Ask the internet how often a PGA Tour player holes a 10 foot putt and you get two different answers. One widely cited figure says 40 percent. Another says 68.3 percent. Both cannot be true, and the gap is not small: it is the difference between a putt you expect to miss and one you expect to make.
We track every putt on tour. Here is the answer from 1,075,821 tracked putts.
Make rate by distance
| Distance | Make rate | Putts tracked |
|---|---|---|
| Inside 3 feet | 99.6% | 391,895 |
| 3 to 5 feet | 96.8% | 122,961 |
| 5 to 8 feet | 71.5% | 93,106 |
| 8 to 12 feet | 40.8% | 97,443 |
| 12 to 18 feet | 23.6% | 108,269 |
| 18 to 25 feet | 13.1% | 87,548 |
| 25 to 35 feet | 7.6% | 82,994 |
| 35 to 50 feet | 4.2% | 62,726 |
| 50 feet and beyond | 2.2% | 28,879 |
Our 8 to 12 foot band comes in at 40.8%, across 97,443 putts. That supports the lower figure and refutes the higher one. The 68.3 percent number almost certainly describes something else, most likely putts taken from inside 10 feet, which is dominated by tap ins and is a very different question.
Why the short numbers look so high
Inside 3 feet the make rate is close to automatic, and that band alone accounts for more than a third of every putt hit on tour. Any statistic that pools all putts together is really measuring how often players leave themselves a tap in, not how well they putt.
That is the single most common mistake in golf putting statistics. Distance has to be held constant before a make rate means anything.
Where the drop off actually happens
The steep part of the curve sits between 5 and 12 feet. Inside 5 feet a tour player is close to certain. By 12 feet it is worse than a coin flip. That narrow band is where putting skill separates players, and it is why proximity matters as much as it does. A putt in the 5 to 8 foot band goes in roughly three times as often as one in the 12 to 18 foot band, which is the whole argument for hitting approaches closer.
Beyond 25 feet the curve flattens. The difference between a great and an average putter from 35 feet is small in make rate terms, because almost nobody makes those. The skill there is leaving the next one short and straight, not holing out.
How these numbers are produced
Every putt in our shot database is bucketed by its starting distance, then pooled across courses and seasons. The rate for each band is simply the number holed divided by the number attempted, so a venue with few tracked rounds cannot distort the result the way an average of per course averages would.
The figures update as the database grows. There is no seasonal cherry picking and no filtering by player quality: this is the whole tracked population.
The caveat worth stating
These are pooled tour averages. Green speed, slope, weather and pin position all move them, and an individual player on an individual green can sit well either side of these numbers. Treat them as the baseline, not a prediction for one putt.
PropGolf prices hole by hole golf props from shot level data like this, live while play is happening. See the live board.