Golfers With the Most Masters Wins

Jack Nicklaus has won the most Masters, with six green jackets between 1963 and 1986. Tiger Woods is second with five, Arnold Palmer third with four, and a group of five players — Jimmy Demaret, Sam Snead, Gary Player, Nick Faldo, and Phil Mickelson — are tied at three apiece. Nobody else has cracked three wins. That's the entire list of multi-time Masters champions, and it hasn't grown much in the last two decades.

Key Takeaways

• Jack Nicklaus holds the record with six Masters wins (1963, 1965, 1966, 1972, 1975, 1986).
• Tiger Woods is next with five (1997, 2001, 2002, 2005, 2019), followed by Arnold Palmer with four (1958, 1960, 1962, 1964).
• Five players are tied at three wins each: Jimmy Demaret, Sam Snead, Gary Player, Nick Faldo, and Phil Mickelson.
• Only three players have won back-to-back Masters: Nicklaus (1965–66), Faldo (1989–90), and Woods (2001–02).
• Multi-time champions share a common thread — elite iron play into Augusta's tiered greens and repeated tournament experience, not just raw length.

Who Has Won the Most Masters Titles?

Jack Nicklaus, and it isn't especially close. Six wins over a 23-year stretch, capped by the 1986 win at age 46 that's still replayed every April — a back-nine 30 that ran down Greg Norman and Seve Ballesteros in what a lot of longtime patrons still call the best final round Augusta has ever seen. Tiger Woods sits second at five, with a run that started in 1997 (a 12-stroke rout, still the largest margin in tournament history) and closed in 2019 with maybe the most emotional win of his career after years of injuries and a fused back. Arnold Palmer is third with four, all won in a tight seven-year window from 1958 to 1964, back when the Masters was still establishing itself as a major on par with the U.S. Open and The Open Championship.

The Three-Win Club

Below Palmer, five names are tied at three: Jimmy Demaret (the tournament's first three-time winner, 1940–1950), Sam Snead (1949–1954), Gary Player (the first international champion to reach three, 1961–1978), Nick Faldo (1989–1996, including back-to-back), and Phil Mickelson (2004–2010, the three wins that turned him from "best player without a major" into a genuine Hall of Famer). That's it — that's the whole group of players with three-plus green jackets, spanning nine decades of the tournament.

What Separates Multi-Time Champions From One-Time Winners?

It's not driving distance. Augusta rewards a specific skill set that repeats itself across every multi-time champion on this list: precise iron play that can hold greens running away from the shot, a putting stroke built for speed control on severely tiered surfaces rather than pure line-reading, and — maybe most underrated — repetition. Nicklaus, Woods, Palmer, Player, and Faldo all played Augusta National dozens of times before and after their wins. Course knowledge compounds there in a way it doesn't at rotating U.S. Open or Open Championship venues, because the golf course itself barely changes year to year. A player who's mapped where not to miss on 11, 12, and 15 has a real edge over someone seeing those pin positions for the first time.

One-time winners, by contrast, are often players who caught the course in a hot week — a Danny Willett or a Trevor Immelman — rather than players who built a system for it. That's not a knock; winning a major once is still one of the harder things in professional sports. But the gap between "won a Masters" and "kept winning Masters" tends to track with how a player's game matched up long-term against Augusta's greens, not with any single great week.

Has Anyone Won Back-to-Back Masters?

Three players have done it: Nicklaus in 1965–66, Faldo in 1989–90, and Woods in 2001–02. It's rarer than it sounds, given how often the same handful of elite players are in contention every April — Augusta's setup changes just enough year to year (pin positions, firmness, wind) that going back-to-back has stayed a short list even among the game's greatest players. Rory McIlroy, who completed the career Grand Slam with his 2025 Masters win over Justin Rose in a playoff, would join that group with a repeat win — worth watching for, not something to treat as settled before it happens.

Sources

• List of Masters Tournament champions — Wikipedia
• The Masters Historical Stats — Masters.com
• Who Has Won the Most Masters Tournaments — Britannica

For the complete year-by-year champions list, see every Masters winner since 1934. New to what makes the Masters one of golf's four biggest events? Start with the four golf majors explained. And for a look at the course itself, see our rundown of the world's most famous golf courses.