn, and a drink on the porch behind the 18th hole.

The Reserve at Lake Keowee in Sunset is one of the best courses in South Carolina. Discover our experts' reviews and where The Reserve at Lake Keowee ranks in our rankings

The Golf Club at Briar's Creek in Johns Island is one of the best courses in South Carolina. Discover our experts' reviews and where Briar's Creek ranks in our rankings

You’d never know the Bulls Bay site was agricultural land indistinguishable from everything else for miles around. Strantz completely transformed the terrain of this property north of Charleston by excavating earth and creating a ridge on one side of the course. With the clubhouse sitting atop, it’s the focal point of the course and provides elevation changes uncommon for the lowcountry, with several holes playing into and off of the high ground. The lower holes are just as enticing with a mix of long and short par 4s, four lovely and diverse par 3s, two boomerang par 5s and a stretch of holes that border Capers Creek and the Intracoastal Waterway.

Haig Point's Signature course is one of the best courses in South Carolina. Read our experts' reviews and discover how you can book a tee time

The Cliffs at Keowee Vineyards in Sunset is one of the best courses in South Carolina. Discover our experts' reviews and where The Cliffs at Keowee Vineyards ranks in our rankings

Musgrove Mill Golf Club in Clinton is one of the best courses in South Carolina. Discover our experts' reviews and where Musgrove Mill ranks in our rankings

The Jack Nicklaus course at Colleton River Club in Bluffton is one of the best courses in South Carolina. Discover our experts' reviews and where Colleton River Club ranks in our rankings

Its oceanside dunes are mostly covered with turfgrass and mature trees now, but when Robert Trent Jones built The Dunes back in the late 1940s, the property was primarily windswept sand dotted with lagoons. Those lakes come in prominently on many holes, particularly on the 11th through 13th, dubbed Alligator Alley. (The boomerang-shaped par-5 13th is called Waterloo.) The home hole, with a pond in front of the green, started as a gambling par 5 but today is a daunting par 4. The course has hosted three USGA championships, including the 1962 U.S. Women's Open and, most recently, the 2017 U.S. Women's Amateur Four-Ball. The Dunes Golf and Beach Club has hosted the PGA Tour's Myrtle Beach Classic for the past two years.

Quixote Club, an hour east of Columbia, is built over the top of an old country club course, although nothing of that routing remains. North Carolina-based architect Kris Spence and Jack Nicklaus II created a gorgeous walking course with new holes twisting and turning elegantly through exposed sandscapes and stands of oak and pine. The name of the club is taken from the owners’ altruistically audacious mission of providing funding for a charter school that hopes to turn around the educational opportunities of up to 2,000 local students.

The Chanticleer course at Greenville Country Club is one of the best courses in South Carolina. Discover our experts' reviews and where Greenville Country Club ranks in our rankings

The Cliffs at Mountain Park in Travelers Rest is one of the best courses in South Carolina. Discover our experts' reviews and where The Cliffs at Mountain Park ranks in our rankings

Chechessee Creek Club in Okatie is one of the best courses in South Carolina. Discover our experts' reviews and where Chechessee Creek Club ranks in our rankings

Old Tabby Links in Okatie is one of the best courses in South Carolina. Discover our experts' reviews and where Old Tabby Links ranks in our rankings

Built some 35 years after nearby Harbour Town Golf Links, May River is an interesting contrast in Jack Nicklaus's portfolio (Nicklaus was co-designer of Harbour Town with Pete Dye). It's an equally low-profile layout with a number of bump-and-run approach shots, but with several Pine Valley-like waste areas and with larger, bolder greens. The classic routing has the front nine turning clockwise through the forest while the back nine circles counter-clockwise, and each touch repeatedly on the wetlands of the namesake May River. Gorgeous and mysterious at every turn, the course is at its best when it gets players thinking, like at the short par-4 seventh where they must decide to either lay up to an island of fairway or take a swipe at a shallow green situated on another small isthmus of land along the marsh, and the par-5 10th where a wetland crossing the fairway and several small centrally arranged pot bunkers put indecision into the second and third shots toward a green backed up against the river.

The Pete Dye course at Colleton River Club in Bluffton is one of the best courses in South Carolina. Discover our experts' reviews and where Colleton River Club ranks in our rankings

The Country Club of Charleston is one of the best courses in South Carolina. Discover our experts' reviews and where the Country Club of Charleston ranks in our rankings

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.

Built half a decade before the club’s other 18, Cassique (ranked 198th on our latest rankings), The River Course at Kiawah Island Club features an exquisite river setting. The course flows gently through forest and along lagoons for the first six holes, then becomes truly great from seven to nine, with two holes playing around big Bass Pond and the ninth running along the marshy edge of the Kiawah River. The back nine repeats the rhythm, with play again beginning in the forest and along ponds before a dunesy stretch scattered with live oaks and vast expanses of sand. The River Course concludes appropriately with 17 and 18 along the tidal wetlands of the Kiawah River. There’s nothing particularly original in the architecture of The River Course, as Fazio has done variations of these holes before. In some ways, it’s The Greatest Hits of Tom Fazio.

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 patterns, 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 briefly returned in 2023-'24.

Long Cove was originally routed by Frank Duane and his then-partner Arnold Palmer in the early 1970s. Then Pete Dye was offered the job, but turned it down in order to concentrate on the construction of No. 41 TPC Sawgrass. Once TPC was finished, Dye was persuaded to build Long Cove. Having previously done No. 170 Harbour Town just down the road, Dye wanted to do something different, so he installed knobs and mounds and framing berms, shaped some remarkably large greens and built two holes skirting the Colleton River. His construction crew contained half a dozen youngsters who would ultimately become golf architects, including construction supervisor Bobby Weed, Tom Doak, David Savic, Ron Farris, Scott Pool and Pete’s younger son, P.B. In 2018, Weed, author of No. 103 Olde Farm, was picked to restore Pete’s original design, which had grown shaggy around the edges. Now golfers can again run the ball onto 16 of the 18 greens.

Kiawah Island Club’s Cassique Course (pronounced kah-SEEK) was created by Hall of Famer Tom Watson and his crew from old farm fields along the tidal marshes of the Kiawah River. As a five-time Champion Golfer of the Year, Watson wanted his design to demand the “touch, feel and imagination” of links-style golf, so he framed most holes with choppy faux dunes, rumpled the fairways and installed some of his favorite links features: a burn a la Turnberry, Carnoustie-inspired Spectacles and a Hell Bunker from St. Andrews. With the front nine in open land and the back nine among trees, Cassique poses bump-and-run opportunities everywhere, and even has a couple of blind shots.

Pete Dye and his son P.B. did the early routing of Secession, but when they left in a dispute with the developer, Bruce Devlin, a PGA Tour veteran who’d previously designed courses with Robert von Hagge, stepped in and finished something much in keeping with the then-prevailing Dye philosophy of low-profile architecture. Greens were set at ground grade, protected by low humps and pot bunkers with vertical stacked-sod faces. True to his Australian (New South Wales) roots, Devlin also left open the front of the greens for running approach shots. The site itself is a peninsula in a marsh, with several holes on individual islands. Secession demands a complete game, both aerial and ground, particularly in steady ocean breezes.

In the late 1960s, Jack Nicklaus landed the design contract for Harbour Town, then turned it over to his new partner, Pete Dye, who was determined to distinguish his work from that of rival Robert Trent Jones. Soon after Harbour Town opened in late November 1969 (with a victory by Arnold Palmer in the Heritage Classic), the course debuted on America’s 100 Greatest as one of the Top 10. It was a total departure for golf at the time. No mounds, no elevated tees, no elevated greens—just low-profile and abrupt change. Tiny greens hung atop railroad ties directly over water hazards. Trees blocked direct shots. Harbour Town gave Pete Dye national attention and put Jack Nicklaus, who made more than 100 inspection trips collaborating with Dye, in the design business. Pete’s wife, Alice, also contributed, instructing workers on the size and shape of the unique 13th green, a sinister one edged by cypress planks. Following the 2025 RBC Heritage, Harbour Town underwent an extensive restoration overseen by Davis Love III and his design company, working to restore and preserve Dye's original strategic intent. The project is completed, and the course reopened in November 2025.

The Old Barnwell property, 12 miles southeast of Aiken, shares much in common with the nearby Tree Farm, which was constructed at virtually the same time in 2022 and 2023. The latter is a better pure golf site, but the more enigmatic, if less aesthetically endowed, Old Barnwell property is profound in other architecturally advantageous ways. The course plays around and through a treeless basin at the center of the 500-acre site, shooting the occasional sortie of holes into thinned-out sections of pine along a perimeter rim. The landforms surrounding the amphitheater are nakedly muscular, and eight holes traverse and tumble off these fallaway ridgelines. First-time lead architects Brian Schneider and Blake Conant used those movements to prop up wide holes that skirt the edges and handled the less suggestive parts of the property by constructing an assortment of contemporary and antique architectural features: old bathtub bunkers recalling hazards at Garden City Golf Club and Myopia Hunt; linear shaggy-grass berms that evoke military entrenchments; open waste areas and geometric chasms of sand; and vertical grass embankments protecting bunkers and greens. On top of this are a set of putting surfaces that crash any conversation of the game’s most profoundly contoured, pushing the limits of playability without crossing into needless ornamentation.

At The Tree Farm, PGA Tour player and founder Zac Blair has attracted a kindred young-in-spirit if not exclusively young-in-age membership from across the country that mirrors his relaxed-casual passion for walking, fast play, head-to-head matches and creative architecture, particularly from the approach shot through the green. A majority of them are good players who think nothing of hoofing 36 or more holes a day.Design credit goes to multiple people, including Tom Doak, who routed the course over a gorgeously secluded site full of ridges, valleys and galleries of pine accented with scrub, sand and shades of underbrush, parts Pinehurst area and vintage Augusta National; and Kye Goalby and Blair, who designed the holes and features. Most of Blair's and Goalby’s fairways merely brush the land with a minimum of earthwork, draped around the curves of bunkers and ravines that tempt players to try and nip the corners. Highlights include a wonderful Redan par 3, a memorable punchbowl green at the par-5 16th, a mighty uphill par 3 (the fourth) modeled on the fifth at Pine Valley and some other subtle nods to template holes, but overall the architecture at The Tree Farm is organic and inspired primarily by what was already there, giving the course a budding air of sophisticated maturity.Some of the subtlest sections of the course, like the loop through a soothing cove of pines at five, six and seven, may be The Tree Farm’s most evocative, a resplendent sotto voce to the explosive aria of the final four holes that includes the Redan, a reachable par 5 with a corner-cut drive and deep punchbowl green, a short archery target par 3 and a downhill drivable par 4 with a split-level green similar to the 16th at Augusta National.

Though it contained a classic collection of Raynor favorites, including a Road Hole, a Biarritz, a Redan and even a Prize Dogleg (based on an entry from a 1914 magazine design contest), Yeamans Hall suffered from benign neglect for 50 years, with bunkers overgrown and greens both shrunk by mowing habits and mushroomed by topdressing. But in the late 1980s, the course superintendent discovered Raynor’s original plans in the clubhouse attic. Architect Tom Doak and his then-associate Jim Urbina used the plans to faithfully restore Raynor features. Urbina continues to implement restoration touches, and Yeamans Hall today is one of the country's most polished and evocative examples of Raynor's architecture on a relatively flat piece of lowcountry land.

Tom Fazio has designed countless compelling golf courses on sites that weren't. But at Congaree, 30 minutes inland from Beaufort, S.C., he at least had great material: sand, in the form of two deep sections of it separated by a lowcountry wetland area. The sand made it easy to scoop and shape long ridgelines, creating significant movement across an otherwise level property—and dozens of stately live oaks, carefully transplanted for effect—further outline the design. Finely edged Melbourne-style bunkers sweep up to the edges of fairways and into greens, catching shots that drift too far and leading to challenging hi-lo recovery situations. Congaree hosted the 2022 CJ Cup after making its debut as a tour venue for the previous year's Palmetto Championship, which replaced that year's Canadian Open.

The Ocean Course was designed on short notice for a specific event, the 1991 Ryder Cup, when the PGA of America decided to move the event from California to the more attractive Eastern time zone television time slot. This manufactured linksland-meets-lagoons layout might well be Pete Dye’s most diabolical creation. Every hole is edged by sawgrass, every green has tricky slopes and every bunker merges into bordering sand dunes. Strung along nearly three miles of ocean coast, Dye took his wife Alice's advice and perched fairways and greens so golfers can actually view the Atlantic surf over a ridge of beach dunes. That also exposes shots and putts to ever-present and sometimes fierce coastal winds. The Ocean Course will forever be linked with Phil Mickelson and his improbable victory at the 2021 PGA Championship, as well as Rory McIlroy's romp in 2012.