Who Actually Runs America’s Private Clubs: A 2,272-Club Analysis of Board Filings

Everyone in the club business has an opinion about who sits on private club boards. Almost nobody has counted. Membership rosters are private, board lists are rarely published, and the governance conversation at every conference runs on anecdote: the board is too big, it turns over too slowly, it looks nothing like the membership it serves.

It turns out the data exists. Most American private clubs are 501(c)(7) tax-exempt social clubs, and every one of them files a Form 990 in which Part VII lists officers and directors by name and title. Those filings are public. We pulled the most recent return for every club in our database that files one, and built the board of each: 30,996 officers, directors and senior staff across 2,272 clubs, overwhelmingly fiscal year 2024.

What comes out is the first broad picture of private club governance in America. Some of it confirms what operators already suspect. One finding contradicts the thing most club leaders assume is true, and it should trouble anyone planning for the next decade of membership.

The Median Club Board Has Eleven Seats, and Grows With Money

Across 2,178 clubs with an identifiable board, the median is eleven directors and officers. The distribution is tighter than the folklore suggests: the middle 80% of clubs seat between six and eighteen, only 141 clubs seat twenty or more, and just 25 carry a board of thirty or more.

Board size tracks revenue almost linearly. Sorting clubs into five equal groups by total revenue, the median board runs eight seats in the smallest fifth (median revenue $334,000) and rises steadily to thirteen in the largest fifth (median revenue $14.4 million). Every step up in revenue buys roughly one more seat at the table.

The extremes are instructive. The largest board in the dataset belongs to the Amarillo Club in Texas, at 52 seats, followed by The Country Club of Lincoln and Metropolitan Yacht Club at 45 apiece. At the other end, a handful of clubs report a single officer. And size does not follow money as tidily as the quintiles suggest: Desert Mountain Club, the largest filer in the set at $108.3 million in revenue, governs with 14 seats, while The Union League of Philadelphia, at $87.3 million, seats 31. Two clubs of comparable scale have made opposite decisions about how many people belong in the room.

That is defensible — a bigger operation carries more committees and more fiduciary surface. It is also worth naming the cost. A thirteen-person board with staggered three-year terms means a governance body that can take the better part of a decade to fully turn over, in a market where member expectations have moved faster than that twice since 2020.

The Gender Gap Is Real, and It Is Mostly a Golf Problem

We estimated gender from first names using Social Security Administration birth records for the 1930–1985 cohort, counting only names that skew at least 95% to one gender. That resolves 20,990 of 25,449 board seats, or 82.5%. Ambiguous names — Chris, Pat, Lee, Jamie, Terry — are excluded rather than guessed.

On that basis, women hold 21.4% of private club board seats. That figure alone is unremarkable in 2026. What matters is how unevenly it is distributed, because the gap is not a club-industry problem so much as a golf problem.

Yacht clubs seat women in 28.7% of board positions (363 clubs, 3,825 seats). City clubs reach 31.9% (51 clubs). Athletic clubs are at parity, though on a small base of 19 clubs and 201 seats, so treat that number as directional. Country clubs sit at 19.0% across 1,329 clubs and 12,222 seats, and pure golf clubs at 18.0% across 395 clubs.

The clubs with the most golf in them have the fewest women governing them, and the sample is large enough that this is not noise.

Money Does Not Fix It

Here is where the data turns on the conventional wisdom. The most common assumption we hear is that the wealthiest, most sophisticated clubs are ahead on this and the rest of the market will follow. The filings say otherwise.

Across revenue quintiles, the female share of board seats is flat to slightly declining: 22.4% in the smallest fifth of clubs, 24.2%, 21.5%, 19.8%, and 20.2% in the largest fifth. A club doing $14 million a year is no more likely to seat women than one doing $334,000, and is modestly less likely than a club in the second quintile.

Whatever is producing this pattern, it is not budget, staff sophistication or professional management. Those all scale with revenue. This does not. It is governance culture, which is exactly the thing a board can change by deciding to.

Women Who Do Reach the Board Are Routed to the Same Seat

This is the finding worth a governance committee’s attention. Sorting every board seat by role reveals a clean and familiar pattern.

Women hold 36.4% of secretary positions — well above their 21.4% share of seats overall — and only 14.3% of president and chair positions across 2,670 top-officer seats. The share falls at every rung from secretary to president.

A club that seats a woman on its board is meaningfully more likely to make her secretary than to make her president. That is a pipeline that produces the current picture indefinitely, because the secretary’s chair has never been the path to the head of the table.

One in Five Boards Has No Women at All

Among 1,968 clubs where we could resolve at least five board seats, 392 — 19.9% — have no women on the board whatsoever. Again the split is by type: 25.3% of golf clubs and 21.4% of country clubs field an all-male board, against 10.0% of yacht clubs and none of the athletic clubs.

Geography moves it too. Connecticut (27.3%), Minnesota (27.1%) and Washington (27.0%) sit at the top among states with at least 25 clubs in the sample. Tennessee (10.5%), Illinois (15.1%) and Pennsylvania (16.2%) sit at the bottom.

What To Do With This

Four things follow directly from the data, and all of them are inside a board’s control.

• Count your own board, then find your peer number. You now have the benchmark: 11 seats, 21.4% women, 14.3% of presidencies. If your board is at zero, you are in the 19.9% — and unlike most benchmarks in this industry, this one is verifiable by anyone who can read your 990.
• Audit the route, not just the roster. If the women on your board are in the secretary’s chair, adding another director does not change the trajectory. Look at which committees feed the officer ladder — finance, green, long-range planning — and who has been appointed to them over the last five years.
• Treat board size as a decision with a cost. Thirteen seats and three-year staggered terms is close to a decade of turnover. If your club is repositioning, the governance body may be the slowest-moving part of the plan.
• Assume this is visible. Every figure in this article came from public filings. Prospective members, journalists and your competitors can run the same analysis on your club specifically. Governance is no longer a private matter in practice, whatever the bylaws say.

The sharpest version of the problem is a commercial one. The wealth that funds private club membership is shifting: women are a growing share of high-net-worth households and of the decision-makers in the households clubs already serve. A governance structure that routes them to the secretary’s chair is not just dated. It is a club making decisions about its future with a board that does not resemble the people it needs to recruit.

Methodology: we extracted Form 990 Part VII, Section A from the most recent available e-filed return for every club in our database with a matched EIN — 2,272 clubs, 30,996 named individuals, 22,765 of 25,449 board seats from fiscal year 2024. “Board” means rows the filer flagged as individual trustee, director or officer; compensated staff are excluded. Gender is estimated from first names against SSA birth records for 1930–1985, restricted to names with a 95% or greater skew and at least 500 recorded births, resolving 82.5% of seats; the remainder are excluded, not assumed. Because 501(c)(7) filing is the source, the sample covers member-owned clubs and under-represents for-profit and management-company-operated clubs, which do not file comparable returns. Figures for athletic clubs and city clubs rest on small samples and are directional.

Private Club Marketing builds membership, brand and governance strategy for private clubs across the United States. If you want your own board and membership benchmarked against this dataset, talk to our team.