Course and Slope Rating in Britain: MyEG, the clubhouse table and who rates your course

Walk into almost any clubhouse in Britain and, somewhere between the honours boards and the starter’s window, you will find a laminated sheet with a grid of numbers on it. Most members glance at it once, find the column for the yellow tees, read off a figure and head for the first. That sheet is the visible end of a system that most club golfers never quite get to the bottom of. Each set of tees carries a Course Rating with a decimal point and a Slope Rating without one, and between them they decide how many shots you get, what your card is worth once it is in, and whether the white tees on a links you have never seen will be a fair test or a long afternoon. This is a plain guide to both numbers, written for golfers in England, Scotland and Wales.

Goodbye SSS, hello two numbers

Anyone who learned the game before November 2020 grew up with the Standard Scratch Score, the single figure the old CONGU system used to say how hard a course was. The World Handicap System replaced that arrangement across Great Britain and Ireland in November 2020, and with it came a second number. The Course Rating is the closest relative of the old SSS: it is the score a scratch player should return from a particular set of tees in normal conditions, given to one decimal place, such as 69.4 or 73.1. The Slope Rating is the newcomer. It runs from 55 to 155, with 113 as the neutral value, and it tells you how much more the course punishes a bogey player than it punishes a scratch player.

The distinction matters because difficulty is not one thing. A course can be hard for everybody, hard mainly for the higher handicapper, or both. The Course Rating describes the first; the slope describes how steeply things get worse as your handicap climbs.

The two imaginary golfers behind every rating

Both numbers rest on two reference players, defined precisely enough that you can work out roughly where you sit between them.

• Scratch. A man who carries and rolls his drive about 250 yards and reaches a 470-yard hole in two, or a woman who drives about 210 yards and reaches a 400-yard hole in two.
• Bogey. A man who drives about 200 yards and gets home in two on a 370-yard hole, or a woman who drives about 150 yards and reaches a 280-yard hole in two. In handicap terms he sits at an index of around 20, she at around 24.

Raters estimate what each of them would score. The scratch figure is published as the Course Rating. The bogey figure becomes the Bogey Rating, which rarely appears on a scorecard but is the raw material of the slope.

Where the slope figure comes from

The slope is simply the gap between those two expected scores, scaled so that an average gap lands on 113. For men, take the Bogey Rating, subtract the Course Rating and multiply by 5.381. For women, the multiplier is 4.240.

Imagine a parkland course in the Midlands whose yellow tees carry a Course Rating of 70.6 and a Bogey Rating of 93.9. The bogey player is expected to need 23.3 more shots than the scratch player, and 23.3 × 5.381 comes to 125.4, so the slope is 125. Now picture the red tees on the same course rated 73.2 for women with a Bogey Rating of 100.4. The gap is 27.2, and 27.2 × 4.240 gives 115.3, a slope of 115. Both courses are illustrations, not real tees, but the arithmetic is exactly what the rating software does.

A wide-open course with little rough tends to keep the gap small, because a mishit still finds grass. Tight heathland lined with heather and gorse, or a links with pot bunkers waiting where a 200-yard drive comes down, stretches the gap and pushes the slope upwards.

What a rating team looks for on a British course

Clubs do not rate themselves. In England the work falls to the county rating teams that operate under England Golf, with lead raters who arrange a visit and bring between two and six volunteers depending on how many sets of tees need rating. Scottish Golf and Wales Golf run their own teams on the same method, so a rating in Fife and a rating in Pembrokeshire are built on the same rules.

The team starts with effective playing length. Measured yardage is only the beginning: they adjust for how much a drive runs on firm summer turf or stops on a soft fairway, for uphill and downhill holes, for doglegs that force a lay-up and for the prevailing wind. On a coastal links, where a westerly is part of the furniture rather than an exception, that adjustment can be substantial.

Then come the obstacle values, assessed separately for the scratch and bogey player at the points where each one’s shots come to rest. Fairway width, rough and the chance of recovering from it, bunkers, penalty areas, out of bounds, trees, the size and firmness of the green and the difficulty of the putting surface all go into the form, along with a psychological factor for holes where trouble stacks up. Every set of tees gets its own rating, men and women are rated separately from the same tees, and the result describes the course as it is normally set up, not with championship pins and shaved greens.

Turning your index into shots on the day

Your Handicap Index travels with you; your Course Handicap belongs to the tee you are standing on. Since April 2024, golfers in Great Britain and Ireland have used the same formula as the rest of the WHS world:

Course Handicap = Handicap Index × (Slope Rating ÷ 113) + (Course Rating − Par)

Before that date the last part, Course Rating minus par, was left out of the Course Handicap in GB&I. Adding it means your shots now bring you back to par, not to the Course Rating, which is why some members noticed their allowance shift by a shot or two on the day the change came in.

Take an 18.4 index. On a parkland course rated 69.1 / 121 with a par of 70, the working runs 18.4 × 121 ÷ 113 = 19.70, then minus 0.9, giving 18.80, which rounds to 19. From the back tees of a seaside course rated 73.8 / 138, par 71, the same golfer gets 18.4 × 138 ÷ 113 = 22.47, plus 2.8, which makes 25.27 and rounds to 25. Six shots separate two rounds played off one index.

For competitions there is one more step, the Playing Handicap, which applies an allowance to the Course Handicap. Here the home nations no longer agree. In England, singles stroke play stays at a fixed 95 per cent, so the golfer on 25 plays off 23.75, rounded to 24, and England Golf has said it will not revisit allowances before 2028. In Scotland and Wales, since 1 April 2026, clubs may choose 85, 90, 95 or 100 per cent for singles counting competitions. At a Scottish club that has settled on 85 per cent, the same 25 becomes 21.25, so 21. If you play opens on both sides of the border, check the entry sheet rather than assuming.

What the ratings do to your card afterwards

Once your score is in, the same two numbers decide how much it counts. Each acceptable round becomes a Score Differential:

Score Differential = (113 ÷ Slope Rating) × (Adjusted Gross Score − Course Rating − PCC)

The adjusted gross score caps every hole at net double bogey, so one disaster does not wreck the record. PCC, the playing conditions calculation, is an automatic correction from −1 to +3 that kicks in when the whole field scores far above or below expectation, as on a day of sideways rain at the coast. Your index is the average of the best eight differentials from your last 20 scores.

Here is why that matters. Say you shoot 91 on a links rated 72.6 / 133: 91 minus 72.6 is 18.4, and 18.4 × 113 ÷ 133 gives a differential of 15.6. A week later you shoot 85 on a gentle parkland rated 68.4 / 115: 16.6 × 113 ÷ 115 gives 16.3. The 91 was the better golf, and the system records it that way. If the links day had been rough enough for a PCC of +2, the first differential would drop to 16.4 × 113 ÷ 133, or 13.9.

Where to read the ratings in England, Scotland and Wales

The most reliable place is the official app of your national association. In England that is MyEG, which England Golf members and iGolf subscribers use to enter scores; it works out your Course Handicap for the course and tees you select. Scottish golfers have the Scottish Golf app, which also carries the OpenPlay scheme for golfers without a club. In Wales, the handicap table at the club and the scorecard remain the surest places to read your strokes.

At the course itself, look for the rating certificate and handicap table. In England, the national body sends each club its Course and Slope Rating certificates together with the handicap tables, and most clubs pin the table up near the first tee or in the clubhouse, one column per set of tees. Many scorecards print the ratings too, but cards are reprinted less often than courses change, so treat the app or the club’s current table as the reference.

Who stands behind the numbers? The ratings come from the national associations: England Golf, Scottish Golf and Wales Golf (Golf Ireland covers the island of Ireland), using the WHS Course Rating System. CONGU, the Council of National Golf Unions, publishes the guidance on how the WHS Rules of Handicapping are applied across GB&I. A course has to be rated at least once every ten years, and sooner after significant permanent changes, such as a change of more than 100 yards in overall length. County teams are always short of volunteers, and if you want to understand the system properly, a day out with a rating team is the quickest education available.

No club? You can still hold an official index, and the price varies by nation. Prices as listed on each body’s website in October 2026:

• England Golf, iGolf: £47 a year, including a Handicap Index, public liability insurance and access to MyEG.
• Scottish Golf, OpenPlay: £59 a year or £6.99 a month.
• Wales Golf, Flexi Club: £55 a year or £5.50 a month.

What the numbers will not tell you

A rating is an average for normal conditions. It does not know the greens were hollow-tined last Tuesday, that the forecast says 30 mph from the sea, or that the rough has been left up for the club championship. PCC will tidy some of that up for handicap purposes afterwards, but it will not make your round feel any easier.

Nor does the slope say whether a course suits you. Two courses on 132 can be hard for opposite reasons, one because of carries over heather off every tee, the other because of tiny, raised greens. The long, wild hitter and the short, straight one will have very different days at each.

And ratings date. Lengthened tees, felled trees or rebuilt bunkers can leave a course playing differently from its numbers until the next visit from the county team.

A quick check before your next medal

• Find the Course Rating and slope for your tees in MyEG, the Scottish Golf app or on the table by the first tee.
• Note your Course Handicap from those tees, and the allowance your club uses for the competition.
• Compare the Course Rating with par to set a sensible target.
• If the slope is in the high 130s and your driver wanders, consider the next tees forward for a social round.
• Enter your score afterwards, wherever you played: the ratings will put it in context.

How this page was put together: the reference golfers, the slope multipliers and the obstacle values come from the WHS Course Rating System; the Course Handicap and Score Differential formulas come from the Rules of Handicapping of the World Handicap System; details of the April 2024 change, the 2026 allowance options in Scotland and Wales, the rating process in England and the non-member schemes come from England Golf, Scottish Golf, Wales Golf, county union and CONGU material, all read in October 2026. The courses and ratings in the worked examples are illustrations, not real tees. Panxis Golf has no commercial relationship with any organisation mentioned here.