There are a lot of assumptions around putting and many of them incorrect. When we’re watching the PGA Tour, the majority of the players on our TVs are the leaders and are therefore playing and putting well.
We’ll be fed stats that a certain player has only had 23 putts, but that is almost a once-a-season event.
The best putters on the PGA Tour (the top ten used these putter models in 2024) are still capable of rounds where they take comfortably more than 30 blows.
The one stat that always demonstrates the point that putting is difficult is where a PGA Tour is more likely to miss than make a putt.
Here, from nine feet, the average length of putt made is 45.26% so more players will miss than hole it.
Obviously these players are putting on rapid and tricky greens, and under tournament conditions and with a lot of traffic on the putting surfaces, but the big assumption is that they hole a lot more putts than they actually do.
These are the average putting stats on the PGA Tour for the past 10 seasons.
Year Average Best on Tour
2024 29.06 Sam Burns (27.78)
2023 29.02 Taylor Montgomery (27.38)
2022 29.06 Lucas Herbert (27.70)
2021 29.01 Cam Smith (27.76)
2020 29.03 Ian Poulter (27.88)
2019 29.05 Jordan Spieth (27.71)
2018 29.24 Daniel Summerhays (27.82)
2017 29.16 Wesley Bryan (28.13)
2016 29.17 Jordan Spieth (27.82)
2015 29.17 Jordan Spieth (27.82)
No player has averaged 28.something since 2017 and no player has averaged anywhere near under 27 putts for a season.
If we were to look back to Tiger Woods’ ridiculous season in 2000, where he won three of the four Major Championships and nine of his 20 starts, he ranked in 36th spot with an average of 28.76 – unsurprisingly Brad Faxon was No. 1 on the rankings with 28.05.
The stand-out name here is Jordan Spieth who has topped this stat for three seasons, in 2022 he was down in 98th.
These days there are stats for every element of putting, with a huge emphasis on Strokes Gained – how many strokes a player gains or loses compared to the average golfer on the PGA Tour.
If we were to look at how the amateurs compare then Shot Scope's stats are interesting...
Handicap Average putts
0 29.9
5 30.3
10 31.2
15 32.1
20 33.4
25 34.3
These actually seems quite impressive, though the club golfer will obviously be hitting a small fraction of the number of greens in regulation and we're not playing courses anywhere near as tough around the greens.
