What a used driver actually costs in the UK

"How much is a used driver" has a real answer and a useless one. The useless answer is the cheapest listing on any given day, which is a fact about one seller. The real answer is where the middle of the market sits, and how wide the band around it is.

• Cheapest£21.00
• Middle half£60.00 to £329.99
• Typical£149.00
• Dearest£626.98

The middle half is the number worth carrying around. It says that a driver offered at £60.00 is at the cheap edge of normal rather than a mistake, and that anything under that is either an old model, a damaged one, or not the club the title claims.

What each band actually buys

The quartiles are not arbitrary lines. They correspond to reasonably distinct parts of the used market, and knowing which one you are shopping in saves more time than any amount of comparing.

• Under £60.00 is the bottom quarter. Genuinely usable drivers live here, but they are three or more generations old, or they are a current model with something wrong: a replaced shaft, a scuffed crown, a missing headcover and adjustment tool. Nothing wrong with any of that if the listing says so and the price reflects it. The risk is that it often does not say so.
• £60.00 to £149.00 is where the previous two generations of the big brands sit in honest condition. For most golfers this is the band with the best ratio of club to money, and it is where we would spend.
• £149.00 to £329.99 buys the outgoing or current generation used, usually from a shop rather than a private seller, usually with a return window.
• Above £329.99 is the current model in near-new condition, or a premium aftermarket shaft carrying most of the price. Check which, because a £250 shaft in a £180 head is a very different purchase from a near-new club.

What moves a driver between those bands

Four things, in roughly this order of impact.

How old it is. This is the big one and it is not gradual. A driver falls when its successor is announced, because that is when every shop holding stock discounts and every annual upgrader lists theirs. We have measured it on the pairs we track: the Ping G430 Max of 2023 typically goes for £379.00 against £529.00 for the G440 Max that replaced it, a gap of 28%. The full generation comparison is its own piece.

The shaft. Two identical heads with different shafts are different products and we price them separately for that reason. Stock shafts in regular and stiff are the liquid part of the market and the cheapest to buy. An exotic aftermarket shaft narrows your resale audience to people who want exactly that shaft, which is why those listings sit longer and why they are often the better buy if it happens to suit you.

Left-handed. Fewer made, fewer listed, and the discount you would expect from lower demand is usually cancelled out by the thinner supply. If you play left-handed, expect to wait rather than to save.

Condition, honestly described. Sky marks on the crown are cosmetic. A rattle is not. Neither is a shaft that has been re-tipped or a head that has been re-glued, and neither is reliably disclosed.

Where the rest of the bag sits

Iron set5,563 listed £675.00

Driver7,796 listed £149.00

Putter8,552 listed £129.99

Hybrid4,796 listed £93.95

Wedge8,266 listed £79.00

Fairway wood6,569 listed £74.99

Single iron13,757 listed £58.00

Why two sellers disagree by this much

The same club, listed at the same time, in the same condition bracket, routinely varies more than people expect. Right now the widest gap we can see on a single model is the Titleist T150: £859.00 at the cheapest and £2359.00 at the dearest, across 47 live listings from 8 different sellers.

That gap is not usually anybody behaving badly. Condition grading is subjective, shafts differ, and a shop pricing off an RRP lands somewhere completely different from a private seller pricing off what they saw last week. It does mean that checking three listings before buying is worth real money, which is the entire reason this site exists.

Worth knowing, though, that drivers are the tightest market in golf. Across 144 driver models with enough listings to measure, the dearest live listing is typically 1.84 times the cheapest, against 2.77 times for iron sets. A driver is a model, a loft, a shaft and a flex, and two of them with those four things in common really are the same club, so the price has nowhere to hide. The spread by club type sets out the rest.

Before you buy

Five minutes, in this order. Check the loft and flex in the listing against what you actually play, because a 9 degree stiff and a 10.5 degree regular are not interchangeable and the photographs will not tell you. Ask whether the headcover and the adjustment tool are included, since replacing both is £40.00 or so and sellers routinely omit them without mentioning it. Look at the sole photograph for the wear pattern rather than the crown, because the sole tells you how much it has been used and the crown only tells you how it has been stored. And check three listings of the same model before committing, which on the evidence above is worth more than any single negotiation.

Every driver we track has its own typical price and spread.