Here are the numbers by handicap
How good a putter are you? What’s your make percentage from five feet? Twenty Feet? Twenty-five feet?
And how do you stack up against other amateurs or against Tour players, the guys on TV who seem to routinely make those 20-footers?
The PGA Tour average for putts holed between 20 and 25 feet is just slightly above 12 percent. Max Greyserman led the Tour last year, dropping 23 percent of his exactly 100 tries from that range.
Earlier this spring, two-time major winner Justin Thomas ended an almost-three-year victory drought at the RBC Heritage with a thrilling 24-and-a-half-foot birdie putt on the first hole of a sudden-death playoff. Not long before that, he also holed a 21-foot putt on the 15th hole to move into the lead at the time.
Thomas had a probability of just slightly better than a 1-in-10 chance from that distance. So he beat the odds twice when the tournament was on the line, and it paid off handsomely.
While even recreational players like to view putts under 30 feet as makeable, data from Shot Scope, the golf-tech company that makes laser rangefinders and GPS devices, has quantified the decreasing the make percentage the farther one is from the hole, b. Broken down by a golfer’s handicap:
- Scratch players hole 12 percent
- 5 Handicappers make 13percent
- 10 Handicappers make 10 percent
- 15 Handicappers make 9 percent
- 20 Handicappers make 7 percent
- 25 Handicappers make 6percent
The moral of that story? None of us is early-career Jordan Spieth (when he was holing one in four of his 15- to 25-footers), so let’s all take more time on the putting green to practice lag putting to cut down on the three=putts.
While JT was raining birdies in South Carolina last spring, the PGA Tour was also holding another event in the Dominican Republic, the Corales Puntacana Championship.
Fan-favorite Joel Dahmen was leading down the stretch before agonizingly bogeying each of the final three holes to finish in second by a single stroke. Heartbreak over this collapse has to be an understatement for the popular pro from the Pacific Northwest.
Announcers called his shocking lip-out miss on the 71st hole a two-and-a-half-footer. It looked even closer from the TV camera’s perspective with some news outlets calling it a one-footer.
PGA Tour Shotlink and Shot Scope data both suggest that such a short miss is a statistical anomaly.
The make percentage on the PGA Tour from inside three feet is 99.57 percent and 56 Tour players haven’t missed at all from that range so far in the 2025 season.
Of the golfers who record shot data in the Shot Scope app, their make percentages aren’t perfect, but are also extremely high from inside of three feet. On 0’ to 3’ putts, Shot Scope data shows:
- Scratch players make 98 percent
- 5 Handicappers make 96 percent
- 10 Handicappers make 96 percent
- 15 Handicappers make 93 percent
- 20 Handicappers make 90 percent
- 25 Handicappers make 88 percent
What’s a simple way to incrementally improve your handicap – especially if you’re in the 15 to 25 handicap range? While you’re practicing your lag putting from 20, 25, 30, 35, 40 feet on all sides of the hole, also practice making the second putts to dial in your speed and line.
As automatic as you might think a three-footer looks, statistics show most of us still have room for improvement, even on the most basic skill in the game. And, when you do make a putt longer than 20 feet? Celebrate as wildly as you like. It’s a big deal.
Have a story idea or a news item to report to Alabama Golf News? Email Editor Gregg Dewalt at bamagolfnews@gmail.com
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