Donald Trump has a long history of embellishment around his success as a businessman, for years lobbying Forbes to pump up its estimates of his net worth—occasionally while using the name John Barron, a persona he invented—and even outright lying about the size of his penthouse and other properties. And when it comes to his portfolio of golf courses, Trump can stretch the truth like a par-5.
Legal documents reveal that Trump has improperly tallied sunk costs, overvalued land and undervalued his membership liabilities—deposits he would have to return to his courses’ golfers if they leave the club—while the financial disclosure reports he has released as president and other public filings offer little in terms of how he arrived at the numbers.
Trump has also inflated the size of his golf courses’ real estate. For instance, while he long claimed in marketing materials that Trump National Doral was 800 acres, property records show the resort is less than 700.
But regardless of the inaccuracies or inconsistencies, make no mistake: Trump’s golf empire is worth a fortune.
Together, the 14 courses he owns, along with one other course that bears his name through a licensing deal, pulled in more than $350 million in estimated revenue in 2024, and Forbes values the properties collectively at roughly $1 billion—a sixth of his $6.1 billion net worth. Forbes estimates that Doral alone is worth $255 million net of debt, making it the second-most-valuable property in his entire real estate portfolio, after the $564 million Mar-a-Lago resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
Trump’s golf empire is also on the upswing, even after he sold off his lease for a public course in the Bronx in 2023 under pressure from New York officials and judges. For one thing, on top of the $60 million he reportedly received in that deal, Trump will pocket $115 million thanks to a provision that was triggered when Bally’s was awarded a license to build a casino on the site in December.
Meanwhile, operating profits at ten Trump clubs in the U.S. rose from $19 million in 2020, at the end of his first term as president, to $66 million in 2024, according to Forbes estimates. And new Trump-branded courses are under construction in Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia and Vietnam, as well as Indonesia, where he will have resorts on both Bali and Java. (In a standard deal, he collects hefty licensing fees at the outset, long before the courses even open, and then continues to receive residuals for years to come.)
But the ventures are both business and pleasure for the president, an avid golfer who played an estimated 261 rounds during his first term in office, according to the Washington Post, and whose travel and security expenses during his second term have already cost taxpayers more than $100 million, according to the Huffington Post.
Here is a scorecard of Trump’s 15 current golf courses.
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Trump bought Doral out of bankruptcy in 2012 for $150 million (about $220 million in today’s dollars) and embarked on a major renovation that cost $213 million, according to a 2020 New York Times report citing tax records. Further changes might be on the way for the resort, which has four 18-hole courses. In 2022, the Trump Organization proposed knocking down two buildings—reducing the number of guest rooms to 470, from 643—and building more than 2,200 residential units along with amenity and retail space. The plan was later downsized to include about 1,500 residential units and was preliminarily approved in 2024. According to Trump’s 2025 financial disclosure, he pays 4.9% in interest on a ten-year, $125 million mortgage he refinanced in 2022.
Doral lost much of its northeastern clientele when Trump first ran for president, but business has been trending upward since the end of the Covid-19 pandemic, with operating income reaching an estimated $25 million in 2024, double the best year from his first term in the White House. This year, the Blue Monster, Doral’s signature course, hosted the Cadillac Championship, the PGA Tour’s first tournament there in a decade. The course also hosted LIV Golf events from 2022 to 2025.
Bedminster opened in 2004, two years after Trump took over the incomplete development for, in his words, “substantially less than the $35 million the seller invested in the project.” The 36-hole, roughly 600-acre club an hour west of New York City has become known as Trump’s “summer White House” because he likes to spend weekends there in the warm-weather months before returning to Mar-a-Lago—the winter White House—in the fall. (According to the Telegraph, he once landed by helicopter ten feet from the pool at Bedminster.) The property is also home to a Trump family cemetery, where his first wife, Ivana, was buried in 2022, and it hosted the wedding of Trump’s daughter Ivanka in 2009.
After serving as the site of the 2017 U.S. Women’s Open, Bedminster was supposed to host the 2022 PGA Championship, but the PGA of America withdrew the offer in the wake of the January 6 insurrection. Instead, Bedminster became the first Trump course to host a LIV Golf tournament, for the third event of the tour’s inaugural season in 2022. Trump received about $800,000 for hosting the tournament, according to an income statement included in court filings.
A portion of the Bedminster grounds has qualified for a farmland tax break because of hay farming, wood cutting and goat grazing on the land, a program that can discount a real estate tax bill by up to 98%, according to Golfweek. Trump recently banished the herd of 12 goats but will still qualify for the favorable tax treatment, according to the Financial Times, which pegged the value of the tax break at $240,000 a year.
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Turnberry is perhaps the most prestigious of all of Trump’s clubs, having hosted the British Open in 1977, 1986, 1994 and 2009 and the Women’s British Open in 2002 and 2015. Trump bought the resort for $65 million in 2014 (or $91 million today), and in 2017, his son Eric opened a redeveloped second course there, named King Robert the Bruce. Turnberry, which Forbes values at $75 million, is set to open “Trump’s Twelve”—an additional 12-hole Par 3 course—this year.
Although Trump spent $80 million or so to spruce up the resort, Turnberry continued to lose money. But the outlook has improved recently, with revenue rising 15% in 2024 to $30 million (using the exchange rate as of the end of that year), and CEO Mark Darbon of the R&A, the organizer of the British Open, has expressed an openness toward bringing the event back to Turnberry. His predecessor, Martin Slumbers, had said in January 2021, after the Capitol uprising, that the club would not stage the tournament “until we are convinced that the focus will be on the championship, the players and the course itself, and we do not believe that is achievable in the current circumstances.”
The site of the September 2024 assassination attempt on the president, Trump’s West Palm Beach club was the first golf course in his portfolio, sitting four and a half miles west of Mar-a-Lago. Opened in 1999 with a budget of more than $40 million, the club added an additional nine-hole course in 2002 and features rolling hills—unusual in South Florida—after course architect Jim Fazio moved 2 million cubic yards of dirt to create the undulation. But while Trump owns the club, he doesn’t own the land it sits on. His 99-year lease with Palm Beach County, agreed to after they settled his lawsuit over the noise from airplanes flying over Mar-a-Lago, calls for him to pay $88,338 a month in rent for 214 acres that include the club.
In 2012, some club members who had paid a $150,000 initiation fee were upset when Trump offered initiation-free memberships to attract golfers from rival courses in the area. In hindsight, however, they should probably feel lucky: In 2021, Trump hiked the fee to $350,000, the Washington Examiner reported.
Just a half hour’s drive from the West Palm Beach club, the Jupiter course was designed by legendary golfer Jack Nicklaus for its 2002 opening and joined Trump’s empire a decade later in a deal for $5 million in cash and the assumption of as much as $41 million in membership deposit liabilities. In 2017, Trump teed off with then-Prime Minister Shinzo Abe of Japan at the 285-acre club, which features an island green on the course’s 11th hole and is certified for environmental management by the Audubon Cooperative Sanctuary Program.
Jupiter was among the properties New York’s attorney general accused Trump of overvaluing in a 2022 lawsuit, which pointed out that he pegged the club’s value at $62 million just a year after buying it. (In 2024, a judge ordered Trump and his company to pay $364 million for fraudulently overstating the value of their assets, plus interest, although an appeals panel threw out the fine the following year.)
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The 36-hole club features an indoor tennis center and views of the Potomac River, and being only about 25 miles northwest of the White House, it has hosted Trump for a round of golf at least 32 times during his second term as president, according to tracking by the journalist Philip Bump, more than any other course except West Palm Beach. Trump bought the Virginia club in 2009 for a reported $13 million from a local bank that had seized the property from its developer nearly 20 years earlier, and the Trump family said it invested at least $25 million in a renovation. One of Trump’s personal touches: a plaque memorializing the spot of a Civil War battle that apparently never happened. In more recent—and verifiable—news, LIV Golf held a tournament at the club in May, the week after Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund said it would cease its financial support of the tour beyond this season.
Greg Norman, the Hall of Fame golfer and former CEO of LIV Golf, originally designed the 18 holes at Trump National Charlotte, which opened in 1999, but Trump, in his words, “basically blew it up and built a whole new course” after purchasing the club for $3 million in 2012 (or about $4 million today). Situated on the banks of Lake Norman, about 30 miles north of Charlotte, the club is surrounded by a residential community of more than 1,000 homes.
Before the public club, located along the Pacific coast in Los Angeles County, could open its doors, a landslide in 1999 sent the course into bankruptcy. Trump bought the property for $27 million in 2002 (or $50 million today)—finally opening it to anyone willing to pay its pricey greens fees in 2006—and he later claimed its total construction cost was a hard-to-believe $264 million, which he said made it the world’s most expensive golf course. (By 2008, Trump’s representatives were telling the county tax assessor it was actually worth $10 million, according to Variety.) After Trump referred to some Mexican immigrants as “rapists” and “killers” in 2015, the PGA of America announced its Grand Slam of Golf tournament would not be played at the course.
Colts Neck’s name hints at its location among the equestrian farms of Monmouth County, and like Bedminster, the club receives a farmland tax break. Golfers who complete the 18-hole championship course can tackle a par-3 19th hole featuring an island green next to the imposing clubhouse. The New Jersey club, which originally opened in 2005 and which Trump purchased out of foreclosure for a reported $28 million in 2008 ($43 million today), also has a five-hole short course and a heliport that was installed over the objections of local officials.
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Doonbeg will be the site of the DP World Tour’s Irish Open in September, and organizers have “planned for all scenarios” in case Trump decides to attend. He acquired the links-type course, which opened in 2002 with a design by Greg Norman, in 2014 for $16.6 million (around $24 million today), according to his 2014 statement of financial condition; Forbes now values the club at $29 million. The property includes a 218-room hotel, although the Trump Organization owns only some of the rooms. Trump also proposed building a sea wall to protect Doonbeg’s fairways from coastal erosion, but Irish authorities refused him a permit in 2020 over environmental concerns, including the threat to a rare snail species.
The club was known as Briarcliff, Briar Hills or Briar Hall from its founding in 1922 until Trump bought it for around $8 million in a 1996 foreclosure sale ($17 million today) and rebuilt it for a 2002 reopening. Located about 30 miles from Manhattan—and just a bit farther from Trump’s courses in Hopewell Junction, Bedminster and Colts Neck—the club was once listed in Trump’s financial disclosures as being worth more than $50 million. When he sued the town of Ossining in 2016, however, in an attempt to lower his tax bill, he claimed the roughly 140-acre property was worth $1.4 million. (In a compromise, he and the town agreed to value the club at $9.5 million for 2021.) Over the years, the club’s members have reportedly included Joe Torre, Jack Nicholson and Bill Clinton.
Just across the Pennsylvania-New Jersey state line from Philadelphia sits this 365-acre club Trump acquired in 2010, perched on a hill offering views of the city skyline—although it is not, as the Trump Organization’s website claims, the highest point in South Jersey. Pine Valley Golf Club, four miles down the road, regularly tops lists of the world’s best courses, but Trump told Golf Digest in 2014 that his course is “as good as Pine Valley, OK? People from Pine Valley are playing it all the time, and some say it’s just as good, and some say it’s better.”
The Dutchess County club, which originally opened as Branton Woods in 2002 on a former bison farm in the shadow of Stormville Mountain, became a Trump course in 2010. Months later, the Poughkeepsie Journal reported Trump had nearly doubled its staff and boosted its membership by more than 40%.
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In 2024, Trump received an estimated $5 million to license his name to the club—owned by Emirati real estate developer Damac Crescent Properties—as well as $1 million in management fees. The course, which was designed by prominent golf architect Gil Hanse, opened in 2017—two years after Trump’s name and image were stripped from the construction site when he responded to a shooting in San Bernardino, California, by calling for “a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country’s representatives can figure out what is going on.” “We saw the pressure,” Hussain Sajwani, the billionaire founder of Damac Properties, told CNN in 2016, but “we took a decision that we are going to stick to our legal agreements.” More recently, Trump’s war in Iran has imperiled the Dubai club: Iranian drone attacks in March reportedly struck an airbase and an apartment complex near the course.
Trump purchased a 1,400-acre plot just north of Aberdeen in 2006 and, amid an ultimately unsuccessful fight to stop a wind farm from being built nearby, opened his course there six years later, having invested $41.1 million in the property, according to his 2012 statement of financial condition. He listed the club’s valuation at “over $50,000,000” in his 2025 financial disclosure, but based on its financial performance, Forbes values it more modestly, at roughly $12 million. Last year, the club added a second 18-hole course and hosted the Scottish Championship, its first DP World Tour tournament. Revenue has been rising, bringing the club closer to break-even.
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