Best Golf Courses in Chicago: A Region-by-Region Guide

Chicago golf splits in two. The area's highest-ranked courses sit behind club gates, mostly in the western suburbs and on the North Shore. The public game belongs largely to park districts, forest preserves and cities, plus a handful of daily-fee courses built to tournament length. This guide works through the ten regions in the directory and puts the courses a visiting golfer can book ahead of the clubs they can't. For a public-only shortlist, start with the best public golf courses in Chicago. Plan around the calendar, too: most Chicagoland courses close or go to limited winter play from about November to March.

Chicago

Golf inside the city limits is scarce, and the public side of it is one facility on the South Side, built over a former landfill beside Lake Calumet. Harborside International's Starboard course is the newer of two Dick Nugent layouts there, opened in 1996 to bring treeless, links-style golf to the city. Big bunkers and tall fescue do the framing, the downtown skyline stays in view, and with nothing to block it, the wind decides how long the day plays. Both of its back-nine par 3s cross water from Lake Calumet. Golfweek's Best 2026 list of Illinois courses you can play has the Starboard at No. 8. Apart from Harborside's other course, the remaining three in the Chicago hub are private clubs. For dinner and a night out after the round, MyRSVP covers the city's restaurants and nightlife.

North Shore

From Lincolnwood to Lake Bluff, the North Shore holds the area's deepest run of classic architecture, and almost none of it is public: all but one of the courses in the North Shore hub are private. The exception is worth the drive. The Glen Club in Glenview is a semi-private Tom Fazio course, opened in 2001 on the old Glenview Naval Air Station. The site came with runways and about three feet of elevation change; Fazio moved enough earth to give some holes up to 40 feet of elevation change, then worked in lakes, streams and prairie. Non-members can book up to seven days ahead. A regular Illinois Open venue between 2002 and 2019, it is No. 3 on Golfweek's Best 2026 Illinois list of courses you can play and No. 32 on Golf Digest's 2025-26 Best in State ranking for Illinois.

West Suburbs

The western suburbs have three courses on Golf Digest's 2025-26 America's 100 Greatest, all of them private, and a deep public bench behind them. Start at Cantigny Golf in Wheaton: 27 holes across nearly 300 acres of Robert R. McCormick's former estate. Roger Packard's design opened in 1989, when Golf Digest named it the best new public course in America, and it later hosted the 2007 U.S. Amateur Public Links. It is No. 10 on Golfweek's Best 2026 Illinois list of courses you can play and No. 35 on Golf Digest's 2025-26 Best in State ranking for Illinois. Check before you go: Todd Quitno is renovating the three nines one at a time with 18 holes kept open, and the Woodside nine is closed until about June 2027. The West Suburbs hub lists five more public courses, among them park-district, village and forest-preserve layouts in Schaumburg, Wheaton, Glen Ellyn and Addison.

Southwest Suburbs

The Southwest Suburbs hub is all public golf, and the course that draws golfers from out of town is Cog Hill's No. 4, Dubsdread, in Lemont. Joe Jemsek hired Dick Wilson and Joe Lee to build a fourth course at his public Cog Hill facility that could stand beside the best private clubs, and it opened in 1964. It hosted the Western Open every year from 1991 to 2006 and the BMW Championship in 2007, 2009-2011 and 2013. Rees Jones rebuilt all of its greens, tees and bunkers before it reopened in 2009. The name warns the dub, the poor golfer, to beware, and the card agrees: 7,554 yards from the Black tees, rated 78.0 with a 153 slope, through tight landing areas to heavily bunkered greens. It is No. 1 on Golfweek's Best 2026 Illinois list of courses you can play and No. 14 on Golf Digest's 2025-26 Best in State ranking for Illinois. If you have time for one public round in Chicagoland, this is the one to book.

South Suburbs

Most of the South Suburbs hub is private, which makes its public course all the more useful. Ravisloe Country Club in Homewood opened in 1901, took Donald Ross's rework in the late 1910s and stayed private for more than a century, until a 2009 sale opened it to the public. That long private stretch is why so much of the old architecture is intact. The bunkers are grass-faced and flat-bottomed, restored to Ross's specifications in the early 2000s, and most greens tilt hard from back to front, so leaving an approach above the hole is expensive. At par 70 and 6,343 yards it will not overpower anyone; the greens do the defending. Golfweek's Best 2026 Illinois list of courses you can play has it at No. 11.

Lake County

No region in the directory has more courses on Golfweek's Best 2026 Illinois list than Lake County, where all three public courses in the Lake County hub made the cut. The highest-ranked is Stonewall Orchard in Grayslake, the first Arthur Hills design in Illinois, opened in 1999 among rolling hills, wetlands and, by the club's count, more than 65,000 mature pines and oaks. From the Silver tees it plays 7,106 yards, rated 75.3 with a 152 slope. It has hosted U.S. Open final-stage qualifying and, the club says, Korn Ferry Tour qualifying six times. It is No. 9 on Golfweek's 2026 Illinois list and No. 30 on Golf Digest's 2025-26 Best in State ranking for Illinois. The other two are a Keith Foster links-style course run by the Zion Park District and a Robert Trent Jones Jr. design that serves as the Lake County Forest Preserves' flagship.

Fox Valley & McHenry

More than half of the Fox Valley & McHenry hub, which runs from Aurora and Sugar Grove up to Woodstock, is private. Of its public courses, Highlands of Elgin is the pick. It is a City of Elgin course with two very different nines. One rolls over gentle ground. The other, opened in 2010, was built in an old stone quarry around a 12-acre lake, with four holes on a bluff 30 to 40 feet above the water and carries along the quarry edge that play longer than they look. The club's signature is the par-3 7th, 250 yards from the back tees and hit from an elevated tee over the quarry. It is No. 5 on Golfweek's Best 2026 Illinois list of courses you can play.

Northwest Indiana

Across the state line, the Northwest Indiana hub runs from Hammond on the state line out to La Porte, and most of its courses take public play. Closest to the city is Lost Marsh in Hammond, about 30 minutes from downtown by the club's estimate, with Chicago in view during the round. The course caps a former steel-mill slag dump on Lake George; a 2003 Chicago Tribune report, cited by Audubon International, quoted EPA officials calling it the Midwest's largest and most successful brownfield reclamation. Charles Howard's design opened that year and puts Lake George in play on the first four holes, and there is a nine-hole par-3 course alongside. Walking is not allowed before 1 p.m. on weekends.

Kenosha

Just over the Wisconsin line, the Kenosha hub is small: a private 1922 Donald Ross club and Kenosha County's 45-hole public complex in Kansasville. The public pick is Brighton Dale Links' White Birch course, the original Ed Ault 18 from 1972, beside the Richard Bong State Recreation Area. It is the longest of the complex's three courses, 7,012 yards from the Blue tees with a 73.3 rating and 132 slope, and its 12th is a 279-yard par 3. Todd Quitno renovated its bunkers and drainage in 2018. It is straightforward county golf at a county rate, bookable online.

Golf trips from Chicago

The Golf Trips from Chicago hub gathers the courses that are each a trip from the city, an overnight or a long day rather than a quick round: Kohler, the Kettle Moraine, the sand country near Nekoosa, Lake Geneva and, back in Illinois, the Quad Cities. The headliner is Whistling Straits' Straits course, Pete Dye's walking-only links along two miles of Lake Michigan bluffs, which Kohler puts 142 miles from O'Hare. It hosted the PGA Championship in 2004, 2010 and 2015 and the 2021 Ryder Cup. It is No. 26 on Golf Digest's 2025-26 America's 100 Greatest, No. 4 on its 2025-26 America's 100 Greatest Public list and No. 1 on its 2025-26 Best in State ranking for Wisconsin. Kohler lists it as public, though its FAQ notes the Straits may carry booking restrictions for non-resort guests. The Wisconsin resorts run roughly May through October. For how Kohler stacks up against the state's other big trips, see the Wisconsin golf trips guide.

The private clubs

The best-ranked golf around Chicago is members-only. Chicago Golf Club opened the first 18-hole course in the United States, C.B. Macdonald's 1893 layout in Downers Grove, and was one of the USGA's five founding clubs. Its course in Wheaton is Seth Raynor's 1920s rebuild on Macdonald's routing, and it is No. 11 on Golf Digest's 2025-26 America's 100 Greatest and No. 1 on its 2025-26 Best in State ranking for Illinois. Course No. 3 at Medinah Country Club reopened in 2024 after OCM Golf's redesign and hosted the Presidents Cup in September 2026; it is No. 74 on the same national list and No. 3 in the 2025-26 Illinois ranking. Both are for members and their guests only, like the clubs that fill the North Shore and the South Suburbs, and neither can be booked. The guide to Chicago's courses on Golf Digest's 100 Greatest covers the ranked clubs in more depth.

How to book

Public and semi-private courses book through GolfNow or the course's own tee sheet, and each course listing links the right one. Booking windows vary: Cog Hill's No. 4 takes tee times up to 60 days ahead, while The Glen Club opens to non-members seven days out. Resort courses book through the resort, and at some, the Straits among them, non-resort guests may face restrictions. Private clubs are for members and their guests only. We don't sell tee times; the listings point to the people who do.