GAO-19-178, “Presidential Travel: Secret Service and DOD Need to Ensure That Expenditure Reports Are Prepared and Submitted to Congress,” was issued by the U.S. Government Accountability Office on Jan. 17, 2019 (publicly released Feb. 5, 2019). It examined four presidential trips to Mar-a-Lago between Feb. 3 – March 5, 2017 and found federal agencies spent about $13.6 million — roughly $3.4 million per trip.
GAO's total is a partial one — the real cost runs higher.
“Operating” = aircraft, vessels and vehicles; “Travel” = temporary duty (lodging, per diem) for supporting staff. Figures rounded by GAO; salaries and classified costs excluded.
The single largest line is Air Force One. The modified Boeing 747 (VC-25A) costs about $273,063 per flight hour to operate. A round trip from Joint Base Andrews to Palm Beach runs roughly 4 hours in the air — about $1.1 million in aircraft costs alone, before a single Secret Service agent, support plane, or Coast Guard vessel is counted.
GAO has not published — and as of early 2025 had no work underway on — a cost study of any 47th-term trip. Two of its three GAO-19-178 recommendations, both directed at the Department of Defense to fix the reporting gaps that made costs hard to track, remain open years later. The result: no official ledger of current-term golf costs, only the 2019 benchmark and the public record of where the President has travelled.
Watchdogs and reporters estimate second-term totals by multiplying GAO's verified $3.4 million-per-trip figure by the number of trips since taken. Applying that method to the trips this site has logged — and, to stay conservative, counting only the Florida trips GAO actually priced — gives the figure at left.
This is a floor, not a total. It excludes 11 Bedminster, N.J. trips and 1 Scotland trip — the latter far costlier per trip — along with Sterling, Va. day trips and every expense GAO itself left out. Distinct trips are formed by clustering golf days within 4 days of each other, so multiple rounds on a single Mar-a-Lago stay count as one air round-trip, not several.
An estimate built on GAO's benchmark, not an official GAO number. Published media tallies that count every property and downstream cost range higher — into the nine figures.