The US Open Golf Championship is an annual mens golf tournament staged by the US Open Golf Association each June. It is one of the four major championships in mens golf and is on the official schedule of both the PGA TOUR and the European Tour. The US Open Golf is staged at a variety of courses, and they are usually set up in such a way that low scoring is very difficult and there is a premium on accurate driving.

The first US Open Golf Mens Championship was played on October 4, 1895 on a nine-hole course in Newport, Rhode Island. It was a thirty-six hole competition and was played in a single day. Ten professionals and one amateur entered. The winner was a 21-year-old Englishman named Horace Rawlins who had arrived in the U.S. in January that year to take up a position at the host club. He received $150 cash out of a prize fund of $325, plus a $50 gold medal; his club received the Open Championship Cup trophy, which was presented by the USGA. In the beginning, the tournament was dominated by experienced British players until 1911 when John J. McDermott became the first native-born American winner. American golfers soon began to win regularly and the tournament evolved to become one of the four majors. Throughout the modern history of the competition the title has been won almost exclusively by players from the United States. Since 1950, players from only four nations other than the United States have won the championship, most notably South Africa, which has won five times since 1965.

Around one half of the field of the US Open Golf is made up of players who are fully exempt from qualifying. There are seventeen full exemption categories, including winners of the US Open Golf for the last ten years and the other three majors for the last five years, the top 30 from the previous years PGA Tour money list, the top 15 from the previous years European Tour money list, and the top 50 in the Official World Golf Rankings as of two weeks before the tournament.