The Melbourne Park Precinct: Every Court Explained

Melbourne park courts is a search that usually produces a seating chart for one building. That is the wrong mental model. Melbourne Park is not a stadium with some extra courts attached; it is a precinct of thirty-nine courts spread across roughly forty acres of state-owned land beside the Yarra, of which four are ticketed arenas, two are permanent show courts, a dozen more are dressed up with temporary stands every January, and the rest exist so that professional tennis players have somewhere to practise.

Understanding the layout is not trivia. It determines what a Ground Pass is worth, where the good unseeded matches end up, how long it takes to walk from one match to another, and why the Australian Open can absorb a day of rain or a heat suspension that would break any other major. The site is the tournament's competitive advantage, and it was built that way deliberately.

The two largest buildings on it have their own pages here. Rod Laver Arena covers the centre court, its surfaces and its roof. John Cain Arena covers the loudest court in tennis and its double life as a basketball venue. This page is about everything else, and about how the pieces fit together.

What "Melbourne Park" actually means

The name covers a defined area of parkland bounded by the Yarra to the south, the railway lines to the north, Batman Avenue to the west and Punt Road to the east. It is owned by the state of Victoria and managed by the Melbourne and Olympic Park Trust, a public body that also runs the adjacent rectangular stadium.

The precinct opened in January 1988 as Flinders Park, built to replace Kooyong after the old club proved impossible to expand. It was renamed Melbourne Park in 1996. Since then it has been rebuilt more or less continuously, in three formal stages between 2010 and 2022 costing close to a billion dollars, and the site you walk through today shares very little with the 1988 version beyond the location and the centre court's shell.

Confusingly, "Melbourne Park" is also used loosely to include AAMI Park at the eastern end and the older Olympic Park athletics site. For tennis purposes, the precinct is the tennis courts, the four arenas, the National Tennis Centre and the open ground between them.

The geography, and why it matters on the day

The precinct runs roughly east to west along the north bank of the river. Rod Laver Arena sits at the western end, closest to the city. John Cain Arena is immediately east of it. Margaret Court Arena is south of John Cain, closer to the river. Kia Arena is east again, and beyond that the National Tennis Centre occupies the eastern boundary.

Between and around those buildings sit the outside courts, split into two groups. The western group of about ten courts fills the space between Rod Laver Arena and the river. The eastern group, which used to number thirteen courts, was cut back to two — Courts 16 and 17 — when Kia Arena and Centrepiece took the land.

The practical consequence is that the walk from the far western courts to the National Tennis Centre is about ten minutes at tournament crowd density, and the walk from the main city entrance to Rod Laver Arena is under three. If your ground pass day involves chasing a player across the site, you will lose games doing it.

Every court on the site

The following is the complete inventory of courts that a spectator can encounter during the tournament. Practice-only courts and the clay are listed for completeness.

Court	Opened	Capacity	Roof	How you get in
Rod Laver Arena	1988	14,820	Retractable	Reserved ticket
John Cain Arena	2000	About 10,500	Retractable	Reserved ticket, plus a Ground Pass section
Margaret Court Arena	1988, rebuilt 2015	7,500	Retractable	Reserved ticket
Kia Arena	2022	5,000	Shade canopy only	Reserved ticket
1573 Arena (Show Court 2)	1988	3,000	None	Ground Pass
Court 3 (Show Court 3)	1988	3,000	None	Ground Pass
Courts 5, 6, 7	Various	Several hundred to about 1,000	Partial shade	Ground Pass
Courts 12, 13, 14, 15	Various	Several hundred each	Partial shade	Ground Pass
Courts 16, 17	2010s	Standing and platform viewing	None	Ground Pass, practice only
National Tennis Centre indoor	2013	Eight courts, limited viewing	Fully indoor	Players and accredited only
National Tennis Centre outdoor	2013	Thirteen courts, eight of them clay	None	Players and accredited only

Court numbering is not continuous and has never been. Numbers have been retired, reassigned and skipped as buildings went up over the land they occupied, which is why a map from 2010 and a map from 2026 disagree about where Court 11 is. The groups are stable; the individual numbers are not.

Rod Laver Arena14820

John Cain Arena10500

Margaret Court Arena7500

Kia Arena5000

1573 Arena3000

Court 33000

Permanent tennis capacity for each named court. Rod Laver Arena is quoted at its tennis figure of 14,820 rather than its larger concert configuration. John Cain Arena is quoted at about 10,500, the figure the venue publishes; the tournament has also quoted 9,646 for its tennis setup. Numbered outside courts are excluded because their capacity changes each January with temporary stands.

Show the numbers

Seating capacity of every ticketed and show court at Melbourne Park

Item	Seats
Rod Laver Arena	14820
John Cain Arena	10500
Margaret Court Arena	7500
Kia Arena	5000
1573 Arena	3000
Court 3	3000

Margaret Court Arena

The second court on the site chronologically and the third in the hierarchy today. It opened with the precinct in 1988 as a 6,000-seat open bowl and was gutted and rebuilt in the first redevelopment stage, reopening for the 2015 tournament at 7,500 seats with a retractable roof.

That roof was, when it opened, the fastest of its kind anywhere: it closes in under five minutes, against roughly ten for the far larger Rod Laver Arena mechanism. The speed matters more than it sounds. A Melbourne southerly change can put rain on a court within minutes of the sky changing, and the difference between a five-minute close and a fifteen-minute one is whether a set survives.

Margaret Court Arena is the tournament's second reserved-seat show court and takes the overflow from Rod Laver: high-profile matches that cannot fit the centre court schedule, plus a heavy load of women's matches, doubles finals, wheelchair finals and legends events. Outside January it hosts netball, basketball and concerts.

The naming has been contested. Court has the most Grand Slam singles titles of any player in history, a record covered on the Margaret Court record page, and her public statements on social issues have produced repeated calls to rename the arena. Tennis Australia's position has been that the name honours the playing record and nothing else.

Kia Arena

The newest arena on the site, delivered in the third redevelopment stage and opened for the 2022 tournament. It seats 5,000, which makes it the fourth-largest court at Melbourne Park and the smallest of the four that require a reserved ticket.

Architecturally it is the most interesting building in the precinct. The bowl is partially sunk into the ground, which keeps the profile low against the parkland and puts the entry concourse at mid-height rather than at the bottom. Roughly 270 tonnes of Victorian-fabricated steel carry a canopy that shades most of the seating without closing over the court. It is not a roof: rain stops play at Kia Arena exactly as it does on Court 3.

Its function is capacity. Before it existed, the gap between the 7,500-seat Margaret Court Arena and the 3,000-seat show courts was the tournament's biggest scheduling problem, because a match with a genuine 5,000-person audience had nowhere sensible to go. Kia Arena filled it. Outside the tournament the building has hosted the AO Finals Festival and functions as a mid-size events venue.

1573 Arena and Court 3

These are the two 3,000-seat permanent show courts, both dating from the original 1988 build, and for a Ground Pass holder they are the most valuable real estate on the site.

Show Court 2 currently carries the 1573 sponsor name. Show Court 3 has been sold under the ANZ name. Both numbers move with the sponsorship cycle, which is why long-time visitors still call them Show Court 2 and Court 3, and why the tournament's own signage is not always consistent from one year to the next.

What they deliver is a proper stadium environment on a general admission ticket. Three thousand seats around a court is enough to generate real noise, the sightlines are steep, and the scheduling team routinely puts a seeded player against a dangerous qualifier on one of them because there is nowhere else for that match to go. In the first week these two courts produce more upsets than the arenas do, because that is where the dangerous unseeded players are put.

The queueing is the catch. Both fill early on a good day and operate on a one-out, one-in basis once full, so the way to watch a specific match on Court 3 is to arrive for the match before it.

The numbered outside courts

Below the show courts sit roughly a dozen numbered courts with varying amounts of seating, all of them Ground Pass access. The 2026 configuration runs across two groups: a western cluster of about ten courts between Rod Laver Arena and the river, and an eastern pair — Courts 16 and 17 — used for practice.

The seating is genuinely different court to court, and it is worth knowing which is which before committing to an afternoon in January:

• Court 5 has covered seating on one side only. The other side bakes.
• Court 6 has a grandstand plus elevated covered viewing from the bar pavilion built above it, which is the single most comfortable free vantage point on the site.
• Court 7 is effectively a small stadium with covered seating on both sides.
• Courts 12 and 13 have seating both sides, with a covered grandstand on the city side.
• Court 14 has seating on both sides without much cover.
• Courts 16 and 17 carry no grandstand at all. They are the practice courts, watched from shaded viewing platforms in the zone the tournament brands as The Village, and on the middle weekend they are where you will see more top-twenty players in an hour than anywhere else in the precinct.

The twelve show courts, and the January transformation

The precinct's permanent state and its tournament state are different buildings. Outside January, most of the numbered courts are plain courts with a fence and a bench.

For the Australian Open, roughly twelve courts are fitted with lights, scoreboards, television positions and temporary grandstand seating. That fit-out takes weeks, comes down afterwards, and is the reason capacity figures for outside courts vary from year to year and cannot usefully be tabulated. It is also the reason the site can host a hundred-thousand-person day in January and a few hundred people on a Tuesday in June.

That temporary infrastructure is the modern, disciplined version of exactly the practice that killed Kooyong — where temporary stands were the only way to reach a crowd of fifteen thousand. The difference is that Melbourne Park uses temporary structures to extend a permanent capacity rather than to substitute for one.

The National Tennis Centre

The first major delivery of the redevelopment programme, unveiled in January 2013 at the eastern end of the precinct. Eight indoor courts and thirteen outdoor courts, of which eight are clay.

During the tournament it is the practice base: players book slots, coaches work, and it absorbs the training load that would otherwise consume match courts. Outside the tournament it is Tennis Australia's national high performance centre, where the junior and professional pathway squads train.

The indoor courts do a specific job that is easy to miss. Melbourne's January weather can put an entire day's practice at risk, and a player preparing for a fourth-round match cannot afford to lose a session. Eight indoor courts mean the tournament can guarantee practice conditions no matter what the sky does, which is the same argument as the roofs, applied to the part of the operation the public never sees.

The clay nobody plays the Open on

Eight of the National Tennis Centre's outdoor courts are clay, and the site's total of six clay courts is sometimes quoted differently depending on whether resurfaced courts are counted. Either way, the number is not zero, and that surprises people.

The reason is the calendar. Australian players finish their home summer in early February and, if they are on tour, arrive in Europe in April for a clay season that runs for two months and contains a major. Historically Australians have been poor on clay, and one diagnosed cause was that there was nowhere at home to practise on it properly.

The clay at Melbourne Park is a direct response. It has never been used for an Australian Open match and never will be — the tournament has been a hard-court event since 1988, an arc set out on the surface history page — but it exists so that the pathway does not produce another generation of players who first stand on clay at a professional tournament.

Centrepiece

Opened in September 2021 as part of the third stage, Centrepiece is the building most visitors never enter and the one that makes the economics work.

It is a dedicated function and media facility with a grand hall holding 1,400 people and an auditorium seating 250. In January it houses the media centre and broadcast operations, which previously ate into space that could otherwise be sold. For the remaining eleven months it is a conference and events venue in a parkland setting five minutes from the centre of Melbourne.

That dual use is the answer to the obvious objection to spending A$972 million of public money on a tennis site. A precinct that is only viable for three weeks a year is a bad public investment. A precinct with permanent media infrastructure, four arenas on the year-round events circuit and a conference centre is a working asset.

• Stage 1, 2010 to 201537.5%
• Stage 2, 2015 to 201934.7%
• Stage 3, 2019 to 202227.8%

Announced Victorian government spend on each of the three formal redevelopment stages between 2010 and 2022, in millions of Australian dollars of the day. Stage boundaries are the government's own; some projects spanned two stages and are allocated to the stage that funded them.

Show the numbers

Where the A$972 million redevelopment went, by stage

Item	Value
Stage 1, 2010 to 2015	366m
Stage 2, 2015 to 2019	338m
Stage 3, 2019 to 2022	271m

Grand Slam Oval, Garden Square and the open ground

Roughly half the people on site at any moment during the Australian Open are not watching a match, and the precinct is designed around that fact.

Grand Slam Oval is the large grassed area added in the 1996 expansion, and it functions as the tournament's town square: the big screen, the concentration of food outlets, live music through the afternoon and evening, and enough space to absorb a crowd that has nowhere else to be. It is loud by design.

Garden Square is the deliberate opposite — a shadier, quieter area where the same matches are on screen without the sound system. On a 38-degree afternoon it is where families end up.

Around them sit the zones the tournament rebrands every few years: The Village between John Cain and Kia Arenas with its practice-court viewing platforms, the AO Ball Park family zone with mini courts and waterslides entered from the Birrarung Marr side, the TOPCOURT space aimed at a younger audience, and the Courtside Bar pavilion above Court 6.

Names change; the function does not. The precinct sells a day out to people who would not pay for a reserved seat, and about a third of the tournament's attendance is on Ground Pass terms as a result. The commercial logic behind that is covered on the tickets guide.

Gates, bridges and getting in

There is no single main entrance, which confuses first-time visitors more than anything else about the site.

Tanderrum Bridge, opened for the 2017 tournament, carries pedestrians from Birrarung Marr across the rail corridor into the northern side of the precinct. It is the route from Federation Square and Flinders Street station, and on a busy day it carries the largest share of arrivals.

The Edwin Flack Bridge connects from the Melbourne Cricket Ground side across Batman Avenue, which is the natural approach from Jolimont station and from the MCG if you are combining events.

Olympic Boulevard runs through the precinct and carries tram route 70, with stops at Rod Laver Arena, John Cain Arena and AAMI Park.

Richmond station sits about ten minutes east on foot and is the better departure station after a night session, because it serves multiple lines while Flinders Street funnels everyone through the city.

A multi-level car park holds about 1,000 cars and 28 buses, and during the tournament it is close to useless for general visitors. Roads around the precinct are congested or closed, rideshare pickup zones sit further from the gates than the walk you were avoiding, and the trains run late on both sides of a night session.

How the precinct was built

1. 11988, the original buildFlinders Park opens on state land beside the Yarra with a 15,000-seat centre court carrying the first movable roof at any Grand Slam show court, two 3,000-seat show courts and a set of outside courts. Cost about A$94 million.
2. 21996, the first expansionThe site is renamed Melbourne Park and Grand Slam Oval is added, creating open ground for a crowd that is no longer only there to watch tennis.
3. 32000, the second arenaThe Melbourne Sports and Entertainment Centre opens with a retractable roof and about 10,500 seats. It later becomes John Cain Arena and gives the tournament a second coverable court.
4. 42010 to 2015, stage oneAbout A$366 million delivers the National Tennis Centre with eight indoor courts, and rebuilds Margaret Court Arena from 6,000 open seats to 7,500 under a roof that closes in under five minutes. Melbourne becomes the only major with three coverable courts.
5. 52015 to 2019, stage twoAbout A$338 million overhauls Rod Laver Arena with new entrances, seating and a faster roof mechanism, and builds Tanderrum Bridge to move a crowd of tens of thousands in from Birrarung Marr on foot.
6. 62019 to 2022, stage threeAbout A$271 million delivers the 5,000-seat Kia Arena and the Centrepiece function and media building, taking the land that thirteen eastern outside courts once occupied and reducing that group to two.

The construction sequence as recorded by the venue and by Victorian government agencies. Costs are announced figures in Australian dollars of the day. Dates refer to the tournament at which each element first appeared rather than to practical completion, which in several cases came earlier.

The programme is unusual for a public sports project in that it was completed, on a published sequence, across three governments and a pandemic. What it bought is a site that can hold more than 100,000 people in a day — 103,956 on the record day of the 2026 tournament — and keep every one of them under a roof or in shade if the weather turns.

What three roofs actually buy

This is the point at which the precinct stops being a list of buildings and becomes a competitive advantage.

Wimbledon covers two courts. The US Open covers two. Roland-Garros covers two. Melbourne covers three, holding a combined tennis capacity of roughly 32,800 people, and it did so first — twenty-one years before Wimbledon.

The value shows up on the days that go wrong. A washed-out afternoon at a two-roof major means a backlog that compounds through the rest of the week. At Melbourne Park, three courts keep running, the marquee matches stay in their sessions, and the outside-court backlog gets absorbed by the extra days the tournament now has.

The same logic applies to heat, which is the more common Melbourne problem. When the heat scale crosses its threshold, outside courts stop and the three roofed arenas close and continue. Three matches carry on while the rest of the site waits, which is the difference between a suspended tournament and a slower one. The mechanics of that are set out on the heat policy page, and the way it interacts with evening play on the night sessions page.

• 39Courts on the site
• 3Courts with a retractable roof
• 32820Combined capacity under a roof
• 1368043Attendance across the 2026 tournament
• 103956Record single-day attendance, 22 January 2026

Court counts are the venue's published totals for the whole site, including practice and training courts. Combined roofed capacity is the sum of the tennis capacities of Rod Laver Arena, John Cain Arena and Margaret Court Arena. Attendance figures are the tournament's published totals for the 2026 event across all 21 days.

The precinct when the tennis is not on

For eleven and a half months of the year Melbourne Park is a general events precinct, and that is the part of the business case that most visitors never see.

John Cain Arena is the home court of the city's national league basketball clubs and hosts netball and concerts. Rod Laver Arena runs a full concert calendar. Margaret Court Arena takes mid-size touring shows and netball. Kia Arena hosts festivals and mid-size events. Centrepiece runs conferences and functions year-round.

The National Tennis Centre operates as a training base for national squads and pathway players, and public court hire operates on parts of the site. The precinct also hosts domestic tennis events through the year, and has hosted Davis Cup ties, a tradition covered on the Davis Cup history page.

If you want to see the buildings without a tournament crowd, a concert night at Rod Laver Arena or a basketball fixture at John Cain Arena will get you inside for a fraction of a January ticket price, on a site you can cross in five minutes rather than twenty.

A practical hierarchy for a ground pass day

Ignore the map for a moment. The site sorts itself into four tiers, and knowing which tier a match is on tells you almost everything about how to approach it.

• Tier one: Rod Laver Arena. Reserved seat only. Two sessions a day. Top seeds, finals, most night matches.
• Tier two: John Cain, Margaret Court, Kia. Reserved seat, except for John Cain's Ground Pass section. High seeds, marquee Australians, big women's matches, doubles finals.
• Tier three: 1573 Arena and Court 3. Ground Pass, 3,000 seats each, one-out-one-in when full. Where the upsets happen.
• Tier four: the numbered courts. Ground Pass, a few hundred seats each, standing room at the fence. Qualifiers, juniors, wheelchair, first-round doubles, and the best tennis-watching in the world if you do not care who is playing.

The first week is when this hierarchy is worth exploiting, because sixty-odd matches are running across the site simultaneously. By the second week there are eight matches a day and almost all of them are in tier one or two. The full week-by-week structure is on the schedule page.

A short chronology

• 1988 — Flinders Park opens with a roofed centre court, two 3,000-seat show courts and a set of outside courts, replacing Kooyong.
• 1996 — Renamed Melbourne Park. Grand Slam Oval is added.
• 2000 — The arena now known as John Cain Arena opens with a retractable roof, giving the site a second coverable court.
• January 2013 — The National Tennis Centre opens with eight indoor and thirteen outdoor courts, eight of them clay.
• January 2015 — Margaret Court Arena reopens rebuilt at 7,500 seats under a roof. Melbourne becomes the only major with three coverable courts.
• January 2017 — Tanderrum Bridge opens, changing how the crowd arrives.
• January 2022 — Kia Arena opens at 5,000 seats. Centrepiece, opened the previous September, comes into tournament use.
• 2022 — The three-stage redevelopment programme completes at about A$972 million.
• January 2026 — The whole precinct operates for all 21 days for the first time. Attendance reaches 1,368,043.

Numbers worth carrying

• Courts on the site: 39, of which 33 are hard and six are clay.
• Ticketed arenas: four — Rod Laver 14,820, John Cain about 10,500, Margaret Court 7,500, Kia 5,000.
• Permanent Ground Pass show courts: two, at 3,000 seats each.
• Retractable roofs: three, more than any other major.
• Combined capacity under cover: about 32,800.
• National Tennis Centre: eight indoor courts, thirteen outdoor, eight of them clay.
• Redevelopment: about A$972 million across three stages, 2010 to 2022.
• Record day: 103,956 people on 22 January 2026.

For the centre court itself, see Rod Laver Arena. For the arena that doubles as a basketball stadium, see John Cain Arena. For why the tournament left its old home, see Kooyong to Melbourne Park, and for the tournament itself, the Australian Open's complete history. The wider sport sits under the tennis section, and Australian venues across every code are indexed on the Australia hub and the sports index.