It has always been hard to get a PGA Tour card. There are successful players who have gone through numerous Q-schools trying to score well enough to get a playing card. The record for Q-School failures probably belongs to Mac O'Grady who did not qualify for the PGA Tour 16 times from 1971 through 1981, sometimes going through two PGA Tour Q-Schools in the same year. Finally, in 1982, he succeeded. Even Mark McCumber, PLAYERS champ in 1988, failed seven Q-schools before finally earning the right to play. The same thing happens every year. Some succeed and some don’t.
Starting in 2026 there’s a new measuring stick for who does and who doesn’t get to play in PGA Tour events.
If you’re new to golf, you might not even know that certain players are guaranteed a spot in, for instance, The Sony Open or the Cognizant Classic in The Palm Beaches (formerly The Honda Classic), or The American Express (a long time ago called The Bob Hope) to name just three early in the season.
Since 1983, the number on this guaranteed list of players has been 125. It’s actually called the “exempt” list. What it means in normal language is that this year, the top 125 players in FedEx points from 2024 could enter any regular PGA Tour event in 2025. Guaranteed. They are exempt from pre-tournament qualifying events. They can walk right in.
The exempt list does not include the Masters, the PGA, the U.S. Open or the British Open, all of which have their own rules for who can play. It also does not include special events like the signature events, which have had fewer players, but it does include the rest of the tournaments on the golf calendar in the United States and some outside the U.S. that are still PGA Tour-sanctioned.
The idea of an exempt list has been around for a long time, but the number of players has varied widely. Back in the dark ages of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the exempt list was the top 60. I remember talking to players in the mid-1980s who said about their careers before the exempt Tour that they had always been in the top 60, meaning they always had a place to play and compete.
As you probably know, there are more than 60 golfers in any regular PGA Tour event these days. It’s usually 144 or 156, depending on daylight. But what you might not know is, historically, just because golfers enter an event, it doesn’t mean they are going to get paid. Roughly half the field goes home with no money. That’s still true today, even if his name is Tiger Woods or Scottie Scheffler or Rory McIlroy or Jordan Spieth.
It has been that way since the PGA Tour was created, and that was a custom taken from what existed before the PGA Tour was officially an organization. The PGA Tour, after all, began as an offshoot of the PGA of America, the people who have traditionally run golf courses across the country. It was begun in 1968, and it has to be called a roaring success.
Back to tournaments. To fill the rest of the field after the top 60, there might have been 120 players competing for another 40 or 50 or 60 or more spots in that week’s tournament. The number differed, but the situation was the same. They had to play a one-day tournament, and a certain number of players, based on the best scores, were added to the top 60 to play in that week’s event. It was not only dog eat dog. It was dog eat dog, cat, birds, bread crusts and anything that was in the way of getting into an event.
As Al Barkow’s “History of The PGA Tour” explained, if a player qualified for that week’s tournament on Monday, he knew where he would be, at least until Friday. He would play two rounds. If he didn’t make the half-way “cut,” then he had to go to the next Monday qualifying and try again. These Monday qualifiers were called Rabbits.
Qualifying every week was expensive and frustrating, running around the country not knowing when you’ll have success. To explain how big the issue was, Gary McCord, who most people know from his time as an announcer at CBS, for a while lived out of a storage unit in Southern California, presumably to save money and because he was always on the road trying to qualify.
It was McCord who proposed the all-exempt Tour. He did it, according to a story on golf.com, because he was at a qualifier at Doral and saw Miller Barber, who had 11 PGA Tour wins at that time, and Don January, who had won 10 times including a PGA Championship, both qualifying. McCord looked through the names and did some quick math and realized there were golfers with a total of 54 tournament wins who were qualifying. He decided the system was nuts, although he didn’t say it that way. He decided to do something about it.
So, at a tournament in Tallahassee that was being held opposite the official PGA Tour event that week, he thought he’d get a few of the guys together and talk with them about it.
In that same article, he explained that he first wanted to get support from guys who were not in the regular tournament that week, guys who were probably going to get kicked off the Tour for the next season because they weren’t top 60.
He rented a conference room in the hotel where he and the others in the opposite field event were staying and got the word out and figured maybe he’d get 20 to 30 guys, but 105 showed up. He explained his idea. He wanted to expand the exempt list to 125 and told them he probably needed another 50 to go to the Tour to tell the organizing body what the players needed. He got 80 more. It was more than a majority of the players who participated on the Tour. So, he went to the governing body. Needless to say, he got a call from then-commissioner Deane Beman.
Beman was already considering changes, although not quite what McCord had in mind. Regardless, the commissioner asked McCord to attend the next board meeting and present his concept. And the board went for it, for a 125-man “exempt” or guaranteed spot on the PGA Tour, which was more than double what it had been.
So, in 2026, that guaranteed number that McCord came up with in 1982 will shrink to 100. And 25 golfers are out of luck.
Now there are some exceptions to this. Someone who has won a Tour event gets an automatic exemption for two more seasons after his victory. That means, for instance, that Thomas Detry, who won the first week of February, doesn’t have to worry about his status on the PGA Tour until the end of 2027. If he finishes 130th in FedEx points at the end of this year, he is still guaranteed a spot in regular Tour events. But he better be in the top 100 at the end of 2027, or win another tournament, so that he can continue to play.
As you can imagine, there has been much complaining began by those who were 101 and above.
Regardless, there are still plenty of ways to get into an event, even with the change in exempt player numbers. Usual PGA Tour fields are between 144 and 156 now, and that means tournaments still have to find another 44 to 56 players for regular Tour events. In addition, all 100 exempt players typically don’t show up at every event. So, there will be room for more players. Some of the field will continue to come from categories like Past Champions or Major winners in the last five years. Some of the rest may come from Monday qualifying, which has now morphed into Friday pre-qualifying for Monday qualifying. Others will be sponsor picks and so on.
So, while there are big changes coming next year, while the guaranteed player pool shrinks, that change may actually open up a chance for more non-exempt or non-guaranteed guys to get a shot at playing. We won’t really know how it works until it happens, but there’s definitely going to be a catfight for those remaining spots. In addition, at the end of the year, in the fall events, people will really be clawing their way up the points list trying as best as they can to earn enough points to play another season. Somebody may play in every event to try to gain enough points for 2027.
