Correct Tee Height For Driver: Distance and Accuracy

Tee it high and let it fly! Right? But how high? What is the correct tee height for your driver? And how come when we watch TV we see so many professional players that don’t seem to tee it very high at all, and still hit it super high and super far?

Like many things in golf, there are a lot of one-liners that get passed around as just generally accepted golf logic when it comes to how to play the game, but for almost any piece of advice or instruction, we can find many players who have been super successful doing something entirely different.

The question of what the correct driver tee height is doesn’t have a one-sentence answer. Instead let’s educate ourselves on what the implications are of different golf tee heights, and learn how to pick out our perfect “stock” tee height and then look at how we can manipulate our tee height in an educated way to encourage the ball flight we want based on our swing tendencies that day or the type of shot we want to play.

Different Tee Heights For Driver

There is not one cookie cutter driver tee height that works best for everyone. You can modify your tee height to hit different golf shots, as well as to change your trajectory and control. Let's dive into the different commonly used tee heights.

Normal Tee Height

A good rule of thumb for determining a normal tee height for your driver is to tee it up so exactly half of the ball sits above the top of your driver face and half below when the driver is resting on the ground at address.

Obviously this is not where you want to contact it during your swing. Many players make the adjustment dynamically and are unaffected, while many other players “hover” the driver behind the ball throughout their waggle and address after briefly checking the height of the tee against the grounded club.

It should be noted that many would criticize this optimal tee height as “too high” up until fairly recent times, because driver heads were smaller all the way up through the early 2000s and the trend of hitting “up” on the ball didn’t become more understood and mainstream until Trackman became prevalent over the past decade or less.

When To Use Normal Tee Height For Driver?

Ideally your normal tee height is the one that is going to give you the best combination of more distance and control for your swing and ball flight tendencies. Until you start getting close to scratch or better, you should try to use a consistent tee height - even if it’s a little bit higher or lower than others - on the vast majority of your driver tee shots.

Driving the ball consistently well is a challenge even for the best golfers, and trying to play a “go-to” trajectory and shape (and therefore ball position and tee height) should be the approach on 90 to 99% of your drives, deviating only when you absolutely have to with the driver.

Lower Tee Height

A lower tee height for the driver would be anything that has less than half the ball above the crown of the driver at address. You can achieve this by using a different sized tee, or preferably by driving any longer tee slightly farther into the ground.

When To Use Lower Tee Height For Driver?

Using a lower tee height with your driver can come in handy in a few situations. If you listen to golfers, they will often reference teeing it down for “control.” What they mean is this: a ball teed lower will usually hit slightly lower on the face, spin a little more, and come out with a lower ball flight. All of these things reduce the dispersion or unpredictability of the outcome, but they may or may not produce the maximum possible distance on a perfect strike.

Higher Tee Height

If you have more than half of the ball above the crown of the driver head at address, it is safe to say you are using a higher tee height than normal.

When teeing it high make sure you have a long enough tee that you put enough of it into the ground so everything is stable while you go through your shot routine.

When To Use Higher Tee Height For Driver?

Very generally speaking, teeing the ball higher can promote a higher and potentially longer drive. The ball can hit higher on the driver face, which can give more of a piercing or even knuckleball type effect that produces an extremely long drive, but can be prone to flying dramatically off line. If you have absolutely no trouble and especially if you have the wind at your back, teeing the ball up an extra ¼ or 1/3rd of a golf ball can help sneak a few extra yards out of your driver, but at the risk of a potentially wilder outcome.

People learning to play golf often find it helpful to tee the golf ball higher!

How Does Tee Height Affect Driving Distance?

Like with most things in golf, there is usually a sweet spot with tee height that will optimize your distance. While higher generally gives more potential for farther (it’s definitely not a guarantee) there are diminishing returns and definitely an area where teeing it too high can make things very difficult.

It all depends on the exact matchup between your equipment (flex and loft), your release style/timing, and the setup and ball position that you use to go along with your tee height. Let’s take a look at some of the many parameters to educate yourself on in order to be able to self-diagnose and make your own tee height adjustments to fit your swing or situation.

Attack Angle

To be clear, you can still hit down on a ball that’s teed up. However, teeing the ball higher gives you a chance to “catch it on the upswing” which is how many players are creating maximum distance, including some of the longest and best drivers on the PGA TOUR who could hit as far as 3 to 5 degrees up on some drives.

However, if you look at the total of all of the golfers on TOUR, many of them still hit very very slightly down or almost level with their drivers. And many of them still hit it very far. This is generally considered a tradeoff between distance and dispersion that comes down to a personal strategy choice, comfort level, or matches the particular skill set or athletic ability of that golfer.

Launch Angle

“High launch, low spin” is the oft-repeated formula for the modern tour driver and especially the long driver. If you achieve a high launch by simply adding loft to the club face, you will also add spin. If you take a low-loft club face and launch it high with a positive angle of attack you create a very low “spin loft” number which produces the high, penetrating ball flight that just seems to sail forever down range. 

Again, this comes with a potential for a lack of control or even a two-way miss, and the shots are also more susceptible to wind and just carrying off line more because the shot goes so far.

Ideally a golfer will find their preferred sweet spot, depending on how hard they hit it and how much ro