From November to March the hotels beside the Old Course halve their rates, the green fee does the same, the students fill the pubs and the light at four o'clock is the best of the year. The best-value week in Scottish golf is also the best week in St Andrews.
Last updated 23 September 2026. Rates are indicative and move; we revise this piece each autumn.
There is a version of St Andrews that most visitors never see, because they come in July. It starts in the first week of November, when the last of the American tour groups has flown home and the Links Trust puts the winter mats out, and it runs until the clocks change in March. The town does not close. The university is in full term, so the pubs and the cafés are busier than in August. The Old Course is open, at half the price, and you can get on it. The fires are lit in the Jigger and Bar 1924 and the Road Hole Bar. And the hotels — the same rooms, the same view of the seventeenth, the same rooftop hot tub — cost roughly what a mid-range chain charges in Edinburgh in June.
Nobody is going to tell you this in a brochure, because brochures are written for summer. But if you would rather have the place than the weather, the quiet season is when St Andrews is at its best, and it is not close.
What the hotels cost
The figures below are from public rate searches for a standard double, midweek, and will move with demand; treat them as the shape of the thing rather than a quote, and always book direct, because the hotels here keep their best winter rates for their own websites.
The Old Course Hotel, which asks from around £700 a night in June and July, drops to around £300 from November; some winter weeks go lower, and the spa and the Jigger are exactly as they were. Rusacks, on the eighteenth, goes from around £600 in summer to around £300 in winter, and the balcony rooms over the fairway, unbookable in July, sit empty on a Tuesday in February. Hotel du Vin on the Scores runs from around £300 to around £150, which for a sea-view room two minutes from the first tee is the best-value bed in the town. Rufflets, out among its gardens, from around £250 to around £160 with breakfast, and the fire in Bar 1924 lit all day. Add dinner, bed and breakfast packages, which most of them run from November, and a two-night winter stay at a hotel you could not afford in summer costs about what one summer night does.
What the golf costs
The Links Trust prices the Old Course in three bands: high season from mid-April to mid-October, a fortnight of shoulder rates at the end of October, and a low season from the start of November to the end of March at roughly half the summer fee. The other six courses follow the same pattern. Winter golf in St Andrews means fairway mats — you carry a small mat and play your fairway shots off it, to protect the turf — and it means the greens are slower and the wind has more to say; it does not mean temporary greens, and it does not mean a lesser course. The ballot, which in July is a lottery you enter with your fingers crossed, is in January something you win most days you try. Single golfers who turn up at the starter's hut at first light in February usually get out.
Two cautions. The Old Course closes for a fortnight or so of maintenance in the depths of winter, and the Links publishes the dates each autumn; check before you book. And daylight is the real constraint: in December the sun is up from around half past eight until half past three, which is one round, started early, and then the pub.
What you get
Light, first. The winter sun in St Andrews never climbs high; it comes in low off the sea all day, and from two o'clock onward the whole town — the sandstone of the Scores, the cathedral gables, the R&A clubhouse — turns the colour of a good whisky. Photographers know this; that is why the postcards are winter pictures. Then the town itself. The students are here from September to May, and a Sunday in November with the red gowns on the pier, the cafés full and the West Sands empty is the St Andrews that people who live here would choose. The restaurants that need a week's notice in July take walk-ins. The museum, the spa, the beach sauna and the cathedral tower are all open and all quiet. The East Neuk villages, twenty minutes away, are back to being fishing villages.
And the weather is not what you fear. Fife is the driest corner of Scotland, sheltered by the hills to the west; St Andrews gets less rain than Edinburgh and far less than the west coast, and a cold, bright, still day in January on the West Sands is as fine a day as the town produces. It will also, some days, blow a gale off the North Sea with rain in it. That is what the fires are for.
"If you would rather have the place than the weather, the quiet season is when St Andrews is at its best."
When exactly
The first half of November is the sweet spot: winter rates in, autumn colour still on the trees along the Lade Braes, seven hours of light, the students in and the Christmas lights not yet. Late January and February are the coldest, clearest and cheapest, and the weeks the hotels will do most to fill. The last fortnight of March gives you spring light and low-season golf together, before the rates step up in April. Avoid the week between Christmas and New Year, when rates go back to summer levels for Hogmanay, and the university's graduation weeks, which are in June and outside this season anyway.
Who it is for
The golfer who wants to play the Old Course rather than watch other people play it. The couple who want the Old Course Hotel or Rusacks for the view and the spa and are not paying July money for it. Anyone who has been in summer and wants to see the town it actually is. And anyone whose idea of a good weekend involves a beach walk, a fire, a long lunch and an early night, which in the quiet season is the whole itinerary.
It is not for anyone who needs eight hours of daylight, the terrace at 18 or the guarantee of a dry round. And it is not for the family with school-age children, who are in school.
The rates, in one place
Old Course Hotel: from around £700 (summer) to around £300 (November–March).
Rusacks: from around £600 to around £300.
Hotel du Vin: from around £300 to around £150.
Rufflets: from around £250 to around £160, breakfast included.
Old Course green fee: high season roughly double the low-season rate; low season 1 November to 31 March. Other Links courses similar.
Book direct, midweek, and ask about dinner, bed and breakfast.
Read next
The Old Course Hotel · Rusacks · Hotel du Vin · Rufflets · Kohler Waters Spa · Hot box, cold sea · The red gowns of St Andrews · St Andrews Links, more than the home of golf · A perfect weekend in St Andrews
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