Strokes Gained: Total
Strokes gained: total, shown on leaderboards as SG: Total, is a golf statistic that measures how many strokes better or worse a player scored than the field average over a round. A positive number means the player beat the average; a negative number means they came up short of it.
What is strokes gained: total?
Strokes gained: total rolls a golfer’s entire round into a single figure. Rather than counting raw strokes against par, it compares the player to everyone else in the same event and reports the difference as a per-round average. Beat the field by four shots over a tournament and your SG: Total sits around +4 per round.
The statistic comes from Mark Broadie, a professor at Columbia Business School, who built it from the PGA Tour’s ShotLink shot-tracking data and set it out in his book Every Shot Counts. His premise was straightforward. Every shot from every position on the course has an expected score, and a player either beats that expectation or falls short.
SG: Total collects all of those small gains and losses across driving, the approach game, the short game around the green, and putting, then adds them together. The result is one number that says whether a player’s overall game ran ahead of or behind the field that week.
How strokes gained: total is calculated
The math behind SG: Total rests on a benchmark called expected strokes, sometimes labelled strokes-to-hole. Every spot on the course, defined by distance and lie, carries an average number of shots a benchmark player needs to hole out from there. On the PGA Tour, that benchmark is the tour field. Amateur tracking apps can swap in a scratch golfer or a chosen handicap level instead.
For a single shot, the calculation compares where the ball started against where it finished:
Strokes gained = (expected strokes before) − (expected strokes after) − 1
The minus one accounts for the stroke just played. A drive that moves the ball from a 4.1 expected-stroke position to a 2.8 expected-stroke position gains 0.3 strokes, because 4.1 − 2.8 − 1 leaves 0.3. Repeat that for every shot in the round, group the results by category, and the category numbers combine into the round’s total:
SG: Total = off-the-tee + approach + around-the-green + putting
A player who goes round in 68 while the field averages 72 lands near +4.0 SG: Total for the day.
The four strokes gained categories
SG: Total is built from four category numbers, each covering a separate phase of the round. The PGA Tour publishes them individually so a player can see exactly where strokes are won or lost.
| Category | Abbreviation | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Off the tee | SG: OTT | Tee shots on par 4s and par 5s |
| Approach | SG: APP | Approach shots to the green, including par 3 tee shots |
| Around the green | SG: ARG | Shots within roughly 30 yards of the green that are not putts |
| Putting | SG: PUTT | Every stroke taken on the putting surface |
Add the four together, and you arrive at SG: Total. That breakdown is what makes the statistic so useful for diagnosis, since two players can post an identical SG: Total while reaching it through completely different strengths.
Strokes gained: total vs. strokes gained: tee-to-green
The stat most often mixed up with SG: Total is strokes gained: tee-to-green (SG: T2G). Both are combined figures, so treating them as the same thing is an easy mistake. They measure different things.
| SG: Total | SG: Tee-to-green | |
|---|---|---|
| Covers | Every shot in the round | Every shot except putts |
| Includes putting? | Yes | No |
| Categories combined | OTT + APP + ARG + PUTT | OTT + APP + ARG |
| Best read as | Overall performance vs the field | Long game and ball-striking only |
Put simply, SG: Tee-to-green is SG: Total with putting removed. A player can rank near the top in tee-to-green yet slide to mid-pack in SG: Total when the putter goes cold for a week.
What counts as a good strokes gained: total
Good depends entirely on the benchmark. Measured against the PGA Tour field, breaking even at 0.0 already means a player performed at tour-average level, which is elite by any ordinary standard. Only the strongest professionals stay meaningfully positive across a full season.
Season-long SG: Total leaders sit in a tight band. Scottie Scheffler led the PGA Tour at +2.743 per round in 2025, and Tiger Woods holds the single-season record at +3.443 in 2006. Woods is the only player to average above 3.0, which he managed in three separate years. A season figure near +2.0 is usually enough to top the tour.
Recreational golfers are a different case. When an amateur’s game is scored against a tour benchmark, SG: Total comes out negative almost every time, because the tour field is the toughest comparison available. Tracking apps address this by letting players measure against a scratch golfer or their own handicap level, where landing close to 0.0 marks a genuinely strong round.
Related Golf Terms
- Three-putt avoidance — A measure of how rarely a player three-putts.
- One-putt percentage — The rate at which a player needs only one putt on a green.
- Ball striking — A combined measure of driving and approach-play performance.
- Total driving — A combined ranking of driving distance and accuracy.
- Scrambling percentage — The rate of making par after missing a green in regulation.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is a negative strokes gained: total bad?
Not on its own. The number only says the player scored below the chosen benchmark. Against PGA Tour pros, nearly every amateur posts a negative figure, so the comparison group matters as much as the sign in front of the number.
Does SG: Total always equal the four categories added up?
Almost always. On tour, the published SG: Total can differ from the summed categories by a tiny amount, owing to how the baselines are set and rounded, but for practical purposes the four parts add up to the whole.
When did the PGA Tour start using strokes gained?
The tour adopted strokes gained: putting in May 2011, then expanded to the full four-category system by 2016. The underlying data has since been back-calculated to 2004.
Can a golfer work out their own SG: Total?
Yes. Log where each shot starts and finishes, compare every shot against a benchmark, and add up the results across the round. Most shot-tracking apps do all of that for you automatically.
Sources
- Broadie, Mark. Every Shot Counts. Gotham Books, 2014.
- Broadie, Mark. “Assessing Golfer Performance on the PGA TOUR.” Interfaces, 2012. Accessed August 2026.
https://pubsonline.informs.org/doi/10.1287/inte.1120.0626 - PGA Tour. “Strokes Gained: Defined.” Accessed August 2026.
https://www.pgatour.com/news/2016/05/31/strokes-gained-defined.html - Golf Compendium. “Yearly ‘Total Strokes Gained’ Leaders on the PGA Tour.” Accessed August 2026.
https://www.golfcompendium.com/2021/09/strokes-gained-total-pga-tour.html - Golfity. “Strokes Gained on the PGA Tour: The Four Categories Explained.” Accessed August 2026.
https://golfity.com/blog/strokes-gained-on-the-pga-tour/ - Golf Digest. “Do the PGA Tour’s ‘Strokes Gained’ Statistics Have a Sample-Size Problem?” Accessed August 2026.
https://www.golfdigest.com/story/do-the-pga-tour-strokes-gained-statistics-have-a-sample-size-problem-shane-ryan
