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What Golf Actually Costs Near Portland, Maine: 2026 Green Fees, Verified

Published July 31, 2026 · Updated August 10, 2026 · 15 min read

Try this. Search for the green fee at Riverside, the City of Portland's municipal course. In one afternoon you will be told the rate is $25, that it runs $25 to $45, and that nine holes on the South course cost an estimated $56. Those three numbers cannot all be true, and one of them says nine holes costs more than eighteen.

Here is the actual number, from Riverside's own 2026 rate card: $48 to walk 18 on a weekday, $53 on a weekend morning, and $36 for nine. Every one of those three search results is wrong.

Correction, August 10, 2026. The first version of this guide said Riverside "does not publish a 2026 green fee anywhere on its site" and that South Portland Municipal's rates could not be read. Both were wrong, and both mistakes were ours. We looked at each city's municipal website. Riverside publishes its full 2026 card on the course's own domain, riversidegolfcourseme.com, which is a different host from portlandmaine.gov. South Portland's rates are on its facility page and render only in a browser. Both are below, the summary table has been rebuilt, and the punch-card section has been rewritten because South Portland's passes turn out to be the best value in the region by a wide margin.

The problem is not that golf pricing near Portland is complicated. It is that the sites filling the gap are guessing, and that the course's own rate card is often not on the page a search sends you to. So we went to each course's own rate card and wrote down what is actually posted there, today, for the 2026 season. Where a course publishes nothing, we say that instead of inventing a range.

The short version

Five of the seven public courses inside the 25-minute radius publish a full 2026 rate card you can read without calling anyone: Val Halla in Cumberland, Willowdale in Scarborough, Toddy Brook in North Yarmouth, Riverside in Portland, and South Portland Municipal. Two do not.

The spread is much wider than anyone tells you. South Portland Municipal charges $18 on a weekday for a day's play, and Toddy Brook charges $89 for a weekend riding round. That is a five-fold difference inside a twenty-minute drive, and it is a nine-hole executive course against a full-length one, which is exactly the comparison nobody makes for you.

Among the full-length courses, a walking round of 18 on a weekday runs $48 to $56, and the cheapest of those is the city course. With a cart on a weekend, $84 to $89.

The rate cards, as published

A note on how to read that table. Val Halla and Willowdale quote a single with-cart price. Toddy Brook and Riverside quote walking rates and add the cart separately, so Toddy Brook's $89 is $65 plus a $24 cart and Riverside's $80 is $53 plus a $27 cart. Riverside's weekday rate also covers weekends after 2 p.m., which is the single most useful thing on its card and the reason its twilight column reads $48 rather than a discount. South Portland is a nine-hole course and its posted fee is for a day's play, not a single loop.

Val Halla, Cumberland. The town-owned course posts the most complete card of the group. Monday through Thursday: $34 to walk nine, $51 to ride nine, $56 to walk 18, $80 to ride 18. Friday through Sunday: $38, $55, $60 and $84. Seniors 65 and over, military personnel, and Town of Cumberland residents take 10 percent off greens fees.

Willowdale, Scarborough. Willowdale splits its week by clock rather than by day. Monday through Thursday all day, and weekends after noon, 18 holes is $52 walking or $76 riding, and nine is $40 or $58. Friday through Sunday and holidays before noon, 18 is $62 or $86 and nine is $50 or $68. Twilight after 3 p.m. is $39 walking, $57 riding.

Toddy Brook, North Yarmouth. Toddy Brook publishes two seasons. Its summer card is $55 to walk 18 Monday through Thursday and $65 Friday through Sunday and holidays, with nine at $40 and $45. Carts are $24 for 18 and $16 for nine, or $22 and $14 for members, and a single-rider cart is $37 for 18. Juniors 17 and under play 18 for $40 and nine for $25, after noon on weekdays and after 2 p.m. on weekends. Twilight after 4 p.m. is $35 for up to 18 holes, the best posted number in this whole guide.

Riverside, Portland. The city's course splits its week by clock, not by day, and the split is generous. Weekdays, and weekends after 2 p.m., are $36 for nine and $48 for 18. Weekends before 2 p.m. are $41 and $53. That is a five dollar weekend premium, the smallest in the region, and it disappears entirely at two in the afternoon. Riverside also posts two discount tiers nobody else here publishes at all: juniors pay $23 and $30, and college students and active military pay $31 and $41, both on the weekday-and-weekend-afternoon schedule. Carts are priced per person, $19 for nine and $27 for 18 for non-members, $17 and $25 for members, and they are first come first served with no reservations, so a tee time does not guarantee you a cart. Pull carts are $6 and $11, club rentals $27 and $43. One number worth knowing before you are surprised by it: since January 1, 2025 a 5.5 percent Maine sales tax applies to cart and club rentals under LD 2000, and Riverside states its rental rates already include it.

Nonesuch River, Scarborough. Nonesuch has moved to dynamic pricing, so there is no green fee to publish: the rate changes by day and time of day based on demand, and the rates page sends you to the live tee sheet. Two things worth knowing. The page is still headed "2025 Greens Fees" and was last updated in March 2025, so the cart fees printed on it (public $25 for 18, $17 for nine, $20 twilight) carry a 2025 label. And the rate you are quoted on the phone is the same rate the tee sheet shows, which the club states outright.

Gorham Country Club. No green fee is published on the site, and there is no rates page in the navigation. The membership page does list prices, but it is frozen: the payment deadlines read "Due 1/29/21," the fallback line reads "Rate After 1/29/21," and the printable application is a file named 2021-Membership-Application. Treat every number on it as five seasons old and call 207-839-3490.

South Portland Municipal. This is the cheapest golf in Greater Portland and it is not close. The nine-hole course at 155 Wescott Road (par 33, 2,071 yards, rating 59.0, slope 92) charges $18 Monday through Friday and $20 on weekends and holidays, and that is 18 holes per day, not per loop. Pull carts are $6 and club rentals $15. There are no riding carts. A GHIN handicap through the course is $50, which is genuinely the cheapest route to a handicap index in this market. The course opens in mid-April and runs through October, tee times go in 15-minute intervals up to two days out at 207-775-0005, and walk-ups are taken but not guaranteed. No alcohol, no fivesomes, no club sharing, no non-playing spectators, and management will pair you into a foursome to keep play moving. The clubhouse shares a building with the branch library, which tells you most of what you need to know about the operation. For a beginner, a junior, or anyone who wants nine holes before work, nothing else in the region competes on price.

Three courses in this guide participate in Youth on Course, the Maine State Golf Association program that puts rounds in front of golfers aged 6 to 18 for $5 or less after a $5 signup: Riverside, South Portland Municipal, and Val Halla in Cumberland. Riverside restricts it by time, South Course weekdays teeing off between 10 a.m. and 2 p.m. and weekends and holidays after 2 p.m., North Course weekends after 2 p.m., walking only in every case. If you have a kid who wants to play, this is the single largest discount in this guide and almost nobody mentions it.

The punch-card math nobody publishes

Three courses sell multi-play passes, and not one of them shows you the per-round number. Here it is.

South Portland has the best deal in the region and buries it in a table. Its 13-play pass, if you buy it before May 31, is $155. That is $11.92 a round against an $18 walk-up, a 34 percent discount, and the cheapest posted round of golf anywhere inside the 25-minute radius by a factor of three. Buy the identical $155 after May 31 and you get 10 plays instead of 13, or $15.50 a round, still 14 percent off. The 5-play card is $80, or $16 a round, which is the worst of the three and still cheaper than walking up. The lesson is a date: the same $155 buys three extra rounds if you hand it over before Memorial Day. Nobody at the counter is going to tell you that in April.

Val Halla's 10-play 18-hole pass is $520, which is $52 a round against a $56 weekday walk-up and a $60 weekend walk-up. That is 7 percent off midweek and 13 percent off on a Saturday. Cumberland residents take another 10 percent off the card itself, landing at $468, or $46.80 a round, which still beats their 10-percent-discounted weekday walk-up of $50.40 by $3.60. The nine-hole card is $320, or $32 a round against $34 and $38.

Toddy Brook's cards cut deeper. The Monday-to-Thursday 18-hole walking card is $450, or $45 a round against a $55 summer weekday rate, an 18 percent discount. The anytime card is $540, or $54 against a $65 weekend rate, 17 percent. The 18-hole cart punch card is $216, or $21.60 against $24.

The useful conclusion is that none of these is a break-even proposition. They discount every round from the first one, so there is no round count you have to reach to come out ahead. The only real risk is not using them all. Toddy Brook's cards expire at the end of the 2026 season, and with the season typically running into November, buying a 10-play card on the last day of July gives you roughly three months and change to use it. Our guide to when golf season actually starts and ends near Portland has the closing windows.

If you want a season pass, the decision is in November, not April

This is the single most useful thing we found, and it is invisible unless you check all seven courses in the same week.

Riverside is closed for 2026. The City of Portland's course is not accepting new memberships this season. There is a waitlist, it costs $100 to join, and the deposit comes off your membership cost if you take a spot or comes back as a $100 gift card if you pass, at which point you leave the list.

Nonesuch sells out and reopens in the fall. Season passes are sold through the online store, and the club's own instruction is blunt: if a pass is not listed online, that category is sold out for the season. The 2027 passes go on sale online on November 15, 2026, first come first served until each category fills. There is a priority email list open now, and the club says it contacts that list in early November.

Val Halla has a waitlist too, with the membership form published as a PDF rather than as a rate table on the page.

So if your plan is to buy a season pass and play a lot next year, the window is late autumn. By the time the snow is gone the decision has already been made for you.

Riverside does publish its 2026 membership fees, and they are worth reading for one reason: the residency spread. A single membership on the North course is $1,300 for a Portland resident and $1,585 for everyone else. Mid-week is $950 against $1,240. The Under 35 rate is $1,175 against $1,460. Across the adult categories the non-resident premium runs from roughly 19 to 31 percent, or $175 to $580 in dollars. The exceptions are instructive: junior additions are a flat $200 for residents and $225 for non-residents on every course combination, and the $7,700 corporate pass is the one category where living in Portland buys you nothing. There is also a $100 credit voucher for non-residents who own a business or pay property tax in Portland.

Why the numbers you find elsewhere are wrong

Three failure modes, all of which we hit while reporting this.

Directories publish estimates and present them as prices. GolfLink lists an estimated $82 for 18 holes at Willowdale. Willowdale's own card has no $82 on it: the riding rate is $76 Monday through Thursday and $86 Friday through Sunday before noon, and the walking rate is $52. The estimate sits between two real numbers and matches neither.

Courses leave old cards up. Nonesuch's rates page still says 2025. Gorham's membership page still says 2021. Neither club is hiding anything; a rate page is just the easiest thing on a website to forget. But an aggregator that scrapes those pages will confidently republish a five-year-old number, and so will anything that learns from the aggregator.

The wrong Portland, and the wrong Riverside. Searching these terms surfaces green fees for Portland, Oregon, a Riverside course in Utah, another in Pennsylvania, and a set of English links courses at Southport. There are a lot of Riversides. If a page quoting you a Maine rate does not name a Maine town, it is probably not quoting a Maine rate.

The fix is unglamorous and works every time: open the course's own site, and if there is no rate card there, call. Our directory of every public course inside the radius has the specs and the phone-worthy details for all seven.

What about a private membership?

At some point the arithmetic starts pointing that way. Forty walking rounds a year at Val Halla's weekday rate is $2,240, and forty riding rounds on a weekend is $3,360. Those numbers are in the same neighborhood as a private club's annual dues, which is why people who play a lot eventually run the comparison.

They are not the same product, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise: private dues usually come with an initiation cost, a food and beverage minimum, and a course that is not absorbing 40,000 public rounds a season, which is most of why it plays better. We break the real line items down in what a country club membership actually costs in Maine, and the conditioning side of it in what it takes to keep a course in championship condition here.

Among the four private clubs inside the same radius, the one with the most checkable case is Falmouth Country Club: a Cornish and Silva design that opened in 1988, playing par 72 at 7,372 yards, and the only course in Maine to have hosted a Korn Ferry Tour event, the rung directly below the PGA Tour. It is also a non-equity club, meaning ownership funds capital projects to attract members rather than assessing existing members to pay for them. That is a structural difference worth understanding before you compare any two clubs, and we cover it in equity versus non-equity clubs. Falmouth publishes its own membership details here.

FAQ

How much does it cost to play 18 holes near Portland, Maine?

At the five public courses that publish 2026 rates, a weekday walking round of 18 costs $48 at Riverside in Portland, $52 at Willowdale, $55 at Toddy Brook and $56 at Val Halla, rising to $53, $62, $65 and $60 on a weekend morning. Adding a cart brings a weekend round to $80 at Riverside, $84 at Val Halla, $86 at Willowdale and $89 at Toddy Brook. South Portland Municipal is the outlier at $18 and $20, but it is a nine-hole course.

What is the cheapest golf near Portland, Maine?

South Portland Municipal, at $18 Monday through Friday and $20 on weekends and holidays for a full day's play on its nine-hole course at 155 Wescott Road. Buying its 13-play pass before May 31 drops that to $11.92 a round, which is the cheapest posted golf inside 25 minutes of Portland by a factor of three. Among the full-length courses, the cheapest posted 18 is Toddy Brook's $35 twilight rate walking after 4 p.m., then Willowdale's $39 after 3 p.m., then Riverside's $48 on any weekday or after 2 p.m. on a weekend.

What does it cost to play Riverside Golf Course in Portland, Maine?

For the 2026 season, $48 to walk 18 holes on a weekday or on a weekend after 2 p.m., $53 for 18 on a weekend before 2 p.m., and $36 or $41 for nine on the same schedule. Juniors pay $30 for 18, and college students and active military pay $41. A cart is $27 per person for 18 on top of that. The rates are published on the course's own site rather than on the city's, which is why third-party sites quote figures between $25 and $56 that disagree with each other and with the card. The pro shop is 207-797-3524.

When can I buy a 2027 season pass at a Portland-area course?

Nonesuch River puts its 2027 season passes on sale online on November 15, 2026, first come first served until each category fills, and maintains a priority email list it contacts in early November. Riverside is not selling new 2026 memberships at all and runs a waitlist with a $100 deposit. Val Halla also runs a membership waitlist.

Are golf punch cards worth it in Maine?

Yes, if you will use them, and the deepest discount in the region is South Portland's: its 13-play pass bought before May 31 is $155, or $11.92 a round against an $18 walk-up, 34 percent off. The same $155 after May 31 buys only 10 plays. Val Halla's 10-play 18-hole card works out to $52 a round against walk-up rates of $56 and $60. Toddy Brook's weekday card is $45 a round against a $55 rate, an 18 percent discount. None requires you to reach a break-even round count, because all discount from the first round, but Toddy Brook's cards expire at the end of the 2026 season.

Why do golf directories show different green fees for the same course?

Most directories publish estimates rather than posted rates, and they scrape course pages that are often years out of date. Nonesuch River's rate page is still headed 2025 and Gorham Country Club's membership page still carries 2021 payment deadlines. Searches for Maine courses also pull in results for Portland, Oregon and for similarly named courses in other states.

Do Portland residents pay less at Riverside?

Yes, on memberships. A single North course membership is $1,300 for a resident and $1,585 for a non-resident, and across adult categories the non-resident premium runs roughly 19 to 31 percent. Non-residents who own a business or pay property taxes in Portland can claim a $100 credit voucher. The $7,700 corporate pass costs the same either way.