Every retailer selling used golf balls in the UK tells you the same thing. Up to 70% off. Sometimes up to 80%. Nobody ever shows the working.
We can show ours. This site already puts every offer on the same basis, which is the price of one ball. New, refurbished and graded used all sit in the same table, sorted the same way. So "how much do lake balls actually save you" has a measured answer here rather than a marketing one.
Across the 90 models we currently price both new and used, the median saving is 63%.
That is below the number on the banner ads. It is also real, taken from the 1,572 live offers we held at the refresh on 19 September 2026.
How we worked it out
Three things matter, and all three are places where this sort of comparison usually goes wrong.
Everything is per ball. A 12-pack and a 50-pack cannot be compared on the sticker price. Every offer is divided by its pack size before anything else happens. There is more on how the table works in the FAQ.
We use medians, not averages. Used golf ball listings have a long tail of oddities at both ends. One seller listing a single ball at £36 would wreck an average. A median ignores it.
We threw out the offers we were least sure of. Some listings do not state a pack size, so our ingest infers one. Others have gone out of stock since the last refresh. Both are excluded from every figure on this page. That removes 249 of the 1,572 offers.
Worth knowing before you read on: these are the prices of the balls. Delivery is not included, and on a small used lot it is not trivial. One of the listings behind the figures below is £5.45 for ten balls with £2.94 postage on top.
What each condition actually costs
Median price per ball, on the offers that survived the filtering above.
| Condition | Offers | Median per ball |
|---|---|---|
| Used, Grade C | 4 | £0.43 |
| Used, ungraded | 267 | £0.66 |
| Used, Grade B | 147 | £0.67 |
| Used, Grade A | 280 | £1.04 |
| Refurbished | 31 | £1.54 |
| New | 594 | £2.50 |
Two things in that table are worth more of your attention than the headline.
Grade C is not a finding. Four offers is not enough to tell you anything. It is in the table because leaving it out would be worse, not because £0.43 means something.
Ungraded used costs the same as Grade B. £0.66 against £0.67, across 267 and 147 offers. That is a large enough sample on both sides to take seriously, and it is the most useful thing we know today. A ball sold as "used" with no grade tells you nothing about what will turn up. A Grade B ball has at least been looked at and sorted. You are currently paying the same for both. Buy the graded one.
Does the saving depend on which ball you buy?
Yes, and more than we expected. We took the 48 models with at least four new and four used offers, and grouped them by what the new ball costs.
| New price per ball | Models | Median saving |
|---|---|---|
| Under £1.50 | 6 | 53% |
| £1.50 to £2.50 | 15 | 63% |
| £2.50 to £3.50 | 18 | 70% |
| £3.50 and over | 9 | 77% |
The more the new ball costs, the larger the percentage you save by buying it used. The cash gap widens faster still, from 70p a ball at the cheap end to £3.06 a ball at the top.
The reason is arithmetic rather than anything about golf. Used prices are squeezed into a much narrower band than new ones: three quarters of the used offers we track sit between 40p and £1.50 a ball. A ball that cost £1.30 new has very little room beneath it. One at £5 has a great deal.
That inverts the advice most golfers give themselves. If you are going to buy used balls at all, the premium models are where the saving actually lives. Buying a budget ball used saves you pennies.
Two examples, with the listings behind them
Titleist AVX. New, the median is £5.33 a ball, which is a 12-pack at £63.99. Used, the median is £1.08 a ball, which is 24 Grade B balls at £25.95. That is 80% off, and it is £4.25 a ball in your pocket.
Titleist Tour Soft. New, £2.75 a ball, which is a dozen at £32.99 from Affordable Golf. Used, £0.55 a ball, which is ten recycled balls at £5.45. Also 80% off, but only £2.21 a ball saved, because the new ball costs half as much to start with.
Both of those are medians rather than the cheapest thing we found. There are cheaper AVX offers than £1.08 in the table right now. We are quoting the middle of the range on purpose, because the cheapest row on any given day is the one most likely to be a mistake.
Where the headline does not hold
We went looking for models where used costs more than new, because that would be the interesting failure. Three models appear to show it. None of them survives a look at the listings.
Two of them rest on one new offer and one used offer apiece, which is not a sample. The third, the TaylorMade TP5 Pix, has its used median dragged up by sellers listing balls individually at £4.91 each. Buying one ball at a time is not a thing anybody does, and our data should probably not be counting it. We will fix that.
So the honest answer is that we cannot currently name a model where buying used is a bad deal on price. What we can name are three ways the saving is smaller than it looks.
Delivery is the first, as above. The second is that a pack size we had to guess is a pack size we might have got wrong, which is why those offers are excluded here. The third is that a grade is not a standard. There is no governing body. Grade A from one seller and Grade A from another are not promises of the same thing.
What is it worth over a season?
Take a golfer who loses three balls a round and plays thirty rounds a year. That is 90 balls.
At the median new price of £2.50, that is £225 a year of golf balls. At the median Grade B price of £0.67, the same 90 balls cost £60. The difference is about £165 a season.
If you lose nothing and play twice a month, the sum is small and you should buy whatever ball you like. The saving here is a budget question, and it only matters in proportion to how many balls you part with.
Putting it into practice
The two findings above turn into two filters on the price table.
Buy a graded ball rather than an ungraded one, because at the moment they cost the same. Grade B used, cheapest per ball first is the list that follows from that, and Grade B is the grade where the sample is large enough for the price to mean something.
Buy used at the expensive end rather than the cheap end, because that is where the gap is widest. Used tour balls is that list. The models in it are the ones showing 70% and upwards.
Neither of those is a recommendation of a particular ball. We do not care which one you buy. We care that you do not pay £2.50 for something that is sitting there at 67p.
So are lake balls worth it?
On price, clearly. A 63% median saving across 90 models is not a marketing claim, and the expensive models save you more than the cheap ones.
The part we cannot measure is whether a ball that has spent a winter in a lake still behaves like the ball it was. We price things here. We do not test them, and anyone telling you they have measured that across 90 models is probably not being straight with you.
What we would say is this. If you are buying used, buy a graded ball, because today it costs the same as an ungraded one. And buy used at the top of the range rather than the bottom, because that is where the money is.
See every used ball we track, cheapest per ball first →
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