US Open Qualifying: The Free Week Where Careers Are Decided

Next Monday morning, while the best players in the world are still folding shirts into suitcases in Cincinnati, a gate will swing open in Queens and anybody who wants to walk through it can do so for nothing. No ticket. No resale site. No hundred-dollar seat in the upper bowl of a stadium so big the players look like commas. Just a free pass on your phone, a turnstile, and twenty-odd courts of professional tennis being played by people whose entire year depends on the next two hours.

This is the part of the US Open almost nobody talks about, and it is the part that regular fans fall in love with hardest. The main draw begins on Sunday 30 August. Before that comes Fan Week, running from Sunday 23 August to Saturday 29 August at the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center, and inside it sits the qualifying tournament: five days, hundreds of matches, and thirty-two life-altering places in a draw that most of the players involved have never made.

If you have ever wanted to see top-level tennis without the ticketing panic, this is the week. And if you have ever wondered where the fairytales come from, this is also where they come from.

The week the tournament pretends it has not started

Officially, the 2026 US Open runs from Sunday 23 August to Sunday 13 September. Unofficially, the first seven days are a different event with a different mood. The grounds are open, the food village is trading, the practice courts are busy, and the gates cost nothing. All you need is a free Fan Access Pass through the US Open app if you are eighteen or over. Children do not need one at all.

Fan Week has grown into a proper programme rather than a warm-up. Arthur Ashe Kids' Day has moved to Sunday 23 August this year as the opening act, with programming stretched from half past nine in the morning until six in the evening and a stadium show inside Arthur Ashe at eleven. On Monday 24 August, the qualifying rounds of the reimagined mixed doubles championship take place in the Grandstand, also free to walk into. On Tuesday 25 August, Roger Federer comes back to Flushing Meadows for an exhibition under the Ashe lights, partnering Andy Roddick against Andre Agassi and John McEnroe, though that one needs a separate ticket.

Those are the headline attractions, and they are lovely. But they are not the reason to go. The reason to go is spread across the outside courts from Monday to Friday, where the singles qualifying draws are played out in front of crowds small enough that you can hear a player's breathing between points.

What qualifying actually is

The mechanics are simple and the stakes are not.

Each singles main draw at a Grand Slam holds 128 players. Most of those places go to the highest-ranked entrants: for the 2026 US Open, direct entry into the main draw ran down to about No. 101 in the men's rankings and No. 102 in the women's, based on the ranking lists from 20 July. A batch of wild cards is handed out by the organisers. What is left over, sixteen places in each draw, is decided on court.

So a separate 128-player tournament is staged for each gender in the week before. Three rounds, best of three sets throughout, no five-set marathons even on the men's side. Win three matches and you are a qualifier with a place in the main draw and a locker in the same building as the champion. Lose one and you fly home.

Two hundred and fifty-six players arrive in New York for those thirty-two spots. Which means that by Friday evening, two hundred and twenty-four of them have lost. That ratio is the whole emotional engine of the week. Every court you stop at has somebody on it who is about to have the best month of their career, and somebody who is about to have a very quiet flight.

The field itself is a strange and wonderful cross-section. There are former top-fifty players sliding down the rankings and trying to arrest the fall. There are twenty-two-year-olds from the Challenger circuit who have never played in front of more than two hundred people. There are teenagers on wild cards. There are veterans in their thirties who have done this fifteen times and know exactly which court has the tricky afternoon shadow.

The arithmetic that makes it matter

Tennis prize money is discussed in the language of champions, which hides how the sport actually works for the other ninety-five per cent. Qualifying week is where you see the real numbers.

At the 2025 US Open, the payouts for the qualifying rounds ran to $27,500 for losing in the first round, $41,800 for losing in the second and $57,200 for falling at the last hurdle. Come through all three and you are into a main draw where simply losing your opening match was worth $110,000. The USTA confirms each year's full breakdown in the weeks before the tournament, and the 2026 scale is expected to sit at or above those figures. Last year's total purse was a record $90 million, with $5 million to each singles champion.

Now put that against the cost of being a professional tennis player outside the elite. Flights, hotels, stringing, physio, a coach who eats and sleeps somewhere too. Players ranked between 150 and 300 in the world routinely finish a season having earned less than they spent. That is not a hard-luck story, it is arithmetic, and it is why a first-round qualifying cheque in New York can be the difference between a coach travelling with you next season and a coach staying home.

It also explains something you will notice immediately if you go. The tennis in qualifying is not loose or exhibition-flavoured. It is tighter and more desperate than anything you will see in the first week of the main draw. Nobody in that draw is playing for a ranking point. They are playing for their year.

There is a related detail that only becomes obvious once you know it. Ranking points are awarded for main-draw wins, not qualifying wins, so a player who comes through three matches to qualify and then loses in the first round officially gained almost nothing that week except money and a memory. Which is precisely why the money matters so much.

The week that made Emma Raducanu

Every so often, the qualifying draw produces something the sport cannot quite believe.

In 2021, an eighteen-year-old ranked No. 150 in the world turned up at Flushing Meadows to play qualifying. Emma Raducanu won three matches on the outside courts that week to get into the main draw. She then won seven more, beating eleventh seed Belinda Bencic in the quarter-finals and seventeenth seed Maria Sakkari in the semi-finals, before taking the final 6-4, 6-3 against Leylah Fernandez on 11 September.

Ten matches. Not a single set dropped. She remains the only qualifier, male or female, to have won a Grand Slam singles title in the Open era, and one of the most extraordinary details of that fortnight is how few people watched the first three wins. There were no cameras on most of it. The people who saw Raducanu qualify in 2021 saw it because they wandered past a court.

Her career since has been a long argument with injury, expectation and the British press, and we followed her latest chapter in our look at Raducanu, the grass season and the shadow of that New York fairytale. But the 2021 run remains the perfect advertisement for a Tuesday afternoon on Court 11. You genuinely do not know what you are looking at.

Leandro Riedi and the year that turned

Last summer produced a story almost as good, and one that says even more about what this week costs.

Leandro Riedi hurt his knee during a second-round qualifying match at the 2024 US Open. Imaging found a serious problem with a small bone. He had surgery in September, then hurt the same knee again in practice the following January and needed a second operation. A player who had reached a career high of No. 117 in the world came back ranked No. 435.

He arrived at the 2025 US Open with no main-draw entry and no reason to expect anything. He came through qualifying, beat the world No. 64 Pedro Martinez, and then beat the nineteenth seed Francisco Cerundolo from two sets down, 3-6, 4-6, 6-4, 6-4, 6-2, on a night that Flushing Meadows will remember for a while. He reached the fourth round before Alex de Minaur ended it. The $237,000 he banked for reaching the third round alone was close to half of everything he had earned in his entire career to that point.

Riedi was one of five qualifiers to reach the third round of the men's singles at that tournament, a total that matched the Open-era record for the event set in 1984 and equalled again in 2021. Five men who had spent the previous week on the outside courts, in the heat, in front of nobody, and who were suddenly playing in the second week's build-up with the cameras on.

There is a companion category of miracle here too, the lucky loser: the player who loses in the final qualifying round and gets waved into the main draw anyway when somebody withdraws. It sounds like a technicality. It has produced some of the sport's most improbable runs, including the one we wrote about at Roland Garros this year, Jesper de Jong and the lucky loser run that would not stop.

Who is chasing it this year

The 2026 qualifying field will not be published in full until the draw is made, but a few threads are already worth watching.

Two sixteen-year-olds have been given wild cards into qualifying: Jordan Lee, from Orlando, who won the Wimbledon boys' singles title in July, and Cruz Hewitt, son of the 2001 US Open champion Lleyton Hewitt, whom Lee beat in that final on 12 July. Watching a teenager play his first professional qualifying match at a major, with a famous surname or without one, is one of the more affecting things you can do with a free afternoon.

There will also be a cluster of names you half-recognise from three or four years ago, players who were seeded at majors once and now have to earn their way back in. That is the melancholy layer of qualifying week and the one that tends to catch people off guard. The same draw contains a kid trying to arrive and a thirty-two-year-old trying not to leave.

Meanwhile the top of the sport is somewhere else entirely. The Cincinnati Open finishes on Sunday 23 August, and the seeded players will drift into New York over the following days, practising in the afternoons on courts you can stand beside. That overlap is part of why Fan Week is such good value: the qualifiers are playing for their lives on one side of the site while the champions are hitting serves in front of forty people on the other.

What it feels like out there

Nobody prepares you for how small it all is.

The US Open is the biggest, loudest, most commercial event in tennis. Arthur Ashe Stadium seats close to twenty-four thousand people. But qualifying happens on the outside courts, where there are a few rows of bleachers, a chair umpire, a couple of ball kids and a fence. You can stand close enough to hear a coach muttering in Spanish, a player talking to himself in Czech, the specific ugly noise a frame makes when somebody shanks a forehand.

You will see things that never make television. A player arguing with nobody. A mother in the third row who cannot watch. Two competitors who trained together as juniors playing for the same spot and refusing to look at each other at the change of ends. The scoreboard on a qualifying court is a small electronic box, and when the last point goes, there is no ceremony at all. Someone packs a bag and walks off into the rest of their life.

The grounds during Fan Week are also, frankly, a much nicer place to be than during the tournament proper. The queues are shorter. You can move. You can sit down. There is no crush at the food village, no scrum on the walkway between Ashe and Armstrong. You wander, you drift, you follow the sound of a good rally.

How to actually do it

If you can get to New York, the practical version is short. Download the US Open app, claim the free Fan Access Pass, and take the 7 train to Mets-Willets Point, which drops you at the gate. Kids do not need a pass.

Pick your day by what you want to see. Sunday 23 August is Kids' Day and is aimed squarely at families. Monday and Tuesday are the first round of qualifying, which means the maximum number of matches and the greatest chance of stumbling onto something. Wednesday and Thursday are the second round, the level rises and the tension with it. Friday is the final round, which is the single best day: sixteen matches per draw, each one a straight shootout for a place at a Grand Slam, and the atmosphere on the outside courts by mid-afternoon is genuinely something.

Bring a hat and more water than you think, because late August in Queens is unkind and the outside courts have very little shade. We put together a whole list of what to take for a day of live tennis in our spectator kit guide, and every item on it applies double to a day with no roof and no reserved seat.

One more tip: the practice courts. During Fan Week, the biggest names in the sport are on site preparing, and the practice schedule is posted on the day. Fewer people go and look than you would expect.

If you are watching from home

You do not need to be in Queens to follow it. Qualifying gets streamed, results appear round by round, and by the time the main draw is made on the weekend you will recognise sixteen names in each half that nobody else in your living room has heard of. That is a quietly excellent way to watch a Grand Slam: pick a qualifier on the Friday, then follow them into the first week and see how far the story runs.

The mixed doubles championship, which has been rebuilt into a two-day event with stars in it, also starts its qualifying inside this same week. We wrote about how that experiment came about and why traditionalists are still arguing about it in the million-dollar two-day circus.

The Tuesday nobody films

Here is what stays with you about qualifying week. In a sport built on rankings, seedings and the same eight faces on every poster, there is one week each summer when the hierarchy is temporarily suspended and the entrance is unlocked. Two hundred and fifty-six players, one fence, no ticket price.

Somewhere on the grounds next week, on a court with a number instead of a name, someone is going to win a match that changes the shape of their next five years, and about sixty people will see it happen live. In the last week of August 2021, that person was a teenager from Bromley who nobody outside British tennis could pick out of a line-up. Less than three weeks later she was the US Open champion.

The gate is open from Sunday. It costs nothing to go and find out who it is this time.

Photo: tennis hard court, via Unsplash.