What Is a Bogey in Golf? (Bogey, Double, Triple)
Updated June 2026
A bogey is one stroke over par on a single hole — a 5 on a par-4, a 4 on a par-3, a 6 on a par-5. It's the single most common score in recreational golf, and honestly, if you play the game for any length of time, you'll make more bogeys than any other score you post. This guide covers the whole over-par ladder in one place — bogey, double, triple, and beyond — plus what it actually means to be called a "bogey golfer," a phrase with a more specific definition than most people assume.
- Bogey = one over par. Double bogey = two over. Triple bogey = three over. Past that, golfers just say the number: "quadruple," "quintuple," or more bluntly, "an 8."
- A "bogey golfer" isn't slang — the USGA defines it as a specific handicap band: 17.5–22.4 for men, 21.5–26.4 for women. It's the reference player used to calculate a course's Slope Rating.
- Shooting "bogey golf" for an entire 18 holes means averaging one over par per hole — roughly a 90 on a par-72 course.
- The word didn't start out meaning "one over par" at all — it originally meant the expected score on a hole, the exact opposite of today's meaning.
- See the full scoring terms guide for how bogey fits alongside birdie, eagle, and par.
What's the Difference Between Bogey, Double Bogey, and Triple Bogey?
It's just counting. Each one adds another stroke over par:
| Term | Score vs. Par | Example on a Par-4 |
|---|---|---|
| Bogey | +1 | 5 |
| Double bogey | +2 | 6 |
| Triple bogey | +3 | 7 |
| Quadruple bogey | +4 | 8 |
Past triple, there's no cute vocabulary left. Golf just runs out of names once you're four or five over — you'll hear "quad" occasionally, but mostly players just say the raw number and move on. Nobody's proud of a quintuple bogey, and nobody wants a special word for it either. There is one bit of slang worth knowing: an 8 on a hole is a "snowman," because the number looks like one. That's not official scoring language, but you'll hear it on every course in America.
Why Does Bogey Mean "One Over Par" When It Used to Mean Something Else?
This is the part most golfers get wrong, and it's a genuinely strange bit of history. In 1890, Hugh Rotherham, secretary of Coventry Golf Club in England, came up with the idea of a standardized "ground score" — the number of strokes a good player should need on each hole. Dr. Thomas Browne at Great Yarmouth Golf Club picked up the idea for match play, and during a competition there, a member named Major Charles Wellman reportedly remarked that trying to beat the imaginary standard score felt like chasing "a regular Bogey man" — a nod to a popular music hall song of the era about an elusive phantom. The name stuck, and the target score became "the Bogey."
Two years later, at the United Services Club in Gosport — a club exclusively for military officers — the members decided it was beneath them to measure their golf against a mere "Mister Bogey," so they promoted him. Colonel Bogey was born. (Yes, that's also where the famous march tune, later used in The Bridge on the River Kwai, gets its name.) At the time, "bogey" meant roughly what "par" means today: the expected, standard score. It wasn't until scoring standards improved through the early-to-mid 20th century — largely as American golf tightened up its own standardized par figures — that par and bogey split apart, with bogey settling into its modern meaning of one stroke worse than par.
What Is a "Bogey Golfer," Exactly?
This is where a lot of golfers get confused, because "bogey golfer" sounds like it should just mean "someone who makes a lot of bogeys." It's more precise than that. The USGA defines a bogey golfer as a player with a Handicap Index between 17.5 and 22.4 for men, and 21.5 to 26.4 for women — call it a 20-handicap player, roughly. That's not a throwaway description; it's a formal reference point. Course raters use the "bogey golfer" as one of two standard players (alongside the scratch golfer) to calculate a course's Slope Rating, which measures how much harder a course plays for a bogey-level player relative to a scratch player. If you want the full mechanics of how that number gets built, the handicap explained guide covers the formula end to end, and average golf handicap shows where that 20-ish number actually sits against the real handicap population.
Separately, "bogey golf" as a style of play means averaging one over par per hole across a full round — so on a par-72 course, that's a 90. That's not a bad round for a recreational player. It's a completely normal, respectable Saturday score, and it lines up neatly with where a lot of mid-to-high-handicap golfers actually land.
Is Making a Bogey a Bad Thing?
No — and this is worth saying plainly because a lot of golfers beat themselves up over it. Even PGA Tour pros make bogeys regularly; they just make far fewer of them relative to birdies and pars than the rest of us. For recreational golfers, bogey is often the realistic ceiling of a good hole, not a failure. If you're consistently making bogey rather than double or worse, you're playing solid, sensible golf — hitting greens and fairways often enough, and more importantly, avoiding the big blow-up numbers that actually wreck a scorecard. A round full of bogeys with no doubles or triples beats a round with a couple of pars mixed in among several 8s and 9s, every time.
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Frequently Asked Questions
- By USGA definition, 17.5 to 22.4 for men and 21.5 to 26.4 for women — call it right around 20. It's a specific reference standard used in course rating, not just informal slang for "someone who bogeys a lot."
- Two strokes over par on a single hole — a 6 on a par-4, a 5 on a par-3, or a 7 on a par-5. It's common at every skill level and isn't considered a disaster the way a triple or worse tends to be.
- It's a rough hole, but every golfer makes them, including tour pros on a bad day. One triple bogey rarely ruins a round by itself — it's usually a string of them, or one paired with worse, that does the real damage.
- Triple bogey (+3) is generally the last one anyone bothers naming in casual use. After that, golfers just count the number — "quad," or simply the raw score, like "I made an 8 there."
- A bogey is a single-hole score. A "bogey golfer" is a defined reference player — a specific handicap band the USGA uses to help calculate how difficult a course plays for an average-to-higher-handicap golfer, as opposed to a scratch player.