What is the Charles Schwab Cup Championship?
The 50-and-over tour ends its year the way the regular tour ends its own: with a small field, no cut, and a season-long trophy settled on the final green. PGA Tour Champions brings the top 36 players in its Charles Schwab Cup standings to Phoenix Country Club, the 1899 club at 7th Street and Thomas Road in central Phoenix, for 72 holes in the second week of November with a $3 million purse. The 2026 championship is November 12–15.
The course is the oldest tournament ground in the state. Phoenix Country Club hosted the Phoenix Open 42 times between 1932 and 1986, before the Thunderbirds moved it to the TPC in Scottsdale. The championship has been here since 2017, after four editions on the Cochise course at Desert Mountain in far north Scottsdale (2012, 2014–2016), and the tour has it signed through 2032.
Who comes: the whole season’s leaderboard. Stewart Cink won in 2025 at 20 under to take both the tournament and the Cup; before him came Bernhard Langer, Steven Alker, Pádraig Harrington and Phil Mickelson. Tickets are the cheapest in Valley tournament golf: $35 a day or $90 for the week at early-bird prices in 2026, kids 15 and under free. From Old Town it is twenty minutes west on Indian School Road, and in a crowded November it is the sports ticket worth adding.
How to do it
Tickets. Buy in September or October through the official site; the early-bird grounds price was $35 a day and $90 for the week in 2026, rising closer to the event. The Oasis at the 15th tee and 17th green, $63 a day or $172 for the week, is the value upgrade: shade, a bar, three holes in sight. Kids 15 and under walk in free with an adult; military members and veterans get up to two free grounds tickets a day and a Patriots’ Outpost on the 13th green.
Which day. Thursday is a tournament round with a practice-round crowd, the best day to follow one group for 18 holes. Sunday is the Cup, when the points math can make the back nine a two-leaderboard afternoon. Golf Channel’s window has been 3 to 5 p.m., so the leaders go off around noon and the course is quiet before 10.
Getting there. The club is at 2901 N 7th Street, in a residential grid with no public lots, so plan on the tournament’s free shuttle, which in recent years has run from Arizona Veterans Memorial Coliseum at the state fairgrounds, 19th Avenue and McDowell Road. From Scottsdale, McDowell or Indian School Road west is direct; the 202 and State Route 51 are the freeway options and neither saves much. Gates have opened at 10 a.m.
On the course. The 15th is a par 3 wrapped by the Oasis and the Champions Club, the 17th green sits beside it, and the 18th green has public seating; stand there and you see three finishes without walking. The course is flat and walkable; nothing is more than ten minutes from the clubhouse.
Weather. Mid-November in central Phoenix is 55 at the gates and 78 at 3 p.m.: a light jacket, then sunscreen and a hat. The club is private; for public courses to play the same week, see golf without a membership.
From Puerto Rico to Desert Mountain to 7th Street
The senior tour’s championship began in 1990 at Dorado Beach in Puerto Rico and moved through Myrtle Beach, Oklahoma City and Sonoma, picking up the Charles Schwab Cup name with the season-long points race. From 2010 it alternated between TPC Harding Park in San Francisco and Arizona: in 2012 it came to the Cochise course at Desert Mountain, the gated Nicklaus development in far north Scottsdale that had hosted The Tradition from 1989 to 2001. Tom Lehman, a Scottsdale resident, won by six at 22 under. After one more year at Harding Park the tour returned to Cochise for 2014, 2015 and 2016: Tom Pernice Jr. and Billy Andrade in playoffs, then Paul Goydos in an edition rain cut to 54 holes.
Desert Mountain was a fine course and a hard sell: forty minutes from downtown behind a gate, with November weather in the high desert that cut 2016 to 54 holes. In 2017 the tour moved the finale to Phoenix Country Club, a parkland course redesigned by Lehman and John Fought in 2002 that had not hosted a tour event since the 1986 Phoenix Open. The pandemic year of 2020 merged two seasons into one, so no Cup was awarded, and the Phoenix stop ran as a 54-hole, 81-player event that Kevin Sutherland won for the second time. Then the parade: Mickelson in 2021, Harrington’s 257 in 2022, Alker, Langer at 67, and Cink in 2025, the fourth player after Tom Watson, Lehman and Sutherland to win the tournament and the Cup in the same week. In 2024 the tour extended the club’s contract through 2032.
Why this guide follows it across the line
Phoenix Country Club is where Scottsdale’s biggest event was born. The Phoenix Open started here in 1932, and the Thunderbirds ran it here, on and off, through 1986, then carried it to the new TPC Scottsdale and built the loudest tournament in golf. Walking the 15th in November is walking the course where the Open was a quiet parkland event, which is exactly what the Schwab Cup Championship is: the same institution at a different volume.
The Scottsdale chapter matters too. Desert Mountain gave the championship four editions and a Scottsdale winner, and the tour’s move to a 1899 city course says where tournament golf wants to live now: near the fans and the freeway, not behind a gate. Buy the $90 week, take the shuttle, and watch the players you grew up with finish their season on the state’s oldest fairways.