Wimbledon 2026 ticket ballot now open

As the final week of the U.S. Open is underway, the ticket ballot for its grand slam counterpart has officially opened. Wimbledon announced yesterday that its ticket lottery is now open for registration through Tuesday, September 16.

In this guide, we’ll tell you everything you need to know to be there for next year’s tournament.

Unlike the ticket lottery for the British Open, Wimbledon’s system is much more straightforward.

Fans interested in entering the ballot must first create a myWimbledon account (if you have previously registered for one, you should continue to use that existing account). Once that’s done, fans can enter the ballot for free and request a maximum of two tickets per household.

Unlike ballots for most golf majors, you cannot request a specific tournament day or court; tickets are randomly allotted to ballot winners, and you can win anything from the first day right through the finals. Once winners are notified in February, they can either purchase their awarded tickets or decline them. If you don’t win the lottery at first, you may still be contacted after the first round of winners are announced if those fans decline to purchase their seats.

Fans can enter the ballot for their chance to attend next year’s tournament until Tuesday, September 16, at 5:59 PM ET.

TSI TIP: Try to register during off-hours to avoid long wait times and delays in verification. It took us over an hour just to receive an email verification code when we registered at 10 AM ET.

Yes – and they range from the extremely cheap but hard to get, to the outrageously expensive but easy to get.

Another option to attend Wimbledon is to purchase one of the event’s hospitality packages. Keith Prowse is the official hospitality partner of Wimbledon, so if you’re looking to go big, this is the way to do it. In addition, going this route allows you to choose which day(s) you want to attend, which creates a lot more travel planning flexibility. But, as you would expect, this is a very expensive option, with prices starting at £1,205 (~$1600). Hospitality packages for next year’s tournament are now on sale, and even at those prices they do sell out (especially the lower-priced packages), so if you are serious about this option, you should look into it right away.

One of Wimbledon’s more unique quirks, The Queue provides fans with the opportunity to purchase tickets to the tournament on the day of play. Fans can purchase face-value show court tickets (Centre Court, Court 1, Court 2) or a grounds pass, depending on their place in line.

Undoubtedly you’ve seen social media content about the Queue, and we’ll be sharing some of that with you in the coming months. But here’s what you need to know right now as you start thinking about your ticketing options:

• The first 500 people in line get their choice of court, which almost always means selecting Centre Court.

• The second 500 people in line get to choose from what’s left over after the first group makes their selections. We suppose that a Centre Court ticket or two might slip through, but for the most part, these fans select Court 1 tickets.

• The third 500 people in line get whichever show court still remains, which is usually Court 2.

• For fans in line beyond the first 1500, a limited number of Grounds Passes are made available. Grounds Passes get you access to Wimbledon and everything there, except for the three show courts. The exact number of Grounds Passes available is not disclosed by Wimbledon, but when the queue hits 10,000 people, the tournament will post warnings to social media that additional fans should not join the line because they will likely not be admitted.

To be among the first 500 people in line, you’ll likely need to camp out overnight in the Queue the night before your desired day. Yes, you heard that right – people camp out – in tents – overnight – so they can get a Centre Court (or other show court) ticket. There’s a whole process to this, which is managed by Wimbledon. We’ll go into this more in a future story, but the highlights are:

• People can camp out for days in advance, and experts say that if you want to guarantee yourself a seat on Centre Court, you may want to start camping out before noon on the day before you want to attend the tournament.

• There is an entire village of portable toilets available, but no shower facilities. Read that again – you are going to go to Wimbledon having not showered since you started queuing. And make no mistake – London may not be Phoenix, but it can get toasty out in that field.

• There are also food trucks where you can buy food and beverages. In addition, there are restaurants and convenience stores near the park that sell food and drinks.

• But … you may leave the grounds for no more than 30 minutes. If you leave for longer than that, your fellow queuers will rat you out, and the chaperones will remove you from the line. For real – they take the Queue very seriously, and don’t tolerate people who don’t “do their time” in the line.

• In the morning, the chaperones will wake fans at 6am and have them start packing up their tents. Tents can be stored at a pop-up storage facility located in the park and run by the tournament.

• Once you’re up and the line is consolidated, you’ll still have anywhere from 4-12 hours to wait in line. If you’re holding a queue ticket in the first 500, you’ll likely be in the grounds by 11am. If you’re thousands of spots behind that, you could wait all day without actually getting a Grounds Pass.

Why are we telling you all of this right now? Because we want you to understand that queuing is not for the faint of heart. It’s a whole process, and you need to be committed in order to get tickets to a show court.

Of course the good news about all of this is that if you do get tickets to a show court, the price is incredibly reasonable.

For this year’s tournament, Centre Court tickets purchased through The Queue ranged from £75-£315 (around $100-$400), with the cheaper tickets being for the early rounds and the more expensive tickets for the later rounds. NOTE: there is no queue for Centre Court tickets for the last four days of the tournament. All Centre Court tickets for those last four days are sold in advance.

Earlier this year, tickets to Courts 1 and 2 started around £70 (roughly $92) and increased to approximately £210 ($280), but prices usually begin to fall around Day 10, reaching Grounds Pass pricing by the finale. Note: there are tickets made available for Court 1 for every day of the tournament, but Court 2 tickets are only available for days 1-10.

Ground passes usually start around £30 (~$40) at the start of the tournament, but fall to around £20 (~$27) by the finale, like we did in this year’s tournament.

Waiting in the Queue will undoubtedly leave you with plenty of great stories to tell friends about the experience. If you’re open to being on your feet for hours, and even possibly camping overnight, then this might be the option for you.

Debentures are the English version of PSLs (personal seat licenses). About 2500 of them are sold for Centre Court, and the price starts at $116,000 for a five-year license. For that, the owner gets a ticket for each day of the tournament, and these are the only tickets that Wimbledon allows to be resold.

Which means these are the tickets you can purchase from resale sites such as StubHub or dedicated Debenture resale sites like Green and Purple (we will provide a full breakdown of those options later this fall). Some of these tickets will come with access to the reserved restaurants on the grounds of the tournament, and may include food and beverage as well. But, as you can imagine, these tickets tend to be very expensive. And this process is sometimes not all that seamless, as we’ve had reports of fans buying tickets and having to spend hours on the phone trying to actually receive them.

This is truly the wild card of the entire Wimbledon ticketing process. Through a sponsorship deal with the tournament, American Express is able to sell tickets directly to its cardholders during special onsales.

We wish we could tell you exactly how this works, but they change the process every year, and finding out when these tickets go on sale is one of the hardest things we’ve seen in all of sports (in 2025, the only way we found out about the on-sale was by digging deep into a Reddit chatroom). We’ve even contacted American Express, and nobody we spoke to knows anything about the process either.

Our point: this is not a reliable way to get tickets. We will do everything we can to help decipher this for 2026, but if you are committed to going to Wimbledon next year, don’t consider this to be a reliable option.

There is absolutely no downside to registering for the lottery. If you win, but the tickets are for a day (or court) that you don’t want, you can simply pass on your right to purchase them. There is no cost to sign up, and no obligation to purchase anything.

There’s also no benefit to registering early versus late. As long as you register by the deadline on September 16 at 5:59pm ET, you will be entered into the ballot and will have an equal chance to win tickets. But don’t wait too long, as we’ve seen issues with Wimbledon’s registration system that are causing delays. You don’t want to log in at 5:50pm on September 16 just to experience problems that prevent you from submitting your application on time.

If you are determined to go and don’t want to wait for the results of the public ballot (or be subject to whatever day/court they give you), then you should check out hospitality packages from Keith Prowse, or look into purchasing Debenture seats on a resale platform.