Course data

Last updated: October 21, 2026

The golf courses in TeeMatch, with their names, addresses and locations, come from OpenStreetMap, the map of the world that anyone can edit. © OpenStreetMap contributors. The data is available under the Open Database License (ODbL).

Towns and states that OpenStreetMap doesn’t give come from the U.S. Census Bureau’s geocoder. TeeMatch isn’t endorsed or certified by the Census Bureau.

This page explains how TeeMatch makes its list of courses from OpenStreetMap, and how to get a copy of it.

Where it comes from

Every month, TeeMatch downloads Geofabrik’s extract of OpenStreetMap for the area TeeMatch covers, currently the United States. From it, TeeMatch takes every node, way and relation tagged leisure=golf_course. Each one gives a course its name, its address from its addr:* tags, and its point: the node itself, or the centre of the area that was mapped.

What isn’t a course

Some places tagged leisure=golf_course aren’t somewhere you can play a round. TeeMatch leaves a place out when:

• it has no name, or a name made only of words every course has, such as “Golf Course” or “Private golf course”;
• it has no point;
• it’s tagged as part of a course: golf=driving_range, golf=hole, golf=tee, golf=green, golf=pin, golf=fairway, golf=rough, golf=bunker, golf=water_hazard, golf=lateral_water_hazard, golf=clubhouse, golf=cartpath, golf=path, golf=putting_green or golf=practice;
• it’s tagged golf:course=driving_range;
• it’s indoors or a building: tagged indoor=yes, or with any building=* tag;
• it has a suite number (addr:unit), which no course has;
• its description mentions a simulator or indoor golf;
• its name says it’s a golf simulator, an indoor golf venue or golf lounge, Topgolf, a driving range, practice range or teaching range, a golf school or academy, a putting green, mini golf or Putt-Putt, disc golf or foot golf, or a single hole, such as “7th Hole”.

A pitch and putt stays in: it’s a course.

One course mapped twice

Places with the same name within 2 km of each other are one course mapped twice, such as a point and the area around it. Names count as the same when they match apart from capitals, spaces and punctuation. TeeMatch keeps one of them: an area over a point, a relation over a way, and otherwise the one mapped first. It takes any part of the address the kept one lacks from the others.

What TeeMatch keeps

For each course, TeeMatch keeps its OpenStreetMap id (such as way/123456), its name, its street address, town and state (the two-letter state code only), and its latitude and longitude. A town or state OpenStreetMap doesn’t have comes from the Census Bureau, as above. It keeps nothing else from OpenStreetMap, not even a phone number or a website.

Each month’s import updates the name, address and point of every course TeeMatch already has, so a change made on OpenStreetMap reaches TeeMatch with the next import. A course TeeMatch listed before it used OpenStreetMap is matched to its OpenStreetMap course by name, within 2 km, one to one, so its tee times and the golfers who follow it carry over, and its details are replaced with OpenStreetMap’s.

What isn’t from OpenStreetMap

TeeMatch adds its own information to the courses: tee times, the golfers who follow each course, and a link to the course’s place on Google Maps, which is where its photo comes from. None of that comes from OpenStreetMap, and it isn’t part of the data this page describes.

Getting the data

The course data TeeMatch makes from OpenStreetMap is available under the ODbL. To get a copy, email us at [email protected] and we’ll send it to you: each course’s OpenStreetMap id, name, street address, town, state, latitude and longitude.

Fixing a course

If a course’s name or address is wrong, or a course is missing, you can fix it on OpenStreetMap. TeeMatch picks up the change with its next monthly import.