The cheapest sensible way into a full bag
What fourteen clubs cost at typical used prices, which ones eat the budget, and where shopping around actually pays.
Starting golf from nothing is quoted in wildly different numbers depending on who is quoting and what they sell. Here is ours, and it is arithmetic rather than opinion: the typical used price of each club type, assembled into a bag.
A full set at typical used prices comes to £1364.00 for 13 clubs. Not the cheapest possible, which is a different and much less useful number. This is what you pay buying each club at the middle of its own market.
Where the money actually is
One line dominates. Iron sets at £659.00 are 48% of the total, which means every decision you make about the other clubs is rounding error by comparison. If you are going to spend an evening researching one purchase, it is not the putter.
And the irons are the one part where the obvious saving does not exist. Building a set from single irons comes to £406.00 against £659.00 for a set, so assembling is dearer. The full comparison.
Where shopping around pays
Effort is worth spending unevenly, because the spread is uneven. On iron sets the dearest live listing is typically 2.10 times the cheapest, so a second and third quote genuinely change what you pay. On the tighter categories the market has already agreed with itself and you are shopping for pennies. The gap by club type.
The bag you should actually buy first
Fourteen clubs is the legal maximum, not a requirement, and no beginner needs the number. A driver, a fairway wood or hybrid, irons from 6 to pitching wedge, a sand wedge and a putter is nine clubs, covers every shot a new golfer will face, and takes a meaningful bite out of the total above. The 3 iron you would have bought to complete the set is the club most likely to stay in the garage.
The order to buy them in
If the total above is more than you want to spend at once, the sequence matters more than the individual choices. Buy the putter and the wedges first: they are the cheapest lines on the chart, they are the clubs you will use most often per round, and they depreciate least, so a mistake costs you little. Irons next, because they are the largest single decision and the one most worth getting right. The driver last, because it is the club whose price falls fastest and the one where waiting for the next generation to ship saves the most.
That is close to the opposite of the order most people buy in, which is driver first because it is the club they most want.
What is missing from the total
The figure above is clubs only. A bag, balls, gloves, shoes and a rangefinder are all things you will buy, and none of them are in it. We track all of those too, and they add a meaningful amount, so treat £1364.00 as the floor of a realistic total rather than the whole of it.
Shipping is included in every price on this site, which matters more when you are assembling a bag from a dozen separate purchases than on any single one. A club bought from thirteen different sellers carries thirteen postage charges, and that is a real argument for buying the irons as a set and for taking a slightly dearer listing from a seller you are already buying something else from.
The bag builder prices a specific set as you assemble it, using the same figures as this page.
AdLinks to sellers are affiliate-tagged where we have a programme. If you buy, this site may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. It plays no part in any figure above, which are computed from prices before any link is built. How this works.
Every figure here is read from the tracker when the page loads, so it moves as the market does. Written by George Thirlaway. About this site.