Update Frequencies

This guide helps you plan polling and caching against your request quota. Each feed has a time-to-live (TTL): how long a response is cached, and a data update cadence: how often the underlying data actually changes. The two are not the same: a short TTL on slowly-changing data does not mean you should poll fast. Given your request budget and QPS limits (see API Basics), drive your polling from the Recommended pull columns, not the TTL.

Frequency Chart

The six tournament-scoped feeds share a tiered TTL that follows the tournament state, abbreviated as Live-tiered in the chart:

3 seconds while the tournament is live
60 seconds while it is scheduled
10 minutes once recently closed
4 hours once closed for more than 7 days

Feed	TTL (cache)	Data updates	Recommended pull (non-live)	Recommended pull (live)
Seasons	10 minutes	New seasons appear as added; season statuses update on the day of a status change	As needed	Not applicable
Tournament Schedule	Live-tiered	Schedule and metadata update as events are added or adjusted	Every 10 to 15 minutes after closing for recent tournaments; Daily Change Log for older ones	Every 10 to 30 minutes
Tournament Summary	Live-tiered	Field, location, and status details; also useful for detecting newly added players	Every 10 to 15 minutes after closing for recent tournaments; Daily Change Log for older ones	Every 2 to 5 minutes
Tournament Leaderboard	Live-tiered	Real-time leaderboard and tournament/round player stats	Every 10 to 15 minutes after closing for recent tournaments; Daily Change Log for older ones	Push preferred; REST fallback every 3 to 5 seconds
Scorecards Per Round	Live-tiered	Real-time per-player round scoring during active rounds	Every 10 to 15 minutes after closing for recent tournaments; Daily Change Log for older ones	Push preferred; REST fallback every 3 to 5 seconds
Tee Times Per Round	Live-tiered	Most changes are pre-round, with occasional same-day updates	Every 10 to 15 minutes after closing for recent tournaments; Daily Change Log for older ones	Every 1 to 5 minutes
Tournament Hole Statistics	Live-tiered	Hole-level tournament aggregates update during play	Every 10 to 15 minutes after closing for recent tournaments; Daily Change Log for older ones	Every 5 to 15 seconds
Players	3 seconds	Season player list; new players are added as fields are finalized	Every 12 to 24 hours	Every 1 to 4 hours during tournament weeks
Player Profile	4 hours	Seasonal stats update on a 5-minute timer after a tournament moves to `closed`	As needed; use the Daily Change Log to capture changes after a tournament ends	5 to 10 minutes after a tournament moves to `closed` for the quickest update
Player Statistics	3 seconds	Season player-stat feed; updates as stats are revised or published	Every 12 hours	Every 10 to 30 minutes
Official World Golf Ranking	4 hours	Updates weekly on Monday (about 17:00 UTC); a tournament that finishes on a Monday moves the update to Tuesday	Every 12 to 24 hours	Every 4 hours
Daily Change Log	3 seconds	Entries populate live for changes to players, tournaments, schedules, pairings, and statistics	Every 4 hours or so, depending on your use case	Not applicable

⏱️
TTL Is a Cache Floor, Not a Polling Target
Several slow-moving feeds (Players, Player Statistics, Daily Change Log) carry a 3-second TTL even though their data changes on the order of hours, days, or weekly validation cycles. The TTL only tells you how fresh a response can be; polling those feeds every few seconds burns quota for no benefit. Always size your polling from the Recommended pull columns, and treat anything faster as wasted requests.

The Daily Change Log Window

The Daily Change Log reports changes for a "golf day" that runs from 04:00:00 UTC to 03:59:59 UTC the following day, not midnight to midnight. A captured PGA change log for 2024-04-14 returns:

{
  "alias": "pga",
  "name": "PGA Tour",
  "start_time": "2024-04-14T04:00:00+00:00",
  "end_time": "2024-04-15T03:59:59+00:00"
}

This boundary lines up with the end of US (East Coast) play, so a full day of results and revisions falls inside one window rather than being split across two calendar dates. Entries populate live throughout the window; a pull every 4 hours or so is enough for most use cases. See Monitoring Data Changes for how to consume it.

Live Update Cadence

Golf scoring updates hole by hole: a player's score for a hole becomes available once that hole is completed and recorded. Size your live polling (or Push consumption) to that cadence; pulling faster than scores can change will not surface them any sooner.

Reading TTL from Responses

Response headers carry caching information you can use to avoid requesting data that has not changed; each response carries standard HTTP caching headers. To detect those updates as they land, see Monitoring Data Changes.

Best Practices

Drive polling from the Recommended pull columns; never poll faster than a feed's TTL, and rarely as fast.
Use the live columns only while a tournament is live; once it closes, drop to the non-live cadence and let the Daily Change Log trigger refreshes for older events.
Prefer Push for Tournament Leaderboard and Scorecards Per Round so you are not polling at 3-to-5-second rates.
For the fastest post-event stats, pull Player Profile 5 to 10 minutes after a tournament moves to closed; seasonal stats refresh on a 5-minute timer from that transition.
Treat Players, Player Statistics, and Official World Golf Ranking as slow feeds (hours, not seconds), whatever their TTL says.