Club gapping calculator: find the holes in your bag

Most amateur bags get gapped by accident. You buy a set of irons, add a couple of wedges, keep the 5-wood you liked at the time, and one day notice your 8-iron and your pitching wedge are landing on the same green from the same spot. Or that there are 30 yards between your sand wedge and your pitching wedge, with nothing in between, and you've been trying to manufacture three-quarter PWs from 95 yards because that's what the gap leaves you.

Club gapping is the boring, free fix for all of that. It's ten minutes of writing down what each club actually carries, lining them up by distance, and looking for the slots that overlap or for the holes nothing is filling. The tool below does the lining-up bit for you. Type in your typical carry distance (carry, not total, because rollout is too unpredictable to plan around), and it sorts your bag, draws it out, and flags every gap that isn't sitting in the 10 to 15 yard sweet spot. Where it finds a hole, it tells you the loft you'd want to plug it.

Why club gapping matters more than the clubs themselves

Every shot from 150 yards in is a yardage problem before it's a swing problem. If your bag isn't gapped cleanly, you're being asked to hit dialled-back shots all day on the clubs you score with, and that gets hard under pressure. A clean ladder of 12 to 15 yards per step gives you a full-swing club for almost every approach distance you'll face. There's nothing to think about beyond commit and go.

It's also the cheapest improvement in golf. The audit is free. The fix is usually a wedge swap, sometimes a hybrid in for a long iron. Lessons help your swing; gapping helps your scores tomorrow.

How to read the gaps

Four problem bands matter. Overlaps (under 5 yards) mean two clubs are doing the same job, and one of your 14 slots is wasted. Tight gaps (5 to 9 yards) mean you'll regularly need a part-shot to bridge the difference, which is the hardest swing in golf to repeat under pressure. Wide gaps (16 to 20 yards) are workable but force you to dial down the longer club more often than you'd like. Holes (over 20 yards) are the worst of the lot: they leave you choosing between a club you can't hit full and one you have to lean on, neither of which sets you up to be aggressive.

The 10 to 15 yard band is what we're aiming for because that's roughly one club's worth of distance for the average amateur, lined up evenly. Tour players run tighter, around 12 to 14 yards, because their swings are repeatable enough to pace finer. You don't need to be that precise, but the principle is the same.

Common gapping mistakes amateurs make

A handful of these show up in nearly every amateur bag:

• Two woods at the same distance. A 3-wood and a 5-wood that both carry 200 yards because the lower-lofted one is too long to launch cleanly. Drop one and slot a hybrid in.
• No gap wedge. Modern pitching wedges are stamped at 43 or 44 degrees, and a lot of sand wedges sit at 56. That's a 12 degree (and roughly 20 yard) jump with nothing between them. A 50 or 52 degree gap wedge plugs it and gives you a full-swing club from your most common scoring distance.
• Hybrid duplicating the 5-iron. Carrying both a 4-hybrid and a 5-iron that fly the same number. The hybrid is more forgiving and easier to launch, so go with it and drop the iron.
• Gapping by total, not carry. Total distance moves with the wind, the firmness of the fairway, and the ball you're playing. Carry doesn't. Pin your gapping to carry every time.
• One wedge too many. Four wedges (PW, GW, SW, LW) at four lofts that look spaced but actually leave you with two clubs going within 5 yards of each other. Three wedges at 50, 56, 60 covers nearly every distance under 100 yards cleanly.

How to measure your carry distances accurately

The cheapest accurate read is a launch monitor session at your local store. Most fitters will run you through every club in the bag for free or for the price of a couple of buckets of balls, and the carry numbers come straight off the monitor with no guessing. If you're doing it on the course, take the median of five to ten shots per club rather than the longest, because the long ones flatter and the gaps you actually need are the typical ones.

Two things worth knowing. Range balls fly 5 to 10 yards shorter than premium balls, so if you're using a launch monitor with range balls expect your real carries to be slightly longer than the readout. And gap by carry, not total, because rollout depends on turf and weather you can't reliably plan around.

Frequently asked questions

Once you know where the hole is, browse the wedge shop for the loft you need, or check our pick of used wedges under £100 for the best value-for-money options. For more interactive tools, head back to tools and calculators.