US Open: Qualifying
The 128 seats
How the main draw is filled
Every main-draw seat comes in by one of three routes. Only a thin slice is reserved for players who fought through qualifying — and that slice is the whole point of this page.
Who fills the 128 seats?
Every main-draw seat, by route in.
Roughly four seats in five go to direct entries — players already ranked high enough to walk in. About one in eight goes to a qualifier. That thin blue band is the whole subject of this page.
The gauntlet
The qualifying funnel
So how do you win one of those 16 qualifying seats? You survive a 128-player draw for each of the men and women — three matches, win them all, or go home.
Across both draws, 256 players chase 32 seats. Three wins in a row is the whole job.
The climb
The “open” pathway
“Open” doesn’t mean walk-on. It means earnable from the bottom: there is a rung-by-rung path from the entry level of pro tennis all the way to a US Open seat.
- 1ITF World Tennis Tour. The bottom rung — entry-level pro events, a few hundred dollars a title.
- 2ATP / WTA Challenger & 125s. The tier above: win here and your ranking starts to climb.
- 3A tour ranking. Break into roughly the top 250 and the majors come into range.
- 4Qualifying. Ranked about #105–250? You’re in the 128-player qualifying draw.
- 5Main draw. Three qualifying wins — and you’ve earned a seat at the US Open.
No floor you'd expect, no ceiling at all
The age spectrum
There is a hard minimum age and, famously, no maximum — the draw stretches from teenagers to players in their forties.
The floor is real, and the WTA’s Age Eligibility Rule (1995) still caps how much a player under 18 can compete, to guard against burnout. The ceiling is not real at all — there isn’t one. Kathy Horvath’s 1979 mark (14 years, 5 days) has stood for over four decades; at the other end, veterans like Venus keep playing into their forties, though they re-enter on a wild card rather than grinding through qualifying.
The payoff
The Raducanu run
If you want proof the Open is open, it has a name.
This is the answer to “how open is Open?” In 2021, Emma Raducanu arrived at Flushing Meadows ranked 150th in the world and left as champion — three qualifying wins, seven in the main draw, ten matches, not one set dropped. She is the first qualifier, man or woman, to win a Grand Slam singles title in the Open Era, and the first British woman to win a major since Virginia Wade in 1977. At 18. From qualifying.
How it got here
What changed, and when
The tournament that calls itself “Open” has spent decades widening access — on the court and in the bank.
Follow the money
Prize money, flowing down
The purse keeps setting records, and it’s deliberately pushing money toward the early rounds — and the qualifiers.
The purse has nearly doubled since 2019, and the growth is deliberately pointed down the draw — toward the early rounds and the qualifiers, not just the champions (who still take home $5M). Prize figures as of 2026-07-13.
When & where
Qualifying week is free
Qualifying is played on-site during Fan Week, before the main draw begins — and it costs nothing to watch.
Aug 30
Qualifying and all of Fan Week are free and open to the public, on the grounds at the National Tennis Center — one of the genuinely open things in the sport. See exactly where, on the grounds plan →
At a glance
Every draw, and who qualifies
The US Open is really several tournaments at once. Here’s which of them run their own qualifying.
Try it
Could you have qualified?
Punch in a world ranking and see which route into the 2026 US Open it would take.
Cutoffs are approximate and move every year — the entry list locks about six weeks out, and protected rankings and wild cards shift the edges. Illustrative, as of 2026-07-13.
Looking ahead
What’s next for qualifying
As of 2026-07-13, no change to the singles qualifying format is confirmed for 2026. The recent trajectory is the one this page traces: more prize money and more access — a bigger qualifying purse, a free Fan Week — rather than a structural overhaul of how players get in.
The broader sport is debating bigger questions — the length of the calendar, the idea of a “premium” tour, whether Grand Slam draw sizes should change. Any of those could eventually touch qualifying. None of it is settled, and none of it is on the 2026 US Open’s books today. If that changes, this section changes with it.
Compiled from the USTA and usopen.org (dates, prize money, format), the WTA and ATP rulebooks (age eligibility, entry), and the historical record (Guinness World Records and contemporaneous reporting for the Raducanu and Horvath marks). Structural numbers (draw sizes, rounds, seeds) are stable; the drifting figures — prize money, the age records, the future-watch note — were verified on 2026-07-13 and are re-checked on every rebuild. Figures are reference-grade; this is an explainer of the system, not a live results feed.