How to Find Your Golf Handicap
In golf, your handicap is a number that represents how good you are. Better players have lower handicaps than poor ones. At the end of a round, your handicap is deducted from your number of actual strokes to determine your score. By scoring this way, the handicap allows players with a great difference in skill level to compete against each other in a fair game of golf. Based on the rules of the United States Golf Association, here are the steps to find your golf handicap.
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Instructions
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How to Find Your Golf Handicap
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1
List your score from each of the last twenty rounds of golf you've played. If you've played less than twenty rounds, your handicap is zero.
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2
Next to your score from each round, list the course's "rating" and its "slope." This signifies how challenging a course is to play. The easiest way to find this is a quick Internet search for "course name rating slope" (without quotes). For example, my home course's rating is 72.7 and its slope is 129.
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3
Compute the "differential" for each round. Use your score, the course rating, and the course slope to find the differential for each round using the following mathematical formula:
differential = (score - rating) * 113 / slope
For example, let's say I shot a 100 at my local course. The formula would look like this:
differential = (100 - 72.7) * 113 /129 = 23.91395 -
4
List the 10 lowest differentials you calculated. Compute the average of those 10.
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5
Multiply that average by .96 (96%) and the result is your handicap. This is the number of strokes that will be deducted from your number of strokes at the end of a round to determine your score.
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