Throughout the great State of Texas you will find some fantastic private golf courses. Below is a list of the best Texas private golf courses that we have played in Dallas, Houston, the Hill Country, Austin, and other parts of Texas. If you are looking for a private membership based golf club, these are some of the best in Texas. See the bottom table to see some of the top rated public golf courses and best resort courses and the top rated courses by city.

Texas Outside’s Top Rated Private Golf Courses In Texas

How Texas Outside Rates Texas Golf Courses

Below is our list of criteria that we use to rate a golf course:

• Beauty – tall trees, rolling hills, beautiful houses, waterfalls, and similar stuff would
  score high; a 1 would be a flat course with dead bushes instead of trees, power plants instead of multi million dollar homes, and some grass but mostly weeds. The pictures on this page are from courses that score high on the beauty scale.

• Difficulty – a straight, 300 yard par 4 with no traps or hazards, no out of bounds or water would probably get a 1; if it is a 460 yard par 4 over two ravines, with water along one side, natural hazards on the other, strategically placed bunkers, plus that dreaded tree right in the middle of the fairway protecting your approach to a elevated well protected small green, we are talking a 10. This is a tough one because the harder they are, the more we like and as such rate them higher. This may be contrary to how you like to play.

• Variety – what would you give a course where all the holes looked and played exactly the same (“I thought we just played that hole!”); were side-by-side, which is good for finding other people’s balls, but not much fun; and you could see the flag from every tee box? That’s right, it gets a 1.

• Fun Scale – a 10 is where you walk off the course and say “wow, now that was a great track and a lot of fun” and you can’t wait to get back, or you immediately turn around and play another 18 holes. We try to factor out how we played and our score – both of which can significantly impact how much fun you had on the course.

• Value – a 7 might $50 to $60, a 10 is $20 to $40, and 1 is $200 or so – of course all of this is dependent upon how you liked the course. For example, if a run down, boring flat course, with six players on each hole was only $10; it would still get a value rating of 1. A courses that scores 9s and 10s on all the other categories, but costs $150 would most likely get a 7 to 9 on the value scale.

• Overall Course Condition – this one’s pretty easy – what condition are the fairways, roughs, bunkers, and greens. A 10 means very lush perfectly manicured fairways, soft fluffy sand in the bunkers, roughs that aren’t dirt or rocks, and fantastic greens. Compared to a rating of 1, which has fire ants, weeds, and more dirt than grass!

We also rate the green condition independently of the six above criteria that form the course rating. Very hard to read greens with lots of undulation, slope, and spine rate very high on the difficulty scale. Condition is self-explanatory.

At some courses each nine differs in a number of ways and we’ve found courses where the front nine is ugly and boring, but the back nine was fantastic – as such, we have provided an individual rating for each nine holes which does consider all of the above rating criteria but excludes value.