Handicap allowances for society golf, format by format.

Why allowances exist at all

Full handicaps are designed for one player, one ball, in stroke play. As soon as you change the format — pair players up, let them take their better score, or play head-to-head match play — full handicaps distort the contest. Allowances rebalance it. The World Handicap System publishes recommended allowances so competitions play fairly; a society can adopt them wholesale, and most do.

The recommended allowances

• Individual Stableford / stroke play — 95% of course handicap.
• Individual Par/Bogey — 95%.
• Fourball better-ball (Stableford or stroke) — 85% each.
• Fourball match play — 90% of the difference, strokes off the lowest player.
• Foursomes (stroke play) — 50% of the pair's combined course handicaps.
• Foursomes match play — 50% of the combined difference between the two sides.
• Greensomes — 60% of the lower handicap plus 40% of the higher.
• Singles match play — 100% of the difference; the lower player goes to scratch and gives the difference to the higher.
• Scramble (4 players) — a common set is 25% / 20% / 15% / 10% of each player's handicap, lowest to highest.

Match play works differently

Notice that match play uses the difference between handicaps, not everyone's full figure. In a singles match, if you're a 10 and your opponent is an 18, the 10 plays off scratch and the 18 receives 8 strokes — placed on the 8 hardest holes by stroke index. Because you only ever care about the gap, both players are on an equal footing regardless of the raw numbers. Our guide to running a knockout covers how this plays out across a whole bracket.

A society can set its own — just write it down

These are recommendations, not laws. Some societies play off 100% for simplicity, or tweak allowances to suit their members. That's fine — the golden rule is that the allowance is agreed in advance and applied to everyone the same way. Ambiguity here is the single most common source of "well, I thought we played off full handicap" disputes at prize-giving.

Let the app apply them

Calculating course handicaps, applying the right allowance per format, and spreading strokes across the correct stroke indexes is fiddly to do by hand for a full field. Caddro Society stores each member's handicap index, converts it to a course handicap for the tees in play, and applies the correct allowance for whichever format you've chosen — automatically, every time — so the leaderboard is right before anyone questions it.