What Is The Difference Between Course Rating And Slope Rating?

The jargon used in the game golf can be confusing at times, but often the meaning behind these terms is easily explainable. In this article, we breakdown two of the more important entries from golf's glossary, explaining the key difference between course rating and slope rating so that you can better understand the impact that they have...

What Is The Difference Between Course Rating And Slope Rating?

Course rating is the simpler of the two to understand. It is based on the score a scratch player should be expected to make round the course under normal playing conditions, and expressed in the number of shots, to one decimal place.

Often this figure is very close to, or even the same as, the par for the course given in the scorecard. But not necessarily. For example, take on Rockcliffe Hall from the gold tees where the par on the scorecard says 72, but the course rating is 79.3, reflecting in part its sheer length at 7,877 yards. Royal Lytham & St Anne’s off the blue tees has a par of 70 but a course rating of 76.4.

As well as a course rating, there is a bogey rating for a course. This is the number of shots a golfer with a handicap of 20 to 24 should be expected to go round the course in. This number is rarely published anywhere – unlike course rating – but it is used to calculate a course’s slope rating.

Slope rating is often interpreted by golfers to be purely a reflection of the course’s overall difficulty just as a stroke index is taken to be a pure ranking of the difficulty of the holes. In both cases this is a slight over-simplification.

Just as stroke index is in fact not a reflection of how hard holes are but a ranking of which holes a handicap player in matchplay most needs an extra shot, slope rating is not a measure of how hard a course is per se.

Instead, as the United States Golf Association states, it is a “measurement of the relative playing difficulty of a course for players who are not scratch golfers, compared to scratch golfers”.

Slope ratings are determined by the following formula: Men: 5.381 x (Bogey Rating – Course Rating) Women: 4.24 x (Bogey Rating – Course Rating)

The higher the number, the harder the course is for a bogey golfer to do well on compared with a scratch golfer. Slope ratings range from 55 to 155 with 113 deemed to be the slope rating of a ‘standard difficulty’ golf course. However the average slope rating in the USA is 120 and in Great Britain and Ireland 125.