Welcome to the Golfweek’s Best 2025 ranking of the top par-3, short and non-traditional private golf courses in the United States. To acknowledge a recent and rapid rise in short courses, Golfweek’s Best introduced a ranking of these layouts in 2023. In 2024 we broke the category into two: public-access courses and private layouts.

Basically, they all fit the bill of not being a traditional-length, traditional-par course. And just like the best short courses, we threw out some of the rules used for rating traditional courses and asked our raters to submit one overall score for each course based on how much they enjoyed the design and the environment. Those individual ratings were then combined to form one average rating. Each course had to receive a minimum number of 10 votes.