"How close should I be from 150 yards" has a real answer, and it is not the one most people carry around. Here it is from 556,612 tracked approach shots on par 4s and par 5s, 2021 to 2026, split by the lie the shot was played from.
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From the fairway
Proximity is the average distance the ball finished from the hole, misses included, not the distance of the ones that found the green. Inside 100 yards, every 10 yards, is in how close pros hit it from 30 to 100 yards.
From 137 yards, the fullest bucket in this sample at 88,807 shots, a fairway approach finishes 24 feet away and holds the green 79.7% of the time. Across the whole range, going from 89 to 209 yards multiplies proximity by 2.4x (19 ft to 46 ft) and costs 28 points of green in regulation.
From the rough
What the rough actually costs
At 137 yards the rough multiplies proximity by 2.2x (24 ft to 54 ft) and takes 24 points off the chance of holding the green.
That is the number worth carrying. A drive in the rough does not cost you a stroke directly. It costs you roughly 2.2 times the distance to the hole on the next shot, and that is where the stroke eventually comes from.
Who is best at this
Sharpest approach players from the fairway between 125 and 200 yards, 2025 onward, minimum 250 tracked shots:
Has approach play changed?
Fairway approaches from 125 to 175 yards, the same band every season:
The all-events column moves partly because the events change: we capture more of them every season, and they are not the same courses. At the 11 courses captured in every season, which holds the venues fixed, it went from 26.0 feet in 2021 to 26.6 in 2026, a change of 0.6 feet. Year to year, tour approach play is close to flat.
Green in regulation is left out of this table on purpose. Where a ball finishes is coded differently from 2024 onward (landings in a bunker, for example, barely appear in the earlier seasons), so a green hit in 2021 and one in 2026 aren't counted quite the same way. Proximity is a measured distance and doesn't have that problem.
Why you should distrust a pooled number here
Run this without splitting by lie and the table breaks: shots from inside 75 yards come out WORSE than shots from 75 to 99, which is obviously wrong.
It is a lie-mix artifact. Reaching 60 yards on a par 4 usually means something went sideways, so that bucket is only about half fairway lies, against roughly 70% at 75 to 99 yards. The pooled average is measuring the trouble, not the distance. Split by lie and the order is correct at every step.
Any proximity table that does not tell you the lie is averaging a wedge from the middle of the fairway with a hack-out from the trees.
How this is measured
The regulation approach is the shot played two strokes before the hole's par, so the second shot on a par 4 and the third on a par 5. Every one is counted whether it finished on the green or not, which is what makes the green-in-regulation column meaningful.
Starting distance is taken from where the previous shot came to rest, not from the length of the approach itself. Those are different numbers, and confusing them inverts the whole table.
Sense check against the public record: the PGA Tour reports roughly 32 feet of proximity from 150 to 175 yards. Our nearest bucket, 162 yards from the fairway, comes out at 29 feet on 87,188 shots.
PropGolf models every approach on every hole from data like this, live while play is happening. See the live board.