One of the hardest things to do for players on the PGA Tour is work to improve their game while trying to win every week against the best players in the world. But now, with the 2026 PGA Tour season concluded, Golfweek is taking a statistical look to see which players improved the most in key areas of the game, year over year. The first part of the series (PGA Tour most improved in 2026: Driving distance, strokes gained off tee ) can be found here.
In his 2014 book "Every Shot Counts: Using the Revolutionary Strokes Gained Approach to Improve Your Golf Performance and Strategy," Columbia professor Dr. Mark Brodie dispelled the longstanding myth that pros "Drive for show and putt for dough."
What Brodie's research found was that the golfers who
are consistently contending for wins on the PGA Tour and who earn the most money tend to be players who are elite ballstrikers because they avoid making big numbers and get more chances to score birdies.
Making more putts combines improving in three skills: reading greens, judging the ideal speed and making a repeatable, high-quality putting stroke. As any golfer at any level will tell you, getting better at putting is hard, but the players in the table below did it better than anyone on the PGA Tour last season.
While there are several other putting stats that are tracked by the PGA Tour, Strokes Gained: Putting is the most accurate assessment of a golfer's putting performance because it isolates putting. Counting stats, like three-putt avoidance as an example, inherently include other aspects of a player's game.
If a golfer tends to have a lot of long first putts because his iron play is not sharp, he will be much more likely to three-putt than a golfer with the same level of skill on the greens who hits more approach shots closer to the hole and therefore doesn't face as many long putts. Strokes Gained: Putting cuts through all of that.
Erik van Rooyen struggled with his game in 2026, missing 11 of 20 cuts, but his putting got dramatically better and went from a major weakness to elite. The South African improved by 0.846 shots per round, which means he gained over a shot-and-a-half advantage over the average player through 36 holes based exclusively on the quality of this putting after giving away almost a full shot through 36 holes last season.
Ryan Gerard, who finished third at the Tour Championship on Sunday and won over $10 million in prize money this season, went from 154th in Strokes Gained: Putting last season to 27th this year, an improvement of 0.67 shots. Gerard made 22 of 26 cuts this season and was a runner-up at the Sony Open in Hawaii, the American Express and the Memorial Tournament.
David Dusek is a senior writer at Golfweek covering golf equipment and analytics.
This article originally appeared on Golfweek: PGA Tour most improved in 2026: Strokes Gained Putting
