Pinehurst Southern Pines Nc Peak Occupancy Is Not the Year

Jacob Mishalanie
Aug 8
10 min read

Updated: 13 hours ago

A modern view of a golf course fairway and green in Pinehurst, North Carolina, home to the record-setting 2024 golf tourism economy covered in this post

A Record Year for the Golf Economy

Moore County pulled in $860 million in visitor spending in 2024, a 6.8% increase over 2023, according to the area's destination marketing organization and the North Carolina Department of Commerce's annual visitor spending study. That total ranks Moore County the 10th-largest tourism economy among North Carolina's 100 counties, a notable position for a county of roughly 100,000 residents built around golf rather than a coastal or metro tourism draw.

Tourism directly supported nearly 6,300 jobs in the county in 2024, up 2.7% year over year, making it the county's second-largest employment sector. Local and state tax revenue tied to visitor spending grew as well, with $28.1 million collected locally, up 7.6%, and $32.2 million collected by the state, up 5.4%, translating to an estimated $546.46 in annual tax savings per Moore County resident, more than double the statewide average of $241.

The spending breaks down by category in a way that's worth sitting with if you're marketing a rental here rather than just quoting the headline number. Food and beverage spending led at $259.6 million, up 7.2%, followed by lodging at $213 million, up 5.0%, transportation at $188.5 million, up 5.3%, recreation at $126.4 million, up 9.5%, and retail at $71.6 million, up 9.4%. Every category grew, but recreation and retail, the two categories most tied to a visitor actually engaging with the area beyond a hotel room or rental unit, grew fastest, evidence of a visitor base spending real time and money on the ground rather than just passing through.

What This Number Isn't: County Tourism Spending vs. STR Platform Revenue

It's worth being precise about what an $860 million visitor-spending figure actually measures, because it's easy to conflate with the short-term rental revenue data this cluster's Market Report post already covers, and the two numbers answer genuinely different questions. The $860 million figure is Moore County's total visitor spending across every category, hotels, restaurants, golf-course greens fees, retail, transportation, entertainment, tracked by the state's standard visitor-spending methodology and reported at the county level, not the platform level. It says nothing directly about what a specific Airbnb or Vrbo listing earns; it measures how much money visitors as a whole put into the local economy across every channel, not just short-term rentals.

The Market Report post in this cluster already covers the STR-specific numbers that matter more directly to a host's own P&L: roughly 269 active short-term rentals in Pinehurst as tracked by Host Compliance, an estimated 190 in Southern Pines, and average annual revenue near for 5-plus-bedroom Pinehurst homes. This post's job is different: to establish the scale and trajectory of the broader visitor economy those STR numbers sit inside, because a market pulling in a record $860 million in total visitor spending, with tourism employment growing to nearly 6,300 jobs, is a fundamentally different investment backdrop than a market with flat or declining visitor volume, even where two markets show similar STR revenue figures in isolation.

The U.S. Open Effect: What One Tournament Did to the Local Economy

The clearest driver behind 2024's record spending was a single four-day event. The 2024 U.S. Open, played on Pinehurst No. 2 in June, delivered $242.5 million in economic impact to North Carolina, according to a study the USGA released through Eventcorp. That figure includes $95.7 million in direct visitor spending and an average per-visitor spend of , a number that reflects a golf-tournament crowd's willingness to pay for lodging, dining, and merchandise well above a typical leisure traveler's baseline. The tournament also supported more than 1,800 jobs across the region during the event window.

That $242.5 million figure wasn't just a big number in isolation. It surpassed the combined economic impact of the 2014 U.S. Open and U.S. Women's Open, which were played in back-to-back weeks at Pinehurst and marked the last time both national championships were held there before 2024. Part of that growth traces to the same year's opening of Golf House Pinehurst, the USGA's new seven-acre campus that includes the relocated World Golf Hall of Fame, moved back from its former home in St. Augustine, Florida. The Hall of Fame's return gave the 2024 event a permanent, headquarters-caliber draw the 2014 doubleheader didn't have, and it's now a standing, year-round visitor attraction in its own right, not just a tournament-week fixture.

Golf's Statewide Economic Footprint in North Carolina

Pinehurst's tournament-driven surge sits inside a larger statewide pattern. Golf generates an estimated $2.3 billion in direct spending across North Carolina annually, supporting roughly 53,000 jobs and a combined annual payroll impact of $1.3 billion, according to golf-industry economic impact research. Moore County's outsized role in that statewide total, home to the sport's oldest resort community in the American South and now a permanent USGA campus, in a county of roughly 100,000 residents, helps explain why this market's visitor economy behaves differently from a typical small county's tourism base. It's carrying a disproportionate share of a multibillion-dollar state industry relative to its population.

How Pinehurst's Tourism Surge Compares to Other Southeast Golf Markets

Pinehurst's 2024 numbers are worth sizing up against other Southeast golf and second-home destinations, not because the comparison changes the investment case here, but because it helps calibrate how unusual a $242.5 million single-event impact actually is. Most Southeast golf-adjacent short-term rental markets rely on a season-long draw, spring and fall shoulder seasons, a steady trickle of golf-group bookings, rather than a single four-day event capable of moving a county's entire annual visitor-spending total by a meaningful percentage. Pinehurst's position as a permanent USGA Anchor Site, hosting the U.S. Open on a fixed, recurring schedule through 2047, is a structural advantage a market without a similar anchor tenant simply doesn't have: it converts what would otherwise be one-off tournament luck into a predictable, plannable demand calendar a host can actually build pricing strategy around years in advance.

That predictability is also what separates reading this county's tourism data from reading a market that just happened to have a good year. A one-time festival or a single celebrity wedding can produce a temporary visitor-spending spike anywhere; a scheduled, decades-out tournament calendar tied to a market's only Anchor Site designation is a structurally different, and structurally more investable, kind of demand driver, and it's the specific reason this post treats Pinehurst's tourism numbers as a genuine planning input rather than a one-off headline.

From Tournament Spending to STR Demand: What This Means for Hosts

The mechanism connecting a $242.5 million tournament economic-impact figure to an individual host's booking calendar is straightforward even without a Pinehurst-specific STR occupancy study to cite directly: golf's major championships draw a national and international audience into a small village with a genuinely limited hotel base, and that overflow demand has to land somewhere. A tournament week with an average per-visitor spend of , more than double a typical leisure traveler's outlay, is a week where a well-positioned short-term rental has real pricing power. That's not because of one confirmed STR-specific booking statistic, but because that's exactly the kind of high-willingness-to-pay demand short-term rentals in golf-tournament towns exist to absorb.

For a host, the practical implication is less about the U.S. Open itself, which returns to Pinehurst on a fixed and rare schedule, 2029, 2035, 2041, and 2047, as one of the USGA's Anchor Sites, and more about booking-window behavior in the run-up to any major event on that calendar. A national championship draws golf fans who plan trips months, sometimes over a year, in advance, a meaningfully different booking pattern than the shorter lead times this cluster's guest-persona post describes for typical golf-group and leisure travelers. A host who owns or manages property near Pinehurst No. 2 specifically should treat 2029's back-to-back U.S. Open and U.S. Women's Open, scheduled for mid-June that year, as a demand event worth pricing and calendar-planning for well ahead of the standard booking curve, not something to handle reactively once demand is already visible on the booking platform.

This is also where the distinction between county tourism spending and STR platform revenue, covered above, pays off for a host. A market showing broad-based, multi-category visitor spending growth, not just a lodging spike, is a market where demand is durable enough to support a rental business between major tournaments too, not just during them. The 9.5% growth in recreation spending and 9.4% growth in retail spending alongside lodging growth suggests visitors are engaging with the area's golf courses, the Village of Pinehurst's shops, and Southern Pines' Broad Street corridor at growing rates independent of any single event, which is the kind of steady demand base a host actually wants underneath a tournament-driven spike, rather than a market that only shows up in the numbers once every few years.

Reading County-Level Tourism Data Without Overreading It

A word of caution belongs here too. County-level visitor-spending data, however impressive, is not a substitute for property-specific research before a purchase or a pricing decision. The $860 million figure aggregates every visitor category across Moore County, golf tourists, weekend leisure travelers, business visitors, and day-trippers who never book a room at all, and it can't be cleanly broken down into the share attributable to short-term rental guests specifically versus hotel guests, second-home owners, or day visitors. A host or buyer using this data should treat it as evidence of a genuinely growing, resilient visitor economy worth investing in, not as a stand-in for STR-specific occupancy or revenue projections, which this cluster's Market Report post already covers with numbers sourced at that level.

The same caution applies to the U.S. Open's $242.5 million figure. That number reflects the tournament's total economic footprint, including sponsorship activity, media operations, and hospitality spending well beyond individual traveler lodging, not a clean per-rental revenue multiplier a host can apply directly to a single property's tournament-week rate. What it does confirm reliably is direction and scale: this is a market where a major event can move the county's entire annual visitor-spending total meaningfully, and that's a useful signal for how seriously to take demand planning around future scheduled events, even without a precise dollar figure tying tournament spending to any one listing's tournament-week revenue.

Frequently Asked Questions

How much did visitor spending total in Moore County, NC in 2024?

Moore County generated $860 million in visitor spending in 2024, a 6.8% increase over 2023, ranking it the 10th-largest tourism economy among North Carolina's 100 counties. That's a notable position for a county of roughly 100,000 residents built around golf rather than a coastal or metro tourism draw.

How much economic impact did the 2024 U.S. Open have on North Carolina?

The 2024 U.S. Open, played on Pinehurst No. 2 in June, delivered $242.5 million in economic impact statewide, including $95.7 million in direct visitor spending, and supported more than 1,800 jobs across the region during the event window. That figure surpassed the combined economic impact of the 2014 U.S. Open and U.S. Women's Open, the last time both national championships were held at Pinehurst before 2024.

Is county tourism spending the same thing as short-term rental revenue?

No. County-level visitor spending measures total tourist spending across every category, lodging, food, retail, recreation, and transportation, at the county level, not platform-specific STR booking revenue. This cluster's Market Report post covers the STR-specific figures that matter more directly to a host's own P&L, like active listing counts and average revenue for larger Pinehurst homes.

When does the U.S. Open return to Pinehurst?

Pinehurst is a USGA Anchor Site and is scheduled to host the U.S. Open again in 2029, 2035, 2041, and 2047. The 2029 event is a back-to-back men's and women's U.S. Open, scheduled for mid-June that year, and a host near Pinehurst No. 2 should treat it as a demand event worth pricing and calendar-planning for well ahead of the standard booking curve.

How many jobs does tourism support in Moore County?

Tourism directly supported nearly 6,300 jobs in Moore County in 2024, up 2.7% year over year, making it the county's second-largest employment sector. That scale helps explain why this market's visitor economy behaves differently from a typical small county's tourism base.

What is Golf House Pinehurst?

Golf House Pinehurst is the USGA's seven-acre campus that opened in 2024 near Pinehurst Resort's main clubhouse, including the relocated World Golf Hall of Fame moved back from its former home in St. Augustine, Florida. It's a factor behind 2024's record visitor-spending numbers and is now a standing, year-round visitor attraction in its own right, not just a tournament-week fixture.

How is Pinehurst's tourism surge different from other Southeast golf markets?

Most Southeast golf-adjacent short-term rental markets rely on a season-long draw, spring and fall shoulder seasons and a steady trickle of golf-group bookings, rather than a single four-day event capable of moving a county's entire annual visitor-spending total by a meaningful percentage. Pinehurst's status as a permanent USGA Anchor Site, hosting the U.S. Open on a fixed, recurring schedule through 2047, converts what would otherwise be one-off tournament luck into a predictable, plannable demand calendar.

Which visitor spending categories grew fastest in Moore County in 2024?

Recreation spending grew 9.5% to $126.4 million and retail spending grew 9.4% to $71.6 million, the two fastest-growing categories and the ones most tied to a visitor actually engaging with the area beyond a hotel room or rental unit. Food and beverage led in total dollars at $259.6 million, followed by lodging at $213 million and transportation at $188.5 million, with every category showing growth.

Should a host rely on county tourism data instead of property-specific research?

No. County-level visitor-spending data is not a substitute for property-specific research before a purchase or a pricing decision, since the $860 million figure aggregates every visitor category, golf tourists, weekend leisure travelers, business visitors, and day-trippers, and cannot be cleanly broken down by short-term rental guests specifically. It should be treated as evidence of a genuinely growing, resilient visitor economy worth investing in, not as a stand-in for STR-specific occupancy or revenue projections.

What does golf contribute to North Carolina's economy statewide?

Golf generates an estimated $2.3 billion in direct spending across North Carolina annually, supporting roughly 53,000 jobs and a combined annual payroll impact of $1.3 billion. Moore County, home to the sport's oldest resort community in the American South and now a permanent USGA campus, carries a disproportionate share of that statewide total relative to its roughly 100,000 residents.

Work with Crest & Cove Creative

Pinehurst and Southern Pines hosts who price off one peak golf weekend miss the visitor-spending data showing how the rest of the year actually books, and that gap shows up as empty shoulder-season calendars.

We help Pinehurst and Southern Pines hosts turn visitor-spending and occupancy data into listing copy and pricing that reflects the full year, not just peak week. Send us your current calendar and we will point out the gaps worth fixing.

Reach out at crestcove.co or (256) 998-7502.