The Demographic Sustainability dimension of your GMLB report examines the age profile of your active membership. It looks beyond how many members you have and asks a different question: given who your members are and how old they are, what does the pipeline of future membership look like?
A club can have strong total membership today and still be facing a structural problem that is not yet visible in the headline numbers. If a disproportionate share of the membership is in older age groups, the club is more exposed to natural attrition — members retiring from the game, reducing participation, or passing away — than a club with a more evenly distributed age profile. Demographic Sustainability measures that exposure directly.
Age profile of your membership
Your report shows how the active membership is distributed across age bands. The benchmark distribution reflects the mix typically seen across clubs in the GMLB dataset, and your club's distribution is shown alongside it.
The key indicator is the proportion of members aged 70 and over. This is the age band that drives the highest rates of natural attrition — not through dissatisfaction with the club, but through the physical and lifestyle changes that accompany later life. A club with a high concentration in this band will face a predictable and unavoidable wave of leavers in the coming years that it cannot influence through better onboarding or engagement.
One in four members in the highest natural-attrition age band.
39 percentage points above benchmark. Nearly two-thirds of the membership is in the highest natural-attrition band.
A 64% concentration in the 70+ age band means that the majority of your membership is in the stage of life where departure rates are driven by factors outside the club's control. That changes the nature of the retention challenge entirely — and it makes the pipeline of younger members significantly more important than the headline membership total suggests.
Retention by age band
Age matters not only for natural attrition but for early-tenure retention as well. Younger members — those in the 18–39 age band — show meaningfully different retention patterns from the overall membership, and understanding those patterns is part of the Demographic Sustainability picture.
36-month retention · By age group
Only 16% of members who joined in the 18–39 age band are still active at 36 months — significantly below the overall figure.
This lower retention rate for younger joiners creates a compounding challenge. The club needs younger members most — they are the long-term pipeline that will replace the existing older membership over time. But the group the club most needs to retain is the group it is currently least effective at keeping past the 36-month mark.
Understanding why the 18–39 retention rate is lower is beyond the scope of the benchmark analysis, but the pattern is consistent with broader research on younger golfer behaviour — time pressure, competing demands, and a lower level of deep club integration in the early years all contribute. What the report flags is the scale of the gap and its implications for the club's long-term age profile.
What an ageing profile means over time
A membership that is heavily weighted toward older age groups is not simply a current-year concern. It represents a structural shift in the future flow of the membership. As the proportion of 70+ members rises, the volume of natural leavers increases each year — and the recruitment pipeline has to work harder simply to maintain current total membership, let alone grow it.
A club in this position needs both to recruit more younger members and to retain them at a higher rate than the current pattern suggests. Neither is straightforward. But the demographic data makes the scale of the challenge visible — which is the starting point for addressing it.
The risk rating
The Demographic Sustainability risk rating reflects the severity of the age skew, how far the 70+ concentration sits above benchmark, and what the 36-month retention rate for younger joiners suggests about the pipeline's strength.
A Strong rating indicates the age distribution is broadly in line with benchmark and younger members are being retained at rates sufficient to sustain the future age profile.
A Moderate-Elevated or High rating — which typically applies when 70+ concentration is significantly above benchmark and younger-cohort retention is materially below the overall rate — indicates a structural pipeline challenge. The club's membership numbers today do not reflect the full scale of the leavers it will face in the coming years, and the current younger-member pipeline is not sufficient to replace them at the required rate.
Demographic Sustainability connects directly to the final dimension of the GMLB report: the Gender Pipeline — which looks at the female share of the membership and what it means for the breadth and resilience of the club's long-term recruitment base.