A directory you can take at its word.

Par 5 is an independent directory of golf in the United States. The goal is simple and a little stubborn: one page for every course in the country — more than fifteen thousand of them — organized by state and town, fast to load, and honest about what's known.

Where the data comes from

Course listings are built from OpenStreetMap, the open, community-maintained map of the world, used under the Open Database License. That means names, locations, hole counts, and websites come from open data that anyone can inspect and improve. If a detail isn't in the data, it isn't on the page. For the fuller picture — every source, the checks each stat passes, and why we leave a field blank before we'll show it wrong — see where our data comes from.

The house rules

No invented course histories. No imagined designers, ratings, or green fees. No descriptions of holes nobody here has stood on. Where a page offers context, it's genuinely regional — geography, not embellishment. A thin, accurate page beats a rich, fabricated one, and that trade is made the same way fifteen thousand times.

What's coming

The directory is rolling out state by state, alongside trip guides at /guides/ and small free tools at /tools/, starting with a handicap calculator. If you want a note when new states and guides land, the signup in the footer is the whole mailing list operation — occasional, and easy to leave.

Spotted an error?

Because listings come from OpenStreetMap, the best fix is often at the source: corrections made there flow into Par 5 on the next data refresh, and into every other project built on open map data too.