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How many wedges to carryFirst, check the loft of your pitching wedge

Updated: Nov 5, 2026Contains affiliate links

How many wedges should you carry? Your PW loft decides it. With a 46° PW, carry 50°, 54° and 58°; with a 44° PW, 48°, 52° and 56°. If you only have room for two, go 52° and 58° with a 46° PW, or 50° and 56° with a 44° PW (6° apart). Among women pros, 31 of 40 carried three. "Are 52° and 58° enough?" "Everyone has a 54°, is that right?" How many wedges and which lofts is where a lot of golfers get stuck. But there's something to settle first: the loft of your pitching wedge. Start there.

Bottom line: check your PW loft, then decide

If you start from "56° or 58°, which one?", you won't get an answer. The right pick for those two changes with your PW loft.

Why start from the PW

Recent irons have stronger (lower) lofts. Even under the same name, "pitching wedge," some are 41° and some are 47°. Same name, six degrees apart.

I pulled the real PW lofts for 18 major models from the makers' official spec tables.

From each maker's Japan official spec table (checked Sep 12, 2026). Dunlop's and XXIO's spec tables are images, so I opened the images and read them. The P790 '25 page carries a note saying the figures are "calculated, provisional." Bold marks the models compared in this site's iron rankings.

The most upright, the ELYTE X, is 41°; the weakest, the T250 Launch Spec, is 47°. That's a 6° spread. Quite a difference.

If your PW is 45°, for example, it falls right between 46° and 44° in the chart. In that case, count from that 45°.

The spread shows up even within one maker. Titleist's T250 is 43°, the T100 is 45° and the T250 Launch Spec is 47°. Srixon too: the ZXiR is 43°, the ZXi5 44° and the ZXi7 46°. A brand name doesn't settle it. If you remember a PW loft by brand, you can be off by 3–4°.

The lofts other golfers carry don't carry over to you if your PW loft is different.

What happens if you buy wedges without checking? A GDO article explains it like this.

With a 44° PW and a 52° next, that's an 8° gap. Within that 8°, there's a distance you can't hit. A hole. That's where "I can't hit 100 yards" comes from. When I look at a wedge combination, the first thing I check is exactly this: the gap to the PW.

Club fitter Take-chan (Golf Shop Ishii, Kagawa) also begins at the same point in his GDO interview. "It's important to know the loft angle of your pitching wedge." That's the starting point. I agree.

Combination chart by PW loft

These are the concrete combinations the same Take-chan lists.

Source: GDO, "Too Late to Ask: Do You Really Know Your PW Loft?" (club fitter Take-chan)

The "4–6°" figure has a clear source: wedge designer Bob Vokey himself. It isn't secondhand.

Vokey also warns about the 58°, which is popular in Japan.

Whether to carry a 58° isn't decided by popularity. It's decided by your own PW and how the club in between relates to it.

What loft do you hit 100 yards with? Subtract from your PW distance, 4° at a time

The loft that hits 100 yards differs from person to person. There's one way to find it: start from your PW distance and subtract about 10 yards for every 4° of loft.

Here's the math for me. My 7-iron goes 160 yards (my own measurement). Assuming 10 yards between clubs and a 44° PW, my PW goes about 130 yards. That makes 120 with 48°, 110 with 52° and 100 with 56° (an estimate calculated from my own measurement).

So for me, 100 yards is a full 56°. If your PW goes 110 yards, something around 48° is your 100-yard club. Check the table above to make sure that club is in your setup.

How many to carry: 31 of 40 women pros carry three

This is GDO's survey of the setups of 40 women pros (March 2024).

Source: GDO, "How Many Wedges Is Right? Is the 54° Really Popular? / Women Pros' Clubs Vol. 9" (Mar 28, 2024, by Motoharu Tajima)

The article says, "Among amateurs, I get the impression two wedges is by far the most common." Yet among the women pros, only 8 carry two. A small group.

Also, 17 of the 40 used a 54°, and including the 53° and 55° around it, 20. Around 54° is the most chosen. Nearly half.

So should amateurs carry three too? Take-chan recommends three because "in real play you hit the short distances more often." I agree. You hit the driver 14 times in a round, but more than 30 times inside 100 yards. More than double.

Bounce and sole shape

Once the lofts are set, bounce is next. It depends on how you hit and where you hit. Just two things.

Look at how many grinds (sole shapes) each maker offers.

In Vokey's official explanation, the grinds divide up like this.

• F: an all-rounder for full shots and square-face shots. For players who like a traditional sole
• M: for players who open and close the face. A shallow, sweeping swing type
• T: the narrowest sole, with low bounce. For a wide variety of situations around the green
• K: a wide sole. Comes in high-bounce and low-bounce types

The PING s259 publishes bounce as numbers. The S (standard) is 12° for 46–56°, with 10° for the 58° and 60°; the W (wide) is 14°; the T (thin) is 6°. If you tend to hit it fat, go for the bigger number; if you want to pick the ball clean, the smaller one.

Narrowing it to 56° and lining up four makers, the models offering 12° or more are these. The SM11 has D (12°) and F (14°), the RTZ 2 has Full (12°), the MG5 has SB (12°) and HB (14°), and the s259 has S (12°) and W (14°). I checked each maker's official specs on Oct 5, 2026.

A bigger number isn't automatically safer. If you set up with your hands forward, bounce is reduced by that angle. Lean the shaft 10° forward and a 12° bounce leaves 2°. The math is in my article on chunked chips and bounce (a table of models with 12° or more bounce in a 56°).

If in doubt, start with the standard grind (F for Vokey, S for PING). You can pick from the 27 combinations once you know how you hit. No need to rush.

When to replace: 1,000 rpm lost in 75 rounds

Wedges are consumables.

Titleist Japan's official site puts the replacement guide at 75 rounds. It states clearly that this is "the point where the expected spin starts to fade," not the limit where the club breaks. You can still use it.

So what changes at 75 rounds? Here is how Aaron Dill, the PGA Tour rep for Vokey wedges, explains it.

There are robot-test numbers too. According to Titleist's marketing staff, spin drops by up to 1,000 rpm at 75 rounds, and roll-out nearly doubles.

There's another measurement. Today's Golfer measured a 60-yard pitch shot: a new Cleveland RTX 4 gave 9,094 rpm, and a five-year-old 588 RTX 2.0 gave 7,959 rpm. That's a gap of more than 1,000 rpm: 1,135 rpm, about 12.5% less.

Tour players' replacement frequency is also published. PW once a year, gap wedge twice a year, sand wedge three times a year, lob wedge four to five times a year. The more a club is used in bunkers, the faster it wears. Sand is fast.

Range balls often have harder covers than course balls, which speeds up wear. A hard ball grinds. If you practice a lot, the wear arrives sooner than 75 rounds.

Five major models compared

Official maker or authorized-dealer prices (checked Sep 12, 2026).

A set of three costs ¥80,000–¥100,000. You don't need to buy them all at once. Replace the one you use most first. For most golfers, that's the approach wedge around 52°. Start there.

To spend less, you can aim for the previous generation. The PING s159 (released 2024) is ¥19,800 at the official outlet now that its successor, the s259, is out. The original Callaway OPUS (2024) starts at ¥14,800. Cheap. Groove design doesn't change dramatically over a few years. I care more that the grooves aren't worn than that the generation is new.

What I have handled

I set up my wedges with even steps from the PW so the gaps do not get too wide. The aim is to remove holes in distance and reduce hesitation around the green. I roughly know the full-shot distance of each wedge. Where a gap hurts is when a half shot gets awkward, and it is easier if you decide in advance how to play it.

Compared: with three wedges, 105 yards falls awkwardly in between

My setup is a 46° PW plus 50°, 54° and 58° wedges, four clubs. In this section, "four" counts the PW. The "three" above is a count that leaves the PW out.

I compared them on Sunday, October 4, 2026, at around 2 p.m., in a hitting bay at an indoor range. I was alone, it was a single session of about an hour, 15 shots per club, off a mat with Pro V1 balls and a TrackMan.

The 46° PW is the PW from the ZXi5, and the 50°, 54° and 58° are Titleist SM11 wedges. I used the SM11s for about 25 rounds.

I tried both the three-club and four-club setups. With three, I couldn't hit 100 yards or so as a full shot, and the 105-yard distance was awkward. I also got the ball within a pin's length of the hole less often than with four. With four, the distance steps lined up.

The three-wedge setup was a 46° PW plus 52° and 58°. A full 52° for a 105-yard shot carried only about 98 yards, which is short, and swinging harder scattered it between 103 and 108 yards. A three-quarter PW went about 108 yards, so neither choice felt right.

With four wedges, the measured carries (full / three-quarter / half) were 105, 90 and 70 yards for the 50°, 90, 77 and 60 yards for the 54°, and 78, 66 and 52 yards for the 58°. Between full swings, the gaps are 17 yards from the PW (122 yards) to the 50°, 15 yards from the 50° to the 54°, and 12 yards from the 54° to the 58°.

I confirmed the roughly 15-yard spacing both from the October 4 indoor numbers and from distances I hit later on the course.

Counts are from rounds with wedges.

On Thursday, October 22, I played a flat course in the Kanto area on a cloudy 15°C day with two friends. The shot that helped most was a full 50° from 105 yards out on a par 4, which finished close to the pin. The club I had little use for was the 58°: I took it out 4 times, 2 of them from bunkers.

Turf condition made a difference too. The 54° S grind cut through soft, dewy turf cleanly, and the 58° M was easy to use with the face open. On firm turf, the 50° F didn't skid and I hit fewer fat shots. I did hit one fat from a soft bunker with the 54° S.

I also hit an older SM10. Its spin was about 600 rpm lower than the newer SM11, and the grooves were shallower from the center toward the toe. The SM11's grooves were crisp. I think this difference is why the ball stops less on the green in the rain.

The shop told me this SM10 had about 70 rounds on it. I never got to measure the same club over time, so I can't say how fast the grooves wear.

Even at the same 46°, the PW in my older iron set was 44°. A 2° difference changes the gaps on the wedge side. Check your iron set's PW loft first, then decide on your wedge setup.

I used the RTZ 2 58° and hit it 40 times. The full carry was 76 yards, almost the same as the SM11's 78 yards. The sound was low, the feel soft, and the spin about the same. I only touched the s259 for a few shots at a shop.

Four wedges are a harder fit for golfers who want more long clubs, because inside the 14-club limit you'd have to drop a hybrid or a fairway wood. If you play only a few rounds a year, keeping track of four wedge distances is a chore.

Check the PW loft first and even out the steps across four clubs, and you'll hit fewer moments around 100 yards where you think "that's an awkward number."

My call:With a 46° PW, I'll even out the setup with four clubs by adding 50°, 54° and 58°.

How many yards apart are the wedges that come with an iron set?

From the PW and set-wedge lofts in the table above, I worked out the gap to the next club. Distance uses 2.5 yd per degree of loft.

Lofts are from the table above (each maker's official figures). Distances are my calculation, a rough guide to be replaced with your own measurements.

The XXIO 13/14 leaves 8 degrees, about 20 yd, between the 48 degree AW and the 56 degree SW. The other sets sit at 10 to 17.5 yd. To fill that hole, add a 52 degree between them and you get 48, 52 and 56, 4 degrees or about 10 yd apart. When you shop for wedges, start from the biggest gap in your own set.

About the writer and sources

Written by a golfer who averages a 72 and plays about 150 rounds a year, and who likes comparing gear numbers side by side.

What I have handled is in the section "What I have actually handled". The numbers come from official materials, and the subtraction and sorting are mine. Last updated Nov 5, 2026.

FAQ

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Related reading

【Nov 2026 Update】Lynx Slide Sole Master 56° Review
A new wedge with 1° of bounce at 56°. I split who it suits and who will chunk more, by the numbers.

Chunked chips and bounce: the further ahead your hands, the more it disappears
Once the loft is set, bounce is next. This is why chunk-prone players should pick 12° or more.

Vokey SM11 vs. SM10: what changed
The SM11 adds a 44°, which makes it easier to follow irons with upright PWs.

Hi-Toe 5 vs. MG5
The MG5 runs 46–60°; the Hi-Toe 5 only 56–60°. I compared how to combine them by the numbers.

Choosing a Putter: The Problem of Makers Not Publishing Head Weight
More gear for around the green. This one has no numbers to go on.

How to choose a hybrid | A 4-hybrid is 20–23°

Lessons or clubs first?
Before you add a wedge, this is about measuring your curve and sorting out the cause.

2026 D1 Ball vs. the Previous Model
If you want the ball to stop on approaches, look at the ball's cover before the wedge.

Sources for this article

• Survey of 40 women pros: GDO, "How Many Wedges Is Right?" (Mar 28, 2024)
• Combinations by PW loft: GDO, "Too Late to Ask: Do You Really Know Your PW Loft?"
• The 4–6° rule: Minna no Golf Digest (interview with Bob Vokey)
• Replacement timing: Titleist Japan official site / Minna no Golf Digest (Aaron Dill)
• New vs. old measurements: Today's Golfer
• Product specs: Vokey SM11 / PING s259 / Cleveland RTZ / Fourteen DJ-6

Update history

• Oct 5, 2026: Corrected the PING s259 S grind's bounce by loft (46–56° is 12°; 58 and 60° are 10°). Added the models offering 12° or more bounce at 56° (4 makers).

Last updated: Nov 5, 2026 (previous update: Sep 12, 2026)

The figures in this article are those published by each manufacturer and media outlet. Any numbers from my own hitting or use are given in the article body with their conditions.