Strokes Gained Calculator
The same metric PGA Tour players use to find their real weaknesses — now free, no signup, no hardware. Enter your round stats and see exactly where you're gaining and losing strokes.
What Is Strokes Gained?
Strokes Gained is a statistical framework developed by Columbia Business School professor Mark Broadie that measures how many strokes a golfer gains or loses relative to a baseline in each area of the game. Unlike traditional stats (fairways hit, GIR, putts per round), Strokes Gained accounts for the difficulty of each shot — a 40-foot putt and a 4-foot putt are not weighted equally.
The PGA Tour adopted Strokes Gained as its official performance metric because it answers the question traditional stats can't: where are you actually losing the most strokes? A golfer with 32 putts per round might think their putting is fine — but if most of those putts were from inside 10 feet after missing greens, their putting is actually costing them.
The Five Strokes Gained Categories
SG: Off the Tee measures tee shot performance — distance, accuracy, and penalty avoidance. SG: Approach measures iron play from the fairway or rough to the green. SG: Around the Green covers chipping, pitching, and bunker play. SG: Putting measures performance on the green. SG: Tee to Green combines the first three — it's the total non-putting performance.
A positive number means you're gaining strokes vs. your benchmark (better than average). A negative number means you're losing strokes (worse than average). The bigger the negative number, the more that area is hurting your score.
How to Use Your Results
Focus your practice time on the category where you're losing the most strokes. Research consistently shows that most amateur golfers underestimate how much they lose on approach shots and overestimate how much they lose on putting. This calculator will show you the truth.
Share your results with your golf instructor before your next lesson — it gives them a data-driven starting point instead of guessing. Find an instructor near you in our directory of 12,000+ golf pros.
Want a quicker assessment? Try our Find Your Real Weakness tool — it takes just 2 minutes and uses dropdown inputs instead of exact numbers.