The 10 best SC golf courses you can play in 2025, Golf Digest says. Here’s why they’re great
Summer is basically here, which for golf enthusiasts means playing as many rounds as possible.
But where should you go for your next golf trip?
South Carolina is packed with golf courses. Myrtle Beach alone has more than 90 courses, most of which are public.
Golf Digest has taken up the task of helping players find the best of the best.
The popular monthly magazine has compiled a list of the 50 best golf courses in South Carolina in 2025. Below are the top 10 best golf courses on the list. To view the full ranking, click here.
#1 Kiawah Island Golf Resort: The Ocean Course
Located on the eastern-most end the Kiawah Island, the Ocean Course has the most seaside hills in the Northern Hemisphere. The course was designed to give players an unobstructed view of the coastline from every hole.
The course can also be particularly challenging, due to strong winds from the Atlantic.
#2 Congaree Golf Club
Found in Ridgeland, the 18-hole Congaree golf course opened in 2018. The course was built on a historic, 18th-century estate and is surrounded by more than 2,000 acres of forest and lakes. Congaree hosted the 2022 CJ Cup after making its debut as a tour venue for the previous year’s Palmetto Championship.
#3 Yeamans Hall Club
The Yeamans Hall Club golf course was designed in 1925 in Charleston. The course suffered from benign neglect for 50 years, but in the late 1980s, the original plans for the course were discovered in the clubhouse attic and restoration work was soon begun.
“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,” Golf Digest states.
#4 The Tree Farm
Located in Batesburg, The Tree Farm uses the site’s natural terrain in a way that required limited earthmoving. It features short green-to-tee transitions that contribute to the club’s quick pace of play culture, the club’s website states.
“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,” Golf Digest states.
#5 Old Barnwell Golf Club
Old Barnwell is nestled on 575 acres of sandy soil and rolling hills, surrounded by longleaf and loblolly pines near historic Aiken.
“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,” Golf Digest states. “The landforms surrounding the amphitheater are nakedly muscular, and eight holes traverse and tumble off these fallaway ridgelines.”
#6 Harbour Town Golf Links
This perennial favorite among PGA Tour players is located on Hilton Head Island. The course has undergone recent enhancements, such as new Celebration Bermuda grass for the fairways and a new irrigation system. Since 1969, it has been home to the RBC Heritage Presented by Boeing.
#7 Secession Golf Club
Found in Beaufort, Secession is situated on Gibbes Island, providing isolation among the tidal inlets with no housing on or around the property.
“The site itself is a peninsula in marsh, with several holes on individual islands,” Golf Digest states. “Secession demands a complete game, both aerial and ground, particularly in steady ocean breezes.”
#8 Kiawah Island Club: Cassique
Kiawah Island Club’s Cassique Course was created on Johns Island from old farm fields along the tidal marshes of the Kiawah River. The par-72-links-style course offers holes that can be navigated a variety of ways, depending on weather conditions.
“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,” Golf Digest states.
#9 Long Cove Club
The Hilton Head Island golf course at Long Cove offers 7,000 yards and 18 holes of pure enjoyment. With a beautiful Lowcountry backdrop, the course features century-old live oak trees covered in Spanish moss, Carolina pines and gorgeous saltwater marshes.
#10 Sage Valley Golf Club
The exclusive Sage Valley Golf Club, located in Graniteville, opened in 2001 as the final vision of founder Weldon Wyatt, son tom Wyatt and architect Tom Fazio. With 18 holes and 500 acres, the 7,245-yard course offers players significant elevation changes surrounded by pine trees, azaleas and plenty of bubbling streams. You can even play the course at night under the glow of more than 100 Musco lights.
