Where Is the Yardage Hole in Your Wedges?
The hole is almost always between your pitching wedge and the wedge directly below it. Iron lofts have strengthened; wedge lofts have not. A 43-degree pitching wedge above a 52-degree gap wedge leaves nine degrees — about 24 yards you cannot cover with a full swing at any club in your bag.
Enter your set and, if you know it, your full pitching wedge carry. The tool turns the loft gaps into yardage gaps and flags any step too wide to cover.
Where the hole is in your ladder
Add your pitching wedge carry and the degrees become yards.
What a yardage hole actually is
A yardage hole is a distance you cannot cover with a full swing at any club you carry. It is not a swing fault and it is not a practice problem. It is an arithmetic problem in the bag itself.
You experience it as a shot that is always awkward. The number on the rangefinder keeps coming up in the same place, and the answer is always either a hard swing with the shorter club or a soft one with the longer. Golfers tend to interpret this as a gap in their skills. It is a gap in their loft ladder.
Four to six degrees between wedges is the working window. Below four, two clubs land within eleven yards of each other and you cannot tell them apart under pressure — you have wasted one of fourteen slots. Above six, you have a hole.
Why it happens in the wedges specifically
Because two things moved in opposite directions.
- Iron lofts strengthened. Manufacturers compete on distance, and distance comes partly from loft. Pitching wedges went from 48 degrees to as low as 41 without the number on the sole changing.
- Wedge lofts did not. A 52-degree wedge is still 52 degrees. Wedges are bought individually, and 52 / 56 / 60 remained the default recommendation throughout.
The result is a hole that opened up in the bag without anybody deciding anything. It has widened by roughly a degree every few model cycles, and it now sits in a large share of bags. The starting point for fixing it is what degree wedges you need for your own pitching wedge loft .
A worked example of a broken ladder
Take a golfer with a 43-degree pitching wedge that carries 135 yards, who carries two wedges — a 52 and a 56 — because that is what they have always carried.
- 43° Pitching wedge — 135 yd top of the ladder
- 50° Gap / approach wedge — about 116 yd 7° · 19 yd
- 56° Sand wedge — about 100 yd 6° · 16 yd
The 7° step is too big — about 19 yards you would have to manufacture with a part swing. With a 43° pitching wedge, 2 wedges cannot cover the 13° down to 56°. 3 is the count that fits.
Look at what that means in play. From 135 yards, a full pitching wedge. From 111, a full 52. Between them sits everything from 112 to 134 yards — including the 120-yard approach that comes up several times a round — with nothing to hit it with. That entire band is a three-quarter swing.
The same golfer with the ladder fixed
- 43° Pitching wedge — 135 yd top of the ladder
- 48° Gap wedge — about 122 yd 5° · 13 yd
- 54° Sand wedge — about 106 yd 6° · 16 yd
- 60° Lob wedge — about 90 yd 6° · 16 yd
Every step now sits inside the working window, and the widest gap in the ladder is 6 degrees. The golfer added one wedge and changed two lofts. Nothing about their swing changed.
How to find yours in ten minutes
The tool above works from lofts, which is enough to find a hole. To confirm it in yards, you need one real measurement.
- Get your pitching wedge carry. On a range with measured targets or a launch monitor, hit ten full pitching wedges. Discard the two longest and two shortest. Average the rest. Use carry, not total.
- Enter it above. The ladder converts every loft gap into a yardage gap using roughly 2.7 yards per degree.
- Find the widest step. Anything above six degrees is flagged.
- Check it against reality. Hit ten full shots with the club below the flagged gap. If the measured distance is close to the predicted one, the ladder model holds and the hole is real.
Use carry, not total
Wedge shots into a green stop close to where they land, but a wedge on a dry range runs a surprising distance. If you club off the number you see the ball finish at on the range, you will be consistently short on the course. Carry against total, and which one to club off covers the difference.
Why loft gaps do not always match yardage gaps
Loft is the biggest variable in wedge distance but it is not the only one, and the differences are large enough to notice.
- Shaft length. A set-matched gap wedge is usually built to the same progression as the irons, which makes it longer than a specialist wedge of the same loft. Longer club, more speed, more distance — often three to five yards.
- Shaft weight. Specialist wedges typically ship with heavier shafts than iron sets do. That costs a little clubhead speed and changes the feel noticeably.
- Bounce and grind. A high-bounce wedge on firm turf interacts differently with the ground, and the strike quality that follows changes the carry.
- Where you strike the face. Wedges are less forgiving than irons by design. A groove low costs several yards of carry.
This is why the honest process is: use the lofts to find the suspected hole, then confirm it with measured carries. The arithmetic tells you where to look; the range tells you whether you were right.
Fixing it, in order of cost
- Free — re-space what you already own. If you carry four wedges with a duplicate at the bottom, dropping one and re-spacing may close the gap at no cost. Two wedges four degrees apart at the bottom of the bag are doing one job.
- Cheap — bend a wedge. Most forged wedges can be bent one to two degrees either way by any club fitter. Bending a 52 to a 50 costs very little and can be enough. Cast wedges are riskier and some cannot be bent at all.
- Moderate — buy one used wedge. For most golfers with a strong-lofted set this is the answer: a 48 or 50 to sit between the pitching wedge and the rest. Wedge technology moves slowly, so a used wedge with good grooves is close to a new one.
- Expensive, and usually wrong — replace the iron set. Changing the whole set to fix wedge spacing is solving a fifty-dollar problem with a thousand-dollar purchase.
One thing to check before buying: you have fourteen slots, and a wedge you add has to come from somewhere. If the club you drop is your longest iron, make sure you are not opening a hole at the other end of the bag — what loft fairway wood closes the gap above your irons covers the top of the ladder.
What to shop for
Buy by loft. Check the grooves, which is where a used wedge genuinely wears. Check the sole for a bend mark, which tells you the loft may not be the stamped one.
50-degree wedges
The most common missing club in a bag with a strong-lofted pitching wedge.
We earn a commission if you buy through the retailer links below, at no extra cost to you. It never changes the specification we recommend. How this site makes money.
These links run a search for the specification, not for one club. Used clubs are one-of-one and sell within days, so nothing here is tied to a single listing that can go out of stock.
48-degree wedges
For the strongest-lofted sets, where even a 50 leaves too big a first step.
We earn a commission if you buy through the retailer links below, at no extra cost to you. It never changes the specification we recommend. How this site makes money.
These links run a search for the specification, not for one club. Used clubs are one-of-one and sell within days, so nothing here is tied to a single listing that can go out of stock.
Once the wedges are spaced, check the rest of the ladder holds: what your irons should carry at your swing speed works the same arithmetic upward through the set, and the full-bag tool on the homepage does all of it at once.
Common questions
Gapping questions
What is a yardage hole in a golf bag?
A distance you cannot cover with a full swing at any club you carry. It appears when the loft gap between two consecutive clubs is too wide — above about six degrees in the wedges, which is roughly sixteen yards. You notice it as the shot that is always between clubs, and you cover it by manufacturing a part swing.
How big should the gap between my wedges be?
Four to six degrees, which is eleven to sixteen yards on a full swing. Under four degrees the two clubs are indistinguishable on the course and one of the slots is wasted. Over six and you have a hole. The gap between the pitching wedge and the first wedge below it is the one most often wrong.
Why do my wedge distances not match the loft gaps?
Because loft is not the only variable. Shaft length, shaft weight and bounce all change the distance a wedge carries, and a set-matched gap wedge with an iron shaft will fly further than a specialist wedge of the same loft with a heavier wedge shaft. Measure the actual carry rather than assuming the loft gaps translate.
How do I measure my real wedge carry distances?
Hit ten full shots with each wedge on a range with measured targets or a launch monitor, discard the two best and two worst, and take the average of the rest. Use carry, not total. The number you want is the one you can repeat on a normal swing, not the one from your best strike of the day.
Should I fix a yardage hole with a new wedge or with a part swing?
A new wedge, if the hole is above six degrees. A part swing is a shot you have to practise and trust under pressure, and it costs consistency at exactly the distance where you are trying to hit a green. A club that covers the distance on a full swing removes the problem permanently for the price of one used wedge.