Top 10 Private Clubs by Revenue in California

California has more high-revenue private clubs than any state but Florida, and unlike most industry rankings this one is not built from surveys or self-reported figures. Every number below comes from the club’s own Form 990, the return that member-owned, tax-exempt clubs file with the IRS each year. We pulled the most recent return the IRS has processed for every California 501(c)(7) club in our database and ranked them.

The result is a picture of the state’s member-owned elite: 168 California clubs currently file a public 990, 153 of them with a fiscal 2024 or 2025 return already on record. Together they report $1.54 billion in annual revenue, and 62 of them clear $10 million. The ten largest account for $361 million of it.

The Top 10 by Revenue

The Olympic Club sits alone at the top, and it is not close. At $86.1 million for fiscal 2025 it reports more than twice the revenue of the second-place Jonathan Club. Part of that is scale: two courses at Lakeside, a downtown athletic club on Post Street, and the real estate that comes with more than a century in San Francisco. The 990 counts all of it on one line, which is worth remembering before comparing a city-and-golf institution to a single-course country club.

Los Angeles fills three of the top eight spots. The Jonathan Club, Hillcrest and The Los Angeles Country Club are three different models of the same city: a downtown-and-beach city club, a Westside country club, and the club that hosted the 2023 U.S. Open. The Coachella Valley shows up twice, with Vintage Club and Eldorado both in Indian Wells, and the Bay Area twice more with Monterey Peninsula Country Club and Sharon Heights.

Two changes in the table deserve a second look. The Los Angeles Country Club is down 17 percent against fiscal 2023, but fiscal 2023 was the year the club hosted the U.S. Open, and championship revenue does not recur. Brentwood is up 38 percent over the same span, the largest gain in the top ten. Sharon Heights is the interesting one: revenue is down 12 percent, but its balance sheet grew 31 percent, and its fiscal 2023 return reports $13.9 million in initiation fees, the highest in the state that year. That is the signature of a club in the middle of a major capital project, not a club in decline.

The Top 10 by Total Assets

Ranking by assets tells a different story, because the 990 carries land and buildings at what the club paid for them, less depreciation, not what they are worth today. A club that bought its Westside acreage in the 1920s looks almost poor on paper. A club that just finished a $40 million clubhouse jumps up the list. Read this chart as a measure of recent capital investment as much as underlying wealth.

Bel-Air is the clearest example. Its total assets grew 43 percent in two years, from $63.7 million to $91.0 million, which is exactly what a clubhouse rebuild looks like on a balance sheet. Eldorado shows the same pattern at 40 percent. Sharon Heights, again, at 31 percent. Meanwhile The Los Angeles Country Club, on some of the most valuable golf land in the world, reports $97.8 million in book assets. Nobody who has walked the North Course believes that number reflects market value, and it is not meant to.

Who Is Missing, and Why

Only member-owned, tax-exempt clubs file a public 990. That excludes every club owned by a developer, an investor or a management company, and in California that is a long list: Riviera, Sherwood, Bighorn, The Madison Club, The Quarry at La Quinta, and the resort clubs at Pelican Hill and Pebble Beach among them. Several would rank near the top of this list if their numbers were public. What you are looking at is member-owned California, not all of California.

Three other caveats. Total revenue on line 12 includes everything a club takes in, so a club with a hotel, a downtown building or rental real estate carries revenue a golf-only club never will. Fiscal years are mixed; most clubs here have a fiscal 2025 return on file, a few are still at fiscal 2024, and where the prior return on file is two years back the table says so. And a handful of well-known California clubs file as 501(c)(7) corporations that report almost nothing on the 990 because the operating business sits in a separate taxable entity; we left those out rather than rank a shell.

What the Numbers Say About the Market

Across the 68 California clubs with back-to-back returns on file, median revenue growth is 5.3 percent, and 15 of them, about one in five, reported a decline. That is a healthy market, not a booming one. The post-pandemic surge in private club demand has settled into something closer to inflation plus dues increases, with the outliers explained by capital projects and one-time events rather than membership growth.

For club leaders, the more useful signal is in the balance sheets. The clubs adding assets fastest are the ones that have already sold their members on a vision worth paying a special assessment or a higher initiation fee for. Bel-Air, Eldorado and Sharon Heights did not grow their asset base by accident; they grew it by making the case for reinvestment, and the waitlists at clubs like these suggest members are buying that case. The clubs that will struggle over the next cycle are not the ones with the smallest revenue. They are the ones that have not yet found a story compelling enough to fund the next twenty years.

We will publish the same ranking for Florida, Texas and the Northeast in the coming weeks. If your club would like its own filing history benchmarked against peers in its state, get in touch.

Sources: IRS Form 990 filings via the IRS Exempt Organizations Business Master File (September 2026 release) and ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer; Private Club Marketing club database. Revenue is Part I line 12; total assets is Part I line 20, end of year. Prior-year comparisons use the most recent earlier return on file. Only 501(c)(7) tax-exempt clubs are included.