How big French greens really are: 390 m² at the median, 53 to 2,445

Green size appears on no scorecard. It changes everything all the same: the club you take, the margin for error on an iron, the length of the putts that follow. It is published nowhere because knowing it requires every green to have been traced, one at a time.

They have been. 11,874 French greens, as polygons, each with its computed surface.

464 hectares

Laid end to end, France's greens cover 464 hectares — roughly 650 football pitches, maintained at five millimetres of cut.

It is the most expensive surface in golf: daily mowing, irrigation, topdressing, aeration. Measuring it is not merely a player's curiosity, it is a budget line.

A wider perimeter than the bunker ranking

Our most bunkered courses ranking covered only 217 courses. This one covers 484, and the difference comes from the nature of the measurement.

Counting bunkers per 18 holes requires knowing how many holes the survey covers — hence the perimeter restricted to single-course clubs. Measuring an average size raises no such problem: the mean of a 27-hole club's greens is still the mean of its greens, whatever number of cards it publishes. An average is scale-invariant; a total is not.

The three counting rules remain those set out in the bunker article: surveyed tracings only, type other excluded, polygon rather than point.

The twelve courses with the biggest greens

#	Average green	Greens	Range	Course	Built
1	721 m²	18	512–1,227	Cabot Bordeaux	1989
2	709 m²	27	524–1,165	Alsace Golf	1997
3	660 m²	18	366–994	Golf Club Saint-Tropez	2002
4	655 m²	36	235–2,445	Golf de Joyenval	1992
5	652 m²	45	240–928	Blue Green Savenay	1990
6	641 m²	18	442–878	Château d'Augerville	1995
7	594 m²	18	356–799	Golf des Templiers	1989
8	592 m²	18	252–1,880	Royal Mougins	1993
9	592 m²	18	407–796	Château de Chailly	1989
10	582 m²	18	403–815	Estate Feucherolles	1992
11	578 m²	18	491–669	Golf Val-Grand	1991
12	577 m²	27	380–747	Golf des Aisses	1992

And the eight smallest:

Average green	Course
95 m²	Daily Golf de Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône
118 m²	Golf Santa Rosa
133 m²	Golf Riom
138 m²	Golf Club de L'Ariège
165 m²	Golf des Bords de Loire
172 m²	Golf Club Alès Ribaute
180 m²	Château de Bournet

A ratio of 1 to 7.6 separates the two extremes. On Cabot Bordeaux's greens an iron pulled ten metres still finds the surface; at Saint-Ouen-l'Aumône it is in the rough. These are not the same demands, and no scorecard says so.

The national median is 390 m². The middle half of French courses sits between 335 and 452 m².

Greens have not changed in a century

This is the article's cleanest result, and it runs against intuition.

Era	Courses	Average green
before 1940	52	412 m²
1940-1979	63	385 m²
1980-1989	155	402 m²
1990-1999	139	410 m²
2000 onward	23	413 m²

Twenty-eight square metres separate the most generous era from the most frugal — 7%, which is noise. The correlation between year of construction and average green size is r = 0.010. None.

The contrast with sand is striking. Bunkers did drift: recent courses lay fewer and larger ones, a weak but consistent trend. Greens did not. A 400 m² green in 1900 is a 400 m² green in 2020. The dimension is dictated by the game — the distance from which a player must be able to stop a ball — not by fashion or by machinery.

The largest and smallest green in France

The largest measures 2,445 m², at Golf de Joyenval. Next come Étiolles at 2,077 m² and Royal Mougins at 1,880. Thirty-seven French greens exceed 1,000 m².

That ranking needed a precaution. Joyenval's survey holds the 2,445 m² green twice, at a centroid identical to five decimal places: it is one green, traced once per scorecard. Without deduplication the podium would have shown the same green twice.

The phenomenon is widespread — 201 of the 484 courses hold at least one duplicated green, 1,929 surplus tracings in total — but it barely moves the averages: the national median goes from 390 to 388 m² once deduplicated, because duplication strikes large and small alike. The figures in this article are given raw; the giant-green ranking is deduplicated.

At the other end, France's smallest traced green measures 53 m², at Golf de Cunlhat in the Puy-de-Dôme. A hundred and five French greens fall under 100 m² — the size of a large living room.

Consistent or contrasted

A course can have large greens on average and an enormous spread, or small greens that are all alike. The coefficient of variation measures it: 21% at the median within a French course.

The most consistent:

• 7% — Golf Val-Grand, 18 greens between 491 and 669 m²
• 7% — Les Greens d'Eugénie, 310 to 403 m²
• 8% — Jiva Hill Golf Club, 309 to 395 m²

The most contrasted:

• 79% — Royal Mougins, from 252 to 1,880 m²
• 74% — Golf International de Longwy, from 181 to 1,469 m²
• 72% — Golf Chartres-Fontenay, from 141 to 1,118 m²

Val-Grand is France's most predictable course on this measure: eighteen greens that resemble one another, the same approach read every time. Royal Mougins does the exact opposite, and asks you to reassess the target eighteen times.

Method

Source: the FlyAway production database, 17 August 2026. Hazards drawn from the surveyed tracings, not archived, type green, excluding community contributions and manual additions. Scope: French courses not deleted holding at least 18 traced greens — 484 courses, 11,874 greens.

Surfaces are computed from the polygons. The threshold of 18 greens removes partial surveys, on which an average would mean nothing.

The duplication described above was measured by comparing centroids rounded to five decimal places, roughly one metre. It affects 201 courses and leaves the national median within two square metres.

Every course named has its own page in the French course directory.