What is launch angle in golf?

The vertical angle at which the ball leaves the club face at impact.

Launch angle, defined

Launch angle is the vertical angle, measured against the horizon, at which the ball leaves the clubface, expressed in degrees. A drive launched at 13 degrees left the face on a path 13 degrees above level ground.

It is not the loft stamped on the club. Loft is a static number ground into the head at the factory. Launch angle is the result of what actually happened at impact: the loft the club was delivering at that moment, where on the face you struck it, and whether the club was travelling up or down.

What sets it

• Dynamic loft. The loft the face presents at impact, which moves with shaft lean, wrist angles and ball position.
• Angle of attack. A club moving upward adds launch. A club moving downward removes it.
• Strike location. High on the face tends to launch higher and spin less. Low on the face does the reverse.
• Tee height. Where the ball sits decides both where on the face you catch it and where in the arc you catch it.

Why the tee is on that list

Tee height is the only item there you can set exactly, before you swing, every time. The other three are swing outputs that vary shot to shot. If the tee varies too, you have four moving parts instead of three and no way to tell which one moved.

That is the practical case for a fixed-height tee in indoor practice. It is not that one height is magic. It is that an unrepeatable height contaminates every launch number you record.

Higher is not better

Carry distance comes from ball speed, launch angle and spin working together, and each club has a window where that combination is efficient. Push launch too high, usually by adding loft at impact, and spin normally falls at the same time. The ball climbs, hangs, and lands short of what the clubhead speed should produce.

The common amateur pattern with a driver is launching too low with too much spin. The common pattern with irons off a mat is the opposite: too high with too little spin, often because the ball is sitting on a tee doing work the swing should be doing.

Reading it on a launch monitor

Launch angle is among the more reliably reported numbers on consumer devices, because it is usually observed directly rather than inferred. Treat a large session-to-session jump as a sign that something physical changed: the ball, the mat, the lie or the tee. Swing changes tend to move launch gradually. Setup changes move it at once.