Hilton Head Island Golf: Courses, Deals & the RBC Heritage

Championship courses to daily-fee rounds

Most golfing in Hilton Head happens inside its resorts and gated communities — Sea Pines,Palmetto Dunes, Shipyard, Port Royal — where each course is open to resort guests and, on most, the public with an advance tee time. HHI golf courses run the full range from Pete Dye’s tournament test at Harbour Town to gentler resort layouts built for a vacation round, and most share the same Lowcountry character — marsh and lagoon crossings, live oaks draped in Spanish moss, and holes that thread through maritime forest rather than open parkland.

For golf near Hilton Head, Bluffton’s courses are a different trip: public and semi-private daily-fee tracks a short drive off the island, generally easier to book on short notice and priced accordingly. See the full course-by-course breakdown — public, resort, and semi-private access, grouped by area — for the complete list of golf courses hilton head and Bluffton golfers actually play.

Home of the RBC Heritage

Every April since 1969, the PGA Tour has come to Harbour Town Golf Links for the RBC Heritage. The course’s par-4 18th, playing straight at the red-and-white Harbour Town Lighthouse, is one of the most photographed finishing holes in golf, and it’s a real, playable public-facing test the rest of the year — not just a tournament backdrop. Grounds tickets start at $108 a day; see RBC Heritage tickets for every option.

The Island’s Other Tournament

Every March, Long Cove Club hosts the Darius Rucker Intercollegiate, a 17-team women’s college championship founded in 2012 and televised live on Golf Channel. Admission is free, there are no tickets, and it’s the one week a year the public gets inside a private Pete and Alice Dye course.

Planning Golf at Hilton Head, South Carolina

Spring and fall are the busiest stretches for golf in Hilton Head Island, so book tee times ahead of either season. The best Hilton Head golf resorts, Sea Pines and Palmetto Dunes among them, sell stay-and-play packages bundling lodging with discounted rounds, and multi-course passes exist for golfers who want to sample several layouts in one visit — see Hilton Head golf deals & packages for how they work. Courses here overseed each fall for winter color, which briefly affects playing conditions — worth knowing if you’re planning a late-autumn round.

On a rainy day, indoor golf is the fallback: Chronic Golf +Games on New Orleans Road has golf simulator bays that play more than 130 courses, and the PGA TOUR Superstore just over the bridge in Bluffton has simulators in its practice bays.

A golf season that runs most of the year

Winters here rarely get cold enough to close a course, so Hilton Head golf doesn’t really have an off-season the way courses further north do — it has a busy season and a quieter one. Spring and fall bring the mildest days and the heaviest tee-sheet demand around them; summer rounds start earlier to beat the afternoon heat and the occasional pop-up thunderstorm typical of a Lowcountry summer; and winter golf, once the overseed settles in, is often the easiest time to get a same-day tee time at a course that’s booked solid every other season.