PGA Tour’s 2026 Schedule: More of the Same, With a Few Twists
The PGA Tour’s newly released 35-event slate for 2026 looks strikingly familiar, with few surprises beyond Trump National Doral’s return to the lineup. The majors remain major, signature events continue to dominate, and everyone else – both non-signature tournaments and players outside the elite – will keep scrambling for relevancy.
What’s interesting about Doral’s comeback is its current status as a LIV Golf venue for the past four years. This addition only compresses a schedule that’s already as congested as I-20 at rush hour.
The Tour is expanding to nine signature events with the addition of the Miami Championship. That might have been inevitable given how successful these limited-field, big-money events have been, but the timing creates some serious scheduling headaches.
Just look at a six-week stretch next spring that features two majors (the Masters and PGA Championship) and three signature events (RBC Heritage, Miami Championship and Truist Championship). Star players who were already seeking relief will now face even more pressure to play week after week.
It’s not just the stars feeling the pinch. Players starting the year outside the top 50 on the FedExCup bubble will navigate a brutal nine-week stretch from April to early June with just four full-field events. Two of those are the Zurich Classic (a team event) and an opposite-field tournament that awards less than half the FedExCup points (300) compared to signature events (700).
A similar crunch hits during the Florida swing. The Cognizant Classic sits between two signature events (AT&T Pebble Beach Pro-Am and Genesis Invitational) and is followed immediately by the Arnold Palmer Invitational and The Players Championship.
The Tour’s new CEO Brian Rolapp, who’s meeting with media Wednesday at the Tour Championship, has probably already discovered you can’t please everyone. But it’s telling that next year’s schedule doesn’t seem to satisfy either the stars or the journeymen.
“I look at it in the sense of if there’s a particular golf course or there’s something to where I don’t feel like I can play well or it’s a place that maybe doesn’t fit my eye historically, whatever it may be, then as a professional golfer, I have a hard time [going],” Justin Thomas said. “If there are places that I think people look at that way, then you have to do what’s best for that particular person. Obviously, the perfect model would be for all of us to be at all the events as often as possible.”
Whether adding Doral as a signature event represents inevitable expansion or political reality remains unclear. What’s certain is that it further fuels concerns about “load management” among top players – fears that intensified when Rory McIlroy skipped this month’s playoff opener in Memphis.
Never mind that McIlroy had strongly hinted after last year’s FedEx St. Jude Championship that he wouldn’t return to TPC Southwind in 2025, or that he was the only player out of 70 qualifiers to skip the opener. The handwringing still reached feverish levels.
“I’ll always choose the schedule that best fits me, and this year that meant skipping a few signature events. I might skip less next year. I might skip the same amount, I don’t know,” said McIlroy, who played five of this year’s eight signature events. “The luxury of being a PGA Tour player is we are free to pick and choose our schedule for the most part, and I took advantage of that this year and I’ll continue to take advantage of that for as long as I can.”
The word at East Lake is that the Tour is considering making participation in all signature events mandatory to be eligible for the Tour Championship – another workaround that’ll likely be just as unpopular with star players.
To be clear, players aren’t against limited-field, big-money events becoming the norm. What they typically don’t like is scheduling that demands five starts in six weeks, which is why golf’s version of load management has become a legitimate concern.
When the Tour first introduced signature events, they tried leveraging Player Impact Program bonuses with participation, but that got mixed results. On this issue, these independent contractors are surprisingly unified. Instead of concocting new ways to mandate participation in top events, the Tour would be better served by building a more sensible schedule.
