Official World Golf Ranking

The Official World Golf Ranking is a system for rating the performance level of professional golfers. It was started in 1986. The rankings are based on a player's position in individual tournaments (i.e. not pairs or team events) over a "rolling" two-year period. New rankings are calculated each week. During 2018, nearly 400 tournaments on 20 tours were covered by the ranking system. All players competing in these tournaments are included in the rankings. In 2025, 24 tours factored into the world rankings. As well as being of general interest, the rankings have an additional importance, in that they are used as one of the qualifying criteria for entry into a number of leading tournaments.

The chair of the OWGR is former world number twelve and 2008 Masters Tournament champion Trevor Immelman.

The initiative for the creation of the Official World Golf Ranking came from the Championship Committee of the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews, which found in the 1980s that its system of issuing invitations to The Open Championship on a tour by tour basis was omitting an increasing number of top players because more of them were dividing their time between tours, and from preeminent sports agent Mark McCormack, who was the first chairman of the International Advisory Committee which oversees the rankings. The system used to calculate the rankings was developed from McCormack's World Golf Rankings, which were published in his World of Professional Golf Annual from 1968 to 1985, although these were purely unofficial and not used for any wider purpose (such as inviting players to major tournaments).

The first ranking list was published prior to the 1986 Masters Tournament. The top six ranked golfers were: Bernhard Langer, Seve Ballesteros, Sandy Lyle, Tom Watson, Mark O'Meara and Greg Norman. Thus, the top three were all European, but there were 31 Americans in the top 50 (compared with 17 at the end of 2010).

The method of calculation of the rankings has changed considerably over the years. Initially, the rankings were calculated over a three-year period, with the current year's points multiplied by four (three in 1986), the previous year's points by two and the third year's points by one. Rankings were based on the total points and points awarded were restricted to integer values. All tournaments recognised by the world's professional tours, and some leading invitational events, were graded into categories ranging from major championship (whose winners would receive 50 points) to "other tournaments" (whose winners would receive a minimum of 8). In all events, other finishers received points on a diminishing scale that began with runners-up receiving 60% of the winners' points, and the number of players in the field receiving points would be the same as the points awarded to the winner. In a major, for example, all players finishing 30th to 40th would receive 2 points, and all players finishing 50th or higher, 1 point.

Beginning in April 1989, the rankings were changed to be based on the average points per event played instead of simply total points earned, subject to a minimum divisor of 60 (20 events per year). This was in order to more accurately reflect the status of some (particularly older) players, who played in far fewer events than their younger contemporaries but demonstrated in major championships that their ranking was artificially low. Tom Watson, for example, finished in the top 15 of eight major championships between 1987 and 1989, yet had a "total points" ranking of just 40th; his ranking became a more realistic 20th when based on "average points". A new system for determining the "weight" of each tournament was also introduced, based on the strength of the tournament's field in terms of their pre-tournament world rankings. Major championships were guaranteed to remain at 50 points for the winners, and all other events could attain a maximum of 40 points for the winner if all of the world's top 100 were present. In practice most PGA Tour events awarded around 25 points to the winner, European Tour events around 18 and JPGA Tour events around 12.

In 1996, the three-year period was reduced to two years, with the current year now counting double and the minimum number of events reduced from 60 to 40. Points were extended to more of the field, beginning in 2000, and were no longer restricted to integer values. Beginning in September 2001, the tapering system was changed so that instead of the points for each result being doubled if they occurred in the most recent 12 months, one eighth of the initial "multiplied up" value was deducted every 13 weeks. This change effectively meant that players could now be more simply described as being awarded 100 points (not 50) for winning a major. Beginning in 2007, the system holds the points from each event at full value for 13 weeks and then reduces them in equal weekly increments over the remainder of the two-year period.

In 2010, a maximum number of tournaments was introduced as well as the minimum of 40. The maximum number was initially set to 60 from January 2010 and was reduced by 2 every six months until it reached 52 in January 2012. This means that since 2012 only the player's 52 most recent tournaments (within the two-year period) are used to calculate his ranking average.