Where our data comes from

Par 5 exists to be trusted. Every course page is meant to be safe to cite, link to, and quote — by a golfer planning a round, a reporter checking a fact, or a search engine answering a question. That only works if you can see exactly where the numbers come from and where they stop. This page is that accounting.

The sources

Course listings — names, locations, hole counts, websites, and public or private access — are built from OpenStreetMap contributors and OpenGolfAPI, made available under the Open Database License (ODbL). Scorecard figures — course rating, slope rating, and total yardage — come from GolfCourseAPI. These are open, inspectable sources, not a scraped or purchased list, and the attribution stays in the footer of every page.

The state outlines behind the maps on your account page come from a fourth source: the U.S. Census Bureau’s cartographic boundary files, which are public domain. They carry no attribution requirement and no licence obligation — we name them here for the same reason we name everything else.

The checks every number passes

Merging open scorecard data across thousands of courses produces the occasional physically impossible row — a nine-hole par accidentally paired with eighteen-hole yardage, or a mixed-tee composite that no one actually plays. Before any stat is used to rank a course or earn it a "longest" or "hardest" badge, it has to clear a plausibility check:

• Slope rating within the USGA-legal 55–155.
• Course rating within a realistic 55–82.
• Total (18-hole) yardage no greater than 8,500.
• Yards per par between 35 and 118, when both yardage and par are known.

A row that fails any of these is left out of the rankings and carries no badge — its stats are not trustworthy, so we do not lean on them. The course itself is still listed on its town and state pages and keeps its own page; we simply show only what its record honestly supports.

Blank beats wrong

When a field is missing, unverified, or fails a check, the page leaves it blank rather than guessing. An empty rating is more useful than a confident wrong one, because a wrong number is the kind of thing people repeat. You will see plenty of dashes across the site; each one is a deliberate choice not to invent.

Made-up facts: 0

This is the whole editorial rule, and it is not a slogan — it is a constraint the build enforces. No invented course histories. No imagined designers, ratings, green fees, or hole descriptions. No prose about a hole nobody here has stood on. Where a page adds context, it is genuinely regional — geography, not embellishment. A thin, accurate page beats a rich, fabricated one, and that trade is made the same way every single time. The counter on the directory reads zero because that is the target we hold ourselves to.

Found something off?

Open data can still be wrong or out of date, and we would rather hear about it. The fastest fix is to report it through the feedback form — no account needed. For listing details that live in OpenStreetMap, a correction made at the source flows into Par 5 on the next data refresh, and into every other project built on open map data too.