How fast golf clubs lose value
What a driver costs new, what it costs now, and how much of that fall happens in the first two years.
A golf club is a depreciating asset with a very predictable first act: it loses a third to two thirds of its value while it is still, by any reasonable standard, a current club. The interesting question is not whether that happens but when, because that is the difference between paying for a badge and paying for a golf club.
Below is every model we have both a verified UK launch price for and enough recorded sales to know its going rate. The launch prices are sourced individually; the current figures are our own medians.
The pattern
The fall is not gradual and it is not linear. It is mostly a cliff at the moment a successor is announced, because that is when every shop holding stock discounts at once and every owner who upgrades yearly lists theirs. A club two generations old has already taken both hits and sits close to its floor; a club announced last month has taken neither.
Which gives a simple, unglamorous rule: the cheapest golf per pound is almost always the model one generation back, bought after the new one has shipped rather than before. You are buying the same club at the price the announcement created.
Depreciation is not the same across the bag
Drivers fall hardest and fastest, and they are also the club most people replace, which is not a coincidence: the marketing budget that drives the upgrade is what creates the supply of last year's model. Irons fall more slowly because the technology genuinely moves less and a set is a bigger, less impulsive purchase. Wedges are a special case in the other direction, because the face wears out, so an old wedge is not merely an older club but a partly consumed one. Putters barely depreciate on technology at all and are priced almost entirely on condition and brand.
That ordering is worth carrying around, because it tells you where buying used is nearly free and where it costs you something real. The wedge case is the one to read if you are about to buy a used one.
What this means if you are selling
The mirror image of everything above. The worst time to sell a club is the month after its successor is announced, when you are competing with every shop clearing stock and every other upgrader. The best time is the month before, when yours is still the current model and nobody knows for how long. That window is predictable to within a few weeks for most brands, because the release cycles are regular and public.
The practical version: if you upgrade annually, sell before you buy, not after. Most people do it the other way round and eat the drop on both clubs.
What this does not tell you
It is a snapshot, not a trend. We have been recording prices for weeks, not years, so nothing here says how these figures will move from here, and anyone telling you golf gear is cheapest in a particular month is guessing unless they can show you the series. When we have a year of history we will publish the series and you can judge it.
The launch prices are also recommended retail prices, which is a number a shop is free to ignore, so the fall from launch overstates the fall from what people really paid. We use them because they are the only dated, verifiable starting point that exists for every model, and every one above is sourced individually rather than estimated. Why we distrust list prices everywhere else applies here too, and the honest position is that this is the one place on the site where we use one deliberately and say so.
The full ranking keeps this current, and it updates as the medians move.
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.