What a Scottish Caddie Earns: The Published Fees, and What Isn't Published

What a Scottish caddie earns is a question with one published half and one unpublished half. The published half is the per-bag fee: several clubs print it on their caddie pages, and it is the only caddie figure on this site. The unpublished half — how many rounds a caddie carries in a season, what share of the fee reaches them, what they clear in a year — no club states, and this page does not guess at it.

The per-bag fee — what the clubs publish

These are the fees the clubs themselves publish for a single caddie carrying one bag for one round, each read off the club's own caddie or visitor page on 27 September 2026:

Club	Published caddie fee	What the club's page adds
Carnoustie Golf Links (Championship)	£80	"+ gratuity"; the club asks for 24 hours' notice to cancel a caddie booking. The page still labels the rate 2025
Kingsbarns Golf Links	£80	"plus optional gratuity", paid in cash at the end of the round
Crail Golfing Society (Balcomie)	£80	Plus gratuity; the page shows 2027 rates and states the gratuity it would normally expect
Western Gailes	£75	A suggested single-caddie rate, plus gratuity
North Berwick (West Links)	£70	The 2026 rate, plus gratuity
Prestwick	£70	Plus gratuity
Dundonald Links	£70	Plus gratuities

Clubs not on this list either do not publish a figure online or publish it somewhere a reader cannot check today. For those, ask the caddie master when you book — that is the figure that counts, and it is the one you will be asked to pay.

Every club above adds a gratuity on top of the fee. Only Crail's page puts a figure on what it would normally expect, so read that one on the club's own page; for the rest, how much to tip is covered in do you tip caddies in Scotland.

How the fee is paid

Kingsbarns states that its caddies are independent contractors rather than employees, and that the fee is paid in cash at the end of the round — which is also why the club says it cannot guarantee a caddie's availability and asks you to request one when you book. The other pages listed above say nothing either way about the caddies' status or how the fee reaches them, so it would be wrong to assume every club works like Kingsbarns.

What no club publishes

None of the seven caddie pages above says:

• what share of the fee reaches the caddie, or whether the club or caddie master keeps a part of it;
• how many caddies work the course;
• how many rounds a caddie carries in a week or a season;
• what a caddie earns across a year.

Those are the numbers the question "what does a caddie earn?" is really asking for, and they are not published anywhere a reader can check. Figures for them that circulate — per-season totals, per-hour equivalents, annual salaries for a senior caddie at a famous club — are estimates with no source behind them, and this page carried a set of them until September 2026. They have been taken out rather than restated.

What can be said with the published figure is arithmetic, not a finding: a caddie who carries one bag for one round at Kingsbarns is paid £80 plus whatever gratuity the golfer adds. How many of those rounds make a season depends on the weather, the course's visitor traffic and the caddie, and nobody publishes it.

The tax position

Where a caddie works as a self-employed contractor, as Kingsbarns says its caddies do, the fee and the gratuity are income from that self-employment. Two points from HMRC's own guidance on self-employed National Insurance, read on 27 September 2026:

• Class 4 National Insurance is paid only on profits above a threshold, not on every pound earned.
• Class 2 contributions are now treated as paid for anyone whose profits reach the small profits threshold — they no longer have to pay them — and people below it can choose to pay voluntarily to protect their National Insurance record.

This page previously said a caddie "pays income tax and Class 2 / Class 4 National Insurance on the lot". That was wrong on both counts and has been corrected. Whether any particular caddie is self-employed or a worker depends on their arrangement with the club; gov.uk's employment status guidance sets out the categories, and anyone working out their own position should start there rather than here.

Why this matters to the visitor

The fee on the club's page is what you pay, and at every club above it comes with a gratuity on top. That is the whole of what a visitor needs to budget. The rest — how the man or woman carrying your bag fits the work into a year — is their business, and it is not something a table of invented averages would tell you.

For booking a caddie, see how to hire a caddie in Scotland; for what the round itself is like, using a caddie in Scotland.