LPGA Tour 2026 (F)

Thirteen players founded the LPGA in 1950, which makes it the oldest women's professional sports organisation in the United States still running. A year later it had a Hall of Fame, with four charter members: Patty Berg, Betty Jameson, Louise Suggs and Babe Zaharias — the last of whom won two golds and a silver in athletics at the 1932 Olympics before turning to golf. In 1998 that hall was folded into the World Golf Hall of Fame.

The number that sums the tour up is 88. That is how many tournaments Kathy Whitworth won, the record in LPGA history. It is worth comparing: the men's PGA Tour record is the 82 wins shared by Sam Snead and Tiger Woods. Mickey Wright, Whitworth's contemporary, finished on exactly those 82.

Then came Annika Sörenstam's era, with eleven wins in 2002 and ten in 2005, figures that today look like they belong to another sport. This is the tour's 77th season, and the bar those players set still explains why a scoring-average record is measured against what Sörenstam did.

The five majors of 2025 went to five different players: Mao Saigo took the Chevron, Maja Stark the U.S. Women's Open, Minjee Lee the KPMG, Grace Kim the Evian and Miyū Yamashita the AIG Women's Open. Yamashita was also Rookie of the Year — a debutante winning a major in her first full campaign.

And above all of them, Jeeno Thitikul. The Thai won the CME Group Tour Championship on 23 November and with it the four-million-dollar cheque that goes to the winner, more than any other week on tour pays out. She took Player of the Year and topped the money list too.

But the title that really measures what she did is the Vare Trophy, awarded for the season's lowest scoring average: Thitikul won it by beating the mark Annika Sörenstam had held since 2002. A hot streak can win you a lot of tournaments; averaging better than anyone across twenty-odd events on three continents cannot be done on a streak.

The 77th season runs from 29 January to 22 November, hands out 132 million dollars in prize funds and opens with a first major that has moved house again. The Chevron spent fifty-one years at Mission Hills in California; it left for Texas in 2023 and now, barely three editions later, it is played at Memorial Park in Houston. Travelling with it is women's golf's most recognisable tradition, the winner's leap into the water beside the 18th, which at the new venue has a pool built specifically for the purpose.

The other anniversary is rounder. The AIG Women's Open reaches its fiftieth edition and marks it at Royal Lytham & St Annes, a links on the Lancashire coast hosting it for the sixth time.

And there is a gap in the calendar worth understanding: September. The Solheim Cup, the team match between Europe and the United States, is played that month in the Netherlands. It awards no standings points and is not part of this pool — it is team match play, another sport inside the same one — but it takes half the elite away for a fortnight and splits the season just before the closing Asian run.

Memorial Park, in Houston, opens the major season in April. It is a municipal course — anyone can book a tee time and locals still pay little to play it — which is extraordinary for a major. Tom Doak redesigned it with Brooks Koepka as player consultant so it could hold the PGA Tour, which has played there since 2020, and now it inherits the Chevron as well, after the tournament spent half a century in the Californian desert and three years in the woods of The Woodlands.

Evian Resort Golf Club is the only major played in continental Europe. It sits at around 480 metres of altitude, hanging above Lake Geneva with the Alps behind, and that mix of mountain air and constant slope means the ball behaves like nowhere else all year. It is played in July.

Royal Lytham & St Annes hosts the AIG Women's Open on 30 July. It is a Lancashire links with a quirk that makes it unique among the great British courses: it never touches the sea at any point of the round, and even so it has 206 bunkers and the coastal wind in every hole. This is its sixth time as host.

And it all ends at Tiburón, in Naples, Florida, from 19 to 22 November. That is where the four-million-dollar cheque is handed over and the Race to CME Globe is settled, with the whole course set up for the show: few weeks of the year are played knowing a single shot is worth that much money.

The system is simple to state and hard to play: every official event on the calendar pays points, the points accumulate all year, and the top sixty on that list — plus ties — earn a place at the CME Group Tour Championship in Naples. There, across four days in November, the season and the four million dollars are decided.

The consequence is that winning is not the only thing that counts. A player can go the whole year without lifting a trophy, finish inside the top 20 week after week and turn up in Florida with a real chance; another can win twice in March, vanish over the summer and miss the list entirely. That makes the Race to CME Globe a ranking that rewards being there, not only shining.

And it explains why the calendar is followed differently from September onwards. With five or six events left, every cut made stops being a detail and becomes the difference between flying to Naples and finishing the year in Malaysia. The closing Asian tournaments are usually worth more than they look.