Best Public Golf Courses in San Francisco

Lincoln Park is 5,146 yards to a par of 69, rated 66.0 with a slope of 109, and none of those numbers tell you anything useful about how hard it is. The land is hilly enough that a flat lie is close to a rare event, the greens run at severe pitches that golfers describe as diabolical, and the par 3s are long. Average players do not score here, and they say so.

What they come for is the view. Roughly half the holes look out over the Golden Gate, the Pacific, the city skyline or the Legion of Honor, and the 17th is the one people photograph. The course dates to 1902, when golfers laid three holes across the old Golden Gate Cemetery, and reached eighteen by 1917. Willie Watson and Tom Bendelow are both credited with work on it.

Recent rates have run about $32 to $70. It is walkable if you are fit, there is a putting green and a teaching pro but no driving range, and it is open year round. It is also the hardest tee time in this guide: 58% of posted times went before they were played across 51 days. If you want a weekend morning, look at Lincoln Park tee times early. The standing complaints are unrepaired ball marks, thin spots on the fairways, and a shortage of carts on a course where carts genuinely help.

Jack Fleming worked on Alister MacKenzie's crew at Cypress Point before spending his career building municipal golf for San Francisco, and Gleneagles is his. It opened on February 2, 1962, after a political fight that had run for decades, and cost over $500,000, which made it the most expensive nine-hole course built to that point.

It is nine holes with two sets of tees, playing 3,293 yards to a par of 36, and the 18-hole conversion is rated 70.1 with a slope of 131. That slope is the highest in this guide by a wide margin and it is the reason golfers who love the place describe it in terms usually reserved for penal architecture: long, strategic, and unforgiving of a miss. Bent grass greens, rye and kikuyu fairways, walkable, no range.

Recent rates have run about $28 to $46, and availability is close to unlimited. Barely 1% of posted tee times went before they were played, which for the toughest nine in the city is a strange thing to be able to say. Gleneagles tee times are usually there for the taking. The recurring criticism is conditioning: patchy, muddy fairways and greens that reviewers describe as hard to read and not always clean. Several also note the entrance is difficult to find.

The Marina course is the short one at Monarch Bay, a nine-hole par 30 running 1,734 yards beside the San Leandro marina, mostly par 3s with a pair of par 4s. It is rated 29.3 with a slope of 88, which is the gentlest test in this guide. William F. Bell and John Harbottle III are both credited with work on the property.

Recent rates have run from $7.99 to $25, the cheapest golf on this list by a distance, and availability is good. Bent grass greens, paspalum fairways, a driving range on site, walkable, open year round. Golfers describe greens and fairways as consistently in good shape and the atmosphere as family-friendly, and it turns up repeatedly as the course people bring beginners and older relatives to.

The complaints are narrow and consistent: tee boxes worn to bare dirt, and pace backing up on the first two par 3s with no marshal to sort it out. Check the Marina course if you want an hour and a half of golf for the price of lunch.

StoneTree is the full-size play on this list north of the bridge: 6,693 yards, par 72, rated 70.5 with a slope of 109. That slope is low for the length, and it matches what golfers report, which is a course that opens flat and parkland and gets hilly and more interesting on the back nine. Novato scenery does a lot of the work.

The reason to know about it is the pricing. Recent rates have run from about $18 to $60, and the low end is a weekday number, so the value here depends almost entirely on when you book. Availability is comfortable, with 8% of posted times going before play. Walking is allowed, but not before 1:00pm on weekends, and reviewers note some long green-to-tee walks when you do.

The consistent complaints are bunkers, described by more than one golfer as unplayable and needing either sand or grassing over, slow rounds on the back nine, and no real clubhouse to sit in afterwards. StoneTree tee times are worth checking midweek.

Ron Curtola built Pleasanton Fairways in 1974 as a nine-hole par 30, 1,714 yards, rated 29.0 with a slope of 84. It is not pretending to be anything else. What it does well, according to golfers who play it repeatedly, is the greens: raised, saucer-shaped, and they roll properly, which is more than most courses at this price manage.

Recent rates have run $10 to $25. It is bermuda grass tee to green, walkable, open year round, and there is a full driving range attached, which is the other half of why people go: it functions as a practice facility with a course attached rather than the reverse. It comes up constantly as the place to take someone playing their first round.

Ratings for facility quality and pace of play are the weak spots, both landing between average and poor, and a few golfers want harder holes. Neither is a surprise for a par 30. Pleasanton Fairways has wide open availability most days.

Palo Alto Municipal had sat beside the bay since 1956, a flat William F. Bell layout of parallel fairways. In 2016 the city tore it up. Forrest Richardson rebuilt it as a links, with dune-shaped landforms, humps and hollows, and salt-tolerant paspalum that takes recycled irrigation water. It reopened as Baylands Golf Links on May 26, 2018, after roughly $12 million and nearly seven years of work that also widened San Francisquito Creek for flood protection and put 55 acres back into native baylands habitat.

The result is 6,680 yards to a par of 71, rated 72.4 with a slope of 129, the stiffest 18-hole test in this guide. Golfers praise the design, the roll on the fairways and the generously spaced tee sheet. It is also the most expensive round here: recent rates have run $40 to $119, and the top of that range draws direct complaints that similar difficulty is available nearby for half the money.

Conditioning is the argument. A meaningful share of reviewers say weeds have taken hold and the greens are not rolling pure, and several found the routing confusing, with overlapping fairways and flags that are hard to pick out. Demand has not suffered much: 37% of posted times go before they are played. Check Baylands availability before committing to a weekend.

San Ramon dates to 1946 and a Clark Glasson design, and plays 6,451 yards to a par of 72, rated 71.1 with a slope of 122. It is a convenient, straightforward East Bay round, and when it is dry golfers report good conditions, sensible greens and rounds finished inside four hours.

Recent rates have run from $25 to $104, the widest spread on this list, so the day and time you pick matters more here than almost anywhere else. Demand is heavy: 56% of posted tee times went before they were played across 53 days, second only to Lincoln Park. San Ramon tee times go early for weekends.

Two warnings come up again and again. The first is pace. Multiple golfers report Saturday rounds running to six hours with no ranger to move anyone along, and the advice from regulars is simply not to play Saturday. The second is winter. After rain the course holds standing water and reviewers describe individual holes as unplayable, which lands badly against the higher end of that price range. Bunkers get consistent complaints for packed sand.

MacKenzie built Sharp Park for the City of San Francisco between 1930 and 1932, on the coast in Pacifica, with H. Chandler Egan and Robert Hunter involved. It is the only public seaside course he designed in the United States, and San Francisco still owns and runs it despite it being ten miles outside the city. It has also spent much of the last two decades being sued over: the property is habitat for the endangered San Francisco garter snake and the threatened red-legged frog, and repeated attempts to close the course and convert the land have been dismissed in court.

It plays 6,299 yards to a par of 72, rated 70.6 with a slope of 119, on rye grass tees to greens. Recent rates have run about $36 to $88. Walkable, with a driving range and putting green, open year round.

Be honest with yourself about why you are going. Golfers who love it love the routing and say so in the language of pilgrimage, and on a warm dry day it is a fine round of golf. The reviews are also blunt about the rest: overgrown fairways, weeds and dead grass, drainage that fails in the same places every year, greens in poor shape, and a check-in experience several describe as unpleasant. Go for the architecture and the ocean, in summer, and book Sharp Park for a dry week.

Golf has been played on the Corica Park site in Alameda since 1927, with early design work attributed to William F. Bell, and the Mif Albright is the complex's short course: nine par 3s, 1,152 yards, par 27, each hole roughly 75 to 150 yards. It was redesigned and reopened in 2014 under operator Greenway Golf.

Recent rates have run $15.99 to $20 and availability is wide open. It is walkable, there is a driving range, a putting green and a teaching pro on the property, and it is open year round. Golfers describe it as a fast round, about 45 minutes, with little elevation changes on each hole and greens that are generally well kept, and several say they simply go round more than once.

Reviews are mixed rather than uniform. The negative ones cite worn tee boxes, rough and fairway upkeep, a routing that is confusing to follow, and slow service at the counter. If you want a short-game session that counts for something, the Mif is the cheapest way to get one in the East Bay.

Harding Park opened in 1925 on 163 acres along Lake Merced, designed by Willie Watson and Sam Whiting, the pair behind the Lake Course at the neighbouring Olympic Club, and named for President Warren G. Harding. It belongs to the San Francisco Recreation and Park Department, which is the fact worth sitting with: this is a city course.

It is also, by tournament record, close to the most accomplished public course in the country outside the handful of resort titans. Collin Morikawa won the 2020 PGA Championship here. The United States won the 2009 Presidents Cup here. Tiger Woods won a World Golf Championship here in 2005 and Rory McIlroy won another in 2015, and the Charles Schwab Cup Championship came three years running from 2010. The course joined the TPC network and now runs 27 holes of championship golf.

It is the most expensive round in this guide and it is not close, so treat it as an occasion rather than a regular game. Check what is open at Harding Park and book as far ahead as you can.