The 10 best golf watches, to help improve the quality of your swing and shot precision

Golfers are well-renowned for loving a gadget, especially one that promises to shave strokes off their scorecard, which the best golf watch could very well do. The best golf watches with GPS work similarly to rangefinders, providing useful real-time data and distance information which can shape your decision-making on the course and track scores, plus stats to help you analyse and identify areas to improve on once you’re back at the clubhouse.

Golf pro and founder of Urban Golf James Day explains that the core function of a golf watch is the “convenience of having the yardage effortlessly. You really don’t have to do anything but walk up to your ball, look at your watch and the yardage is there.” Even the most basic golf watches give you distance to the front, back and middle of the green.

The best golf watches range from less than £150 up to £1,700. Some can be used straight out of the box, while others require more complicated integration with a smartphone and apps. All come pre-programmed with tens of thousands of global course maps and most offer hazards and layup information with numbers. Others have detailed, colourful graphics and heat maps.

The GPS accuracy of most golf watches tends to be within five yards, but finding a model that’s quick to load the hole, boasts excellent battery life and has additional fitness metrics, such as to track heart rate and sleep, might also factor into your choice.

Which is the best golf watch in 2026? At a glance:

Which golf watch should I buy?

Whether you’re after the best golf watches for beginners or the best golf watches for tracking performance, according to James, the best golf smart watch to choose is the one that gives you the information you need quickly, accessibly and in a way that won’t cause you to get distracted and overwhelmed. Especially if you’re a relative newbie: “The danger with golf is always overthinking, so if you’ve got a beginner who needs to be focusing on striking the ball nicely, getting the ball out the middle of the club and getting it to go straight, sometimes having too much information can be a big distraction,” he says.

How I tested the best golf watches

I tested these golf watches over a period of a few weeks, taking them golfing around south London (Richmond, Duke’s Meadows, Walton Heath) and indoor golf centres to see how they felt comfort-wise. I wore them day-to-day to assess battery life, functionality beyond the golf course and additional health features.

My family of four children (aged seven to 14) and my husband are all very keen golfers, so I also shared the watches around when we were on the golf course: my husband, brother-in-law, friend and even my 11-year-old daughter – who managed to set up a couple of these watches on her own – all tried them as well. This meant that the watches were tested by golfers at varying ability levels and locations to help determine their GPS accuracy, convenience, ease of use and more.

Sometimes, I doubled up and wore two at the same time to see if the distance estimations were the same (they were usually identical or varied by one yard). I also spent a lot of time tinkering with the golf watches and their accompanying apps at home, downloading and registering myself on a multitude of golf GPS apps, watching ‘How To’ videos and studying my data off the course.

The best golf watches of 2026

1. Garmin Approach S70

£509.99, Decathlon

Best Buy golf watch, 9/10

We like: Course info displayed quickly at each hole, stunning graphics, intuitive and easy set-up, useful extra features like Virtual Caddie

We don’t like: An expensive model at £500, only pairs with the newest Garmin Approach Z70 rangefinder