Australian Open Tickets: Ground Pass to Centre Court

Australian Open tickets confuse people for one structural reason: the tournament sells access to a precinct and access to three specific rooms inside it, and those are separate purchases with a partial overlap. Understand the overlap and the whole price list becomes legible. Miss it and you will either pay for an arena seat you did not need or turn up with a pass that cannot get you into the match you flew here for.

This page is about buying. What each ticket admits you to, what it does not, when tickets go on sale, how the presale ladder works, where the price curve bends across the fortnight, and which of the several plausible ways to spend A$200 on this tournament actually returns the most tennis. How the matches are then arranged in time is a different problem, covered on how the Australian Open schedule works, and what the days feel like once you are inside is on the Australian Open visitor guide.

The one rule that explains the whole price list

Every reserved arena ticket also functions as a Ground Pass for that day. Every Ground Pass does not function as an arena ticket at any price.

That asymmetry is the whole system. When you buy a seat in Rod Laver Arena for the Tuesday night session, you have bought two things: the seat, and the right to be at Melbourne Park that day. You can arrive at eleven in the morning, watch four hours of outside-court tennis, eat, wander, take your arena seat at seven, and stay until the second match finishes. The arena ticket did not replace the Ground Pass. It was stacked on top of one.

Run the arithmetic and the consequence is obvious. If a Ground Pass is A$49 and a first-week Rod Laver Arena night seat is A$110, the arena is not costing you A$110. It is costing you A$61 on top of an entry ticket you were going to buy anyway. That is the calculation most first-time buyers never make, and it is why the stadium tickets are less absurd than the headline numbers suggest.

What a Ground Pass buys

The Ground Pass is the tournament's entry-level product and, for a first visit in the first week, it is frequently the correct one.

It admits you to Melbourne Park for one day. Inside that, you get:

• Every outside court. In the first week these hold genuine main-draw singles matches, doubles across the fortnight, and the junior and wheelchair events later on. Seating is unreserved and the good spots go early.
• The smaller show courts. Kia Arena, 1573 Arena and ANZ Arena are permanent seated show courts with real capacity, and Ground Pass holders can use them.
• John Cain Arena. The roofed arena the tournament calls the people's court, and the single strongest reason to buy a Ground Pass rather than dismiss it.
• The entertainment precinct. Grand Slam Oval, Garden Square, the live music stages, the family zone and the bars.
• All the food, retail and facilities on site.

What it does not admit you to is short and absolute: Rod Laver Arena and Margaret Court Arena, at any hour, on any day, for any reason.

John Cain Arena and why the Ground Pass is not a consolation prize

The reason a Ground Pass is a serious ticket rather than a cheap one is John Cain Arena. It is a roofed arena of roughly 10,500 seats, it hosts main-draw singles matches involving seeded and high-profile players throughout the first week and a half, and the tournament has explicitly opened its seating to Ground Pass holders.

Tennis Australia's own framing is that all seats inside John Cain Arena are open to Ground Pass holders. In practice that means an A$49 ticket can put you in a full roofed arena watching a top-twenty player, at a tournament where the equivalent view in the building next door is a reserved product several times the price.

Two things follow. First, arrive early on a day you intend to use John Cain Arena, because unreserved seating in a popular arena rewards the people already in it. Second, the atmosphere is not a lesser version of centre court. It is a different one. The crowd is younger, louder, more partisan and more Australian, which is exactly why the venue acquired its nickname and why the tournament keeps it on Ground Pass terms.

49%51%

• Open on a Ground Pass21500
• Reserved ticket only22300

Approximate tennis-configuration capacities for the permanent arenas at Melbourne Park. Ground-pass accessible covers John Cain Arena plus Kia Arena, 1573 Arena and ANZ Arena. Reserved-only covers Rod Laver Arena and Margaret Court Arena. Outside-court and temporary grandstand seating is excluded because it is not fixed.

Show the numbers

Melbourne Park's arena seating, by what ticket gets you in

Item	Value
Open on a Ground Pass	21500
Reserved ticket only	22300

Read that split carefully, because it is the least intuitive fact about this tournament. Slightly less than half of Melbourne Park's permanent arena seating sits behind a reserved ticket. The rest is available to the cheapest ticket on sale. No other Grand Slam has that ratio, and it is a deliberate policy rather than an accident of construction.

Reserved arena tickets: the three rooms

There are three arenas you cannot enter without a reserved seat for a specific session, and one of them is only sometimes on that list.

Rod Laver Arena is centre court: capacity 14,820, the tournament's main roof, and the venue for both singles finals. Its history, its surfaces and its seating geography are covered in full on the Rod Laver Arena guide. Reserved seats have started from around A$85 for early-round sessions.

Margaret Court Arena holds about 7,500 under a roof added for the 2015 tournament, and functions as the tournament's second show court. Reserved seats have started from around A$69.

John Cain Arena is the ambiguous one. It sells reserved seats — from around A$69 — while also admitting Ground Pass holders to its unreserved seating. If you want a guaranteed seat in a specific location for a specific session, you buy the reserved ticket. If you are willing to arrive early and take what is available, the Ground Pass does the job.

Ticket	Entry price from	Rod Laver Arena	Margaret Court Arena	John Cain Arena	Outside courts and precinct
Opening Week Ground Pass	About A$10	No	No	Qualifying and practice access	Yes
Ground Pass, single day	About A$49	No	No	Unreserved seating	Yes
Ground Pass, 7 days	About A$139	No	No	Unreserved seating	Yes
John Cain Arena reserved	About A$69	No	No	Reserved seat	Yes
Margaret Court Arena reserved	About A$69	No	Reserved seat	Unreserved seating	Yes
Rod Laver Arena reserved	About A$85	Reserved seat	No	Unreserved seating	Yes

The pattern in that table is worth stating plainly: buying up gets you one specific room and never both of the top two. A Margaret Court Arena ticket does not admit you to Rod Laver Arena, and a Rod Laver Arena ticket does not admit you to Margaret Court Arena. If the two matches you want are in those two buildings on the same day, you are buying two tickets or missing one.

How Rod Laver Arena is priced within itself

Inside centre court the seats are banded, and the bands do more work than the price difference suggests.

The tournament has sold Rod Laver Arena in numbered categories running from the lower bowl outward and upward, with a small premium tier in the first rows above the court. Broadly:

• The premium front rows are a tiny allocation, sold at a large multiple of the base price, and mostly absorbed by hospitality and packages before a general buyer sees them.
• Lower-bowl categories put you level with or close to the court. Side-on lower bowl at about the height of the service line is the best tennis-watching seat in the building and priced accordingly.
• Middle-tier categories are the value band: a complete view of the court geometry, less intimacy, materially cheaper.
• Upper-bowl categories are the cheapest, steep, and better than the equivalent seat at a football stadium because a tennis court is small enough to fit comfortably in your field of view from the top row.

One factor the seat map will not tell you: sun. Most sessions are played with the roof open, one side of the bowl shades earlier than the other, and a January day session at Melbourne Park is a long time in the sun. The Rod Laver Arena guide covers the orientation in detail.

Day session, night session, and the clearing of the arena

Reserved arena tickets are sold by session, not by day, and the sessions are separate events that happen to share a room.

A day session ticket admits you to the arena for the daytime programme and to the precinct from gates open until close. A night session ticket admits you to the evening programme, with precinct access from late afternoon.

Night sessions are the tournament's signature product and carry a premium accordingly; the case for buying one is made in full on the night sessions page.

Between them the arena is cleared. This surprises people every year. Your day session seat does not become your night session seat, staff will move you out, and the fact that the room is half empty at the changeover makes no difference. If you want both sessions in the same arena on the same day, that is two tickets.

The finals days collapse this structure. In the closing stages the sessions consolidate and the marquee finals are sold as single-session tickets at the top of the price range.

Opening Week: the cheapest tennis in Australia

The tournament now runs across three weeks rather than two, and the first of them — branded Opening Week — is the least understood and best-value part of the whole event.

Opening Week covers qualifying, open practice sessions, charity exhibition matches on centre court, and Kids Tennis Day. Day passes have been sold from about A$10, children have entered free on some days, and the tennis is real: qualifying is a 128-player draw of professionals playing for a main-draw place, which produces more desperate tennis than a first-round match between a seed and a wildcard.

For a Melbourne local, Opening Week is the obvious answer to the question of how to see this tournament cheaply. For a visitor whose dates are fixed by flights, it usually is not, because it sits before the main draw begins. That timing question is laid out on the schedule page.

Opening Week day pass10

Ground Pass, single day49

John Cain Arena reserved69

Margaret Court Arena reserved69

Rod Laver Arena reserved85

7-day Ground Pass, per day20

The lowest published entry price for each product in recent tournaments, not an average paid. Reserved arena prices rise steeply by round, and every figure here is a first-week starting point. Prices are reset annually and early-bird windows close months before the tournament.

Show the numbers

Entry price by ticket type, in Australian dollars

Item	Price from
Opening Week day pass	10
Ground Pass, single day	49
John Cain Arena reserved	69
Margaret Court Arena reserved	69
Rod Laver Arena reserved	85
7-day Ground Pass, per day	20

The price curve across the fortnight

The single biggest lever on what you pay is which day you go, and the curve is steeper than most people expect.

Days one to three of the main draw are the cheapest and the busiest with actual tennis. The first round is now spread across three days, which means three consecutive days of full outside-court programmes. A Ground Pass on any of them is the best tennis-per-dollar transaction the tournament offers.

Days four to six cover the second round and the start of the third. Outside-court volume is still high, arena prices have begun to climb.

The middle weekend carries third-round and fourth-round matches, draws the largest crowds, and prices accordingly.

The second week is where the price curve turns vertical. Quarter-finals, semi-finals and finals are sold at multiples of the first-week rate, outside-court play thins out to doubles, juniors, wheelchair and legends events, and the Ground Pass proposition weakens sharply as a tennis purchase even as the precinct stays busy.

The counter-intuitive summary: the most expensive days have the least tennis on them.

How this compares with the other three majors

Context matters here, because the Australian Open's reputation as the accessible major is earned rather than marketed.

The comparison that does the work is the cheapest ticket at each event. At Melbourne a Ground Pass gets you into a roofed 10,500-seat arena with main-draw singles in it. At Wimbledon the grounds pass gets you outside courts and the hill, with the show courts reserved for ballot winners and queue survivors. At Roland-Garros the equivalent product varies by day and does not include Philippe-Chatrier. At the US Open the grounds admission does include Louis Armstrong Stadium in the early rounds, which is the closest analogue anywhere.

There is also a structural difference in how you get a ticket at all. Wimbledon runs a public ballot and a physical queue, both of which convert time and luck into access. Melbourne runs a straightforward commercial on-sale with presale tiers, which converts organisation into access. Neither is obviously fairer, but they reward different behaviour: at Wimbledon you queue, at Melbourne you diarise the on-sale date.

The third difference is capacity relative to demand. Melbourne Park's permanent arena seating plus its outside courts absorbs very large daily crowds — the 2026 tournament reported over 1.3 million attendances across three weeks — which historically kept single-day tickets available late. The introduction of capped week-one daily allocations for 2027 is the first serious erosion of that, and it moves Melbourne slightly closer to the book-early model the other majors run.

When tickets go on sale, and the presale ladder

Tennis Australia has been moving the on-sale earlier every year, and for the 2027 tournament it went on sale in the middle of the preceding August — roughly five months ahead.

1. 1Accessibility presaleOpens first, ahead of every other tier, for patrons with accessible requirements. For AO 2027 it ran from 28 July 2026. Booked through the dedicated accessibility channel rather than the general platform.
2. 2Partner presaleA card-partner window, most recently Mastercard, opening the day after the accessibility presale closes. Requires an eligible card at checkout.
3. 3Community and AO Extras presaleOpen to registered members of the tennis community — coaches, officials, club members, junior programme participants — and to anyone signed up to the tournament's free mailing product.
4. 4Public on-saleThe general sale through Ticketmaster. For AO 2027 it opened at midday on Thursday 13 August 2026. Popular sessions move within hours.
5. 5Early-bird window closesGround Pass early-bird pricing has run for a defined period after the on-sale, closing at the end of November for AO 2027. After that the base price rises.
6. 6Official resale opensTicketmaster Resale, the only sanctioned secondhand channel, opened for AO 2027 tickets from the afternoon of the public on-sale day.

The published sequence for the 2027 tournament. Every stage is reset annually and the dates move, so treat this as the shape of the process rather than a fixed calendar. Presale tiers have historically run in this order regardless of the specific dates attached to them.

The practical advice is unglamorous: sign up to the free tournament mailing list months in advance. It costs nothing and it moves you a full tier up the ladder, which for finals-weekend sessions is the difference between buying and not.

A change worth knowing about for 2027: Tennis Australia said it would cap daily allocations for week one for the first time. The reasoning is crowd management — the first week now draws numbers the precinct was not built for — and the effect on a buyer is that first-week days can now sell out in a way they historically did not.

Resale, and the only safe way to buy secondhand

Australian Open tickets carry conditions of sale that prohibit unauthorised resale, and the tournament enforces them. Barcodes bought through general marketplaces are cancelled, and the cancellation is discovered at the gate rather than in advance.

The sanctioned route is the official resale platform, which in recent years has run through Ticketmaster Resale — the same system that sold the ticket in the first place. A seller lists a genuine ticket, the barcode is reissued to the buyer, and the transfer is recognised at entry. Prices there are set by sellers and can exceed face value, but the ticket works.

Three rules cover almost every case:

• If it is not the official platform, assume the ticket will not scan. This applies to resale sites with professional-looking listings and to social media sellers alike.
• Never accept a photograph or a screenshot of a barcode. The same image can be sold to any number of people, and the first scan wins.
• A ticket that seems cheap for a finals session is not cheap. It is fake, or it is stolen, or it has already been cancelled.

This is a general Australian problem rather than a tennis-specific one — the same pattern applies to the sales covered on buying cricket tickets in Australia and State of Origin tickets — but the Australian Open attracts more international buyers than either, and international buyers are the ones the fake market targets.

Buying from overseas

A large share of Australian Open tickets are bought by people who are not in Australia, and the process has a few specific frictions.

Timing. The on-sale runs on Melbourne time, and midday on a Thursday in Melbourne is the middle of the night across Europe and North America. For a session you actually care about, that means setting an alarm rather than checking in the morning.

Currency. Prices are set and charged in Australian dollars. Card foreign-transaction fees and the exchange rate at the moment of purchase both apply, so the number that leaves your account is not the number on the ticket page. For a family buying several sessions, the difference is not trivial.

Delivery. Tickets are digital and delivered through the ticketing platform's app rather than posted, which removes the international-postage problem entirely but creates a different one: you need the account, the app and the phone number that the tickets were issued against to be the same on the day.

Packages. Travel operators sell Australian Open packages bundling tickets with hotels. Some are official partners with genuine allocations; many are resellers with none. The distinction matters, and the test is whether the operator is named on the tournament's own site.

The ticket you actually hold on the day

Australian Open tickets are mobile. There is no paper ticket to collect, no box office to visit, and no printed PDF that will scan reliably.

That has three practical consequences. First, download the ticketing app before you travel and confirm the tickets are visible inside it, not just in a confirmation email. Second, if you bought for a group, transfer each person's ticket to their own account in advance rather than trying to admit five people from one phone at a busy gate. Third, charge the phone. Melbourne Park has charging points but they are busy, and a flat battery at a night-session gate is a genuine problem rather than an inconvenience.

Screenshots do not work. The barcodes rotate, and a static image of one will fail at the scanner. This is the same anti-fraud mechanism that makes the official resale platform trustworthy, and it is the reason a photographed barcode from a stranger is worthless.

Children, concessions and families

The tournament prices children aggressively downward, and it is one of the few major Australian sporting events where a family day out is genuinely affordable.

Children's Ground Passes have been sold for a few dollars for under-14s. Opening Week has run days where children enter free, and Kids Tennis Day on the Saturday before the main draw is built around family attendance. Reserved arena tickets carry child and concession bands in the early rounds and drop them entirely for the finals.

For a family with young children, the Ground Pass is not the compromise option. The purpose-built family zone, the mini courts, the water play areas and the shaded viewing platforms are all precinct facilities, and children under about ten will generally get more out of those and an hour of outside-court tennis than out of three hours in a fixed seat in a large arena. The visitor guide covers what those facilities actually contain.

Accessible ticketing

Accessible tickets are booked through a dedicated channel rather than the general on-sale, and the tournament runs an accessibility presale that opens ahead of every other tier.

The categories are broader than most venues offer. Alongside wheelchair-accessible bays and companion seating, recent tournaments have sold ease-of-access seating for patrons who cannot manage stairs or long walks, enhanced vision seating, and dedicated seating for deaf and hard of hearing patrons. Accessible parking at the Eastern Plaza car park requires advance purchase.

Book at the presale. The allocation is fixed, it is not restocked when general tickets sell out, and Melbourne Park's accessible bays in the two roofed show courts are a small number of seats in very large buildings.

Hospitality, packages and what they actually include

Above the general ticketing sits a hospitality tier sold as packages rather than as seats: premium dining rooms, chef-led restaurant concepts, corporate suites and travel-inclusive products.

Three things to understand before considering them. First, they include a reserved arena seat — that is the point of them, and it is often a seat in a category that never reaches general sale. Second, they are priced per person per session at a level where the food is not the expensive part. Third, they sell early and to repeat buyers, which is why the general on-sale for finals sessions has less inventory than the arena's capacity suggests.

For most visitors they are not the right purchase. For a group that needs guaranteed premium seats on a specific date, they are frequently the only route to them.

• 1300000Attendance at AO 2026
• 14820Rod Laver Arena capacity
• 49Ground Pass entry price, A$
• 7Years since the base Ground Pass price rose

Figures drawn from Tennis Australia announcements for the 2026 and 2027 tournaments. Attendance is the reported total across the whole event including Opening Week. Capacities are tennis configuration. The Ground Pass price is the early-bird entry point rather than an average paid.

Three ways to spend A$200

The abstract advice becomes useful when it is turned into an actual afternoon. Take a budget of roughly A$200 for one person and the three sensible ways to spend it look like this.

Option one: four Ground Pass days in week one. Roughly A$196 at the standard rate, or considerably less on a multi-day product. You will see more live professional tennis than the other two options combined, from a few metres away, across four separate days. You will not see the inside of Rod Laver Arena.

Option two: one first-week Rod Laver Arena night session plus one Ground Pass day. Around A$160 to A$180 depending on the seat band. You get centre court under lights with a full house, plus a full day of outside-court tennis on a separate date. This is the recommendation for a first visit.

Option three: one second-week arena session. A single quarter-final or semi-final ticket will absorb the whole budget and often more. You get one session, two matches, and the best tennis of the fortnight in the best room. Whether that is worth four days of week-one tennis is a genuine question rather than a rhetorical one, and the answer depends entirely on whether you want to see a specific player go deep.

One variable overrides all three options: how long you are in Melbourne. A visitor with a single free day should buy an arena session, because a single Ground Pass day is a gamble on a draw sheet nobody can predict months ahead. A visitor with four free days should buy Ground Passes for three of them and one arena session, because the marginal value of a second arena session is much lower than the marginal value of a first one. A resident with a whole fortnight available should buy Opening Week passes and week-one Ground Passes and skip the second week entirely, which is close to what most Melbourne tennis regulars actually do.

Mistakes that cost people money

A short list, all of them observed every January.

• Buying a Ground Pass expecting to see a named star on centre court. Draw position is not knowable at the on-sale, and centre court is not accessible on that ticket regardless.
• Buying a day session ticket to see a night session match. The order of play is published the evening before; the ticket was bought months earlier.
• Assuming the arena ticket is only for the arena. People buy a separate Ground Pass alongside a reserved seat for the same day. It is wasted money.
• Buying week-two tickets for the atmosphere. The atmosphere in a first-week night session is not measurably different and the ticket costs a third as much.
• Leaving accessible bookings to the general on-sale. By then there is nothing left.
• Buying from a third-party marketplace. Covered above, and worth repeating because it is the single most expensive mistake available.

What to re-check before you buy

Four things move, and all of them move annually.

First, prices and categories are reset every year, and the early-bird window closes months before the tournament. Every figure on this page is an entry point from a recent tournament, not a current price.

Second, the on-sale calendar shifts earlier most years. The presale order has been stable; the dates have not.

Third, what a Ground Pass includes is a policy decision Tennis Australia makes annually. John Cain Arena's Ground Pass access has been a deliberate and repeated commitment, but it is a commitment rather than a permanent structural fact, and the smaller show courts have moved in and out of the arrangement.

Fourth, daily capacity limits are new. The capping of week-one allocations for 2027 changes the risk calculation for anyone planning to buy late.

Related reading on this site: how the Australian Open schedule actually works explains what your session ticket will contain once the order of play is released, the Australian Open visitor guide covers the precinct itself, and the venue detail sits on the Rod Laver Arena guide and the John Cain Arena guide. For what all this money pays for at the other end, see Australian Open prize money, and for how the tournament got here, the Australian Open's history. For how Australian ticketing works in other codes, see cricket membership or general admission and attending an AFL game. The wider set of guides sits on the Australia hub, the tennis section and the sports index.