Guide
US Open tennis format explained: sessions, roofs, heat
The US Open format from the inside: two ticketed sessions a day, two retractable roofs, the heat rule, the tie-break it invented and the mixed doubles.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Guide18 min read
Arthur Ashe Stadium seats more people than any tennis venue ever built, and on the first Monday of the US Open format explained here it will be emptied and refilled in the middle of the day. That is not an accident of crowd flow. It is the design. The tournament sells the afternoon and the evening as two different events, and almost every other decision the US Open makes follows from having built a stadium big enough to make that worth doing.
The format itself is quickly stated. Fifteen days of main draw from late August into September, on acrylic hard courts at Flushing Meadows in New York. Singles draws of 128 in both the men's and women's events, best of five sets for the men and best of three for the women, with a ten-point tie-break settling any deciding set that reaches six games all. Two courts have retractable roofs. A heat rule allows a ten-minute break when conditions cross a threshold. Doubles runs to 64 teams, and mixed doubles has been moved out of the main fortnight altogether.
What separates it from the other three majors is not the rules. It is that the US Open was reconstructed, from the ground up, as a broadcast and hospitality property, and the format has been reshaped repeatedly to serve that. Understanding the tournament means understanding what a session is.
The session is the unit, not the day
At the other majors you buy a ticket for a day. At the US Open you buy a ticket for a session, and the distinction runs through everything.
Arthur Ashe Stadium runs a day session that starts around midday and an evening session that starts in the early evening. They are sold separately. Between them the arena empties completely, the seats are cleaned, and a fresh crowd comes in. Louis Armstrong Stadium works similarly on the busier days. Everything else on the site, the Grandstand and the outside courts, is covered by a grounds pass that does not admit the holder to the stadium sessions at all.
Two structural consequences follow from that, and both are visible on court.
The first is that the tournament has roughly twice as many premium selling opportunities per day as an event that sells a single ticket. A stadium of that size, filled twice, is a very large revenue line, and it is the reason Ashe was built to a capacity that no other tennis stadium approaches.
The second is that the schedule has to be written in matched pairs. Each session needs at least one match a general audience will turn up for, which means the marquee names get split across afternoon and evening rather than stacked into one programme. A player can find themselves on at midday in one round and at nine in the evening in the next, playing in completely different air.
- 108000000Total player compensation, US dollars
- 5500000Singles champion, each draw
- 140000First-round singles loser
- 15Days of main-draw play
Published tournament figures for the 2026 edition. Prize money is in US dollars and is revised annually.
What the two roofs actually do
The USTA spent the middle of the last decade putting a roof over the problem that had embarrassed the tournament repeatedly: a men's final pushed to Monday by rain, in a country where the sports calendar has no patience for that.
Arthur Ashe Stadium's retractable roof was completed for the 2016 tournament, at a reported cost of around 180 million US dollars, and it was an unusually hard engineering problem. The stadium sits on reclaimed ground in Flushing Meadows that cannot carry much weight, so the roof was built on its own independent structure rather than resting on the bowl. It is a fabric panel system that draws closed across the opening rather than folding.
Louis Armstrong Stadium was demolished and rebuilt, reopening in 2018 with a retractable roof of its own as part of a wider transformation of the site that ran to hundreds of millions of dollars across the decade.
Armstrong's roof is the more interesting of the two, because of what it deliberately does not do. The stadium is naturally ventilated: it has open louvred sides, so closing the roof keeps rain off the court without sealing the space or air conditioning it. That was a cost and sustainability choice, and it has a real effect on play. A closed Ashe is a genuinely indoor court, still and warm, where the ball flies. A closed Armstrong is a covered outdoor court, where the wind drops but the air does not change much. Players who move between the two in consecutive rounds notice it immediately.
The surface, and why nobody calls it slow
The courts are acrylic laid over an asphalt or concrete base, painted the shade of blue that the tournament adopted in 2005 to make the ball easier to follow on television. The area outside the lines is green, and the contrast exists for the cameras rather than the players.
What matters underfoot is the amount of grit mixed into the top coat. More grit means more friction, which strips forward speed out of the bounce and lifts the ball higher. Less grit means the ball skids on and stays low. The tournament sets that specification, and it can change it between years without changing anything a spectator would notice from the stands.
The US Open has generally sat at the quicker end of the hard-court range, and the consequences show up in the shape of rallies. Points are shorter than in Paris, the serve earns more, and a returner who wants to control an exchange has to do it from inside the baseline rather than three metres behind it. Players who grew up on the surface tend to hit flatter and earlier, because the court rewards it.
Two variables sit on top of the surface and get blamed on it. The first is the ball, which is a different specification from the one used at the other majors and which players discuss constantly. The second is the air: humid late-summer air in New York is heavier than the dry air of an Australian January, and a heavy ball in heavy air travels less than the same ball indoors. That is why a night session under a closed roof plays quicker than the same court at two in the afternoon with the roof open, and it is a bigger effect than most of the arguments about the paint.
From Forest Hills to a public park
The tournament that exists now is barely fifty years old in its present form, and its history explains the character.
The championship spent decades at the West Side Tennis Club in Forest Hills, a private club with a grass court at its centre, in a format and setting recognisably descended from the English model. It moved to clay for three years in the mid-1970s and then, in 1978, moved a couple of miles north to a purpose-built public facility in Flushing Meadows Corona Park and switched to hard courts.
That relocation is the origin of everything distinctive about the event. The new site sat on parkland next to a major airport, beside a subway line, on land the city already owned, and it was designed to hold crowds rather than members. Aircraft on approach still pass over the courts, and the tournament long ago stopped pretending that is a problem.
The atmosphere followed the architecture. A private club produces a hushed crowd; a public park with a stadium seating more than twenty thousand and a bar on every level does not. Spectators at the US Open move during points, shout between them, and treat the evening session as a night out. Players who prefer silence find it hard. Players who feed on noise have won titles here they won nowhere else.
The rebuild between 2013 and 2018 doubled down on all of it. The roofs, the new Grandstand, the demolished and reconstructed Louis Armstrong Stadium and the widened plazas were a single programme costing hundreds of millions of dollars, and the design brief throughout was to move more people through the site and keep the biggest matches on air.
Heat in New York, and the rule that answers it
Late August in New York produces a specific kind of unpleasantness: high humidity with high temperature, in a stadium bowl with dark surfacing that stores the day's heat and gives it back. Sweat evaporates poorly in humid air, which is precisely the mechanism the human body relies on to shed heat, so a moderate temperature reading understates the load on a player.
The tournament's answer is a break rather than a suspension. When on-site conditions cross the referee's threshold, an extreme heat provision is invoked and players are entitled to leave the court for ten minutes: the women's draw after the second set, the men's after the third. Players can shower, change and cool down, and no coaching or medical treatment converts that break into something else.
The men's entitlement is more recent than most spectators assume. The women's tour had carried a heat break for years before the US Open extended the equivalent provision to men's singles at the 2018 tournament, during a week in which several players retired in punishing conditions. Before that, a five-set match in that heat had no scheduled relief beyond the changeover.
There is an honest limitation to a rule of this shape, and players raise it. A break after the second or third set does nothing for the player who is in trouble in the first, and the threshold is a single judgement made once. Compared with a graded scale that escalates through several stages, it is a blunt instrument. What it has in its favour is that it is simple, it is quick to invoke, and with two roofed courts the tournament has somewhere to put the matches that matter most.
The tie-break the US Open gave the sport
This is the tournament that broke first, and the rest of tennis followed it forty years later.
By the late 1960s the sport had a scheduling problem it could not solve: sets with no upper bound, matches with no predictable end, and a new television audience that needed to know when a broadcast would finish. James Van Alen had been agitating for years for a scoring system that closed the gap, and the United States Lawn Tennis Association adopted his tie-break for the 1970 championships.
The version used then is not the one played now. It was sudden death: first to five points, and at four points all the next point took the set. A red flag marked with the letters S and D was raised beside the umpire's chair so that spectators knew what was happening, which tells you how strange the innovation felt at the time. Twenty-six tie-breaks were played across that tournament, including two in deciding sets.
The sudden-death version gave way to the twelve-point tie-break familiar today, first to seven points with a two-point margin. What did not change was the principle that the US Open applied it in every set including the last. For decades it was the only major that did, which is why its matches have never produced the extended deciding sets that Wimbledon and Roland-Garros became known for.
The rest of the sport caught up in stages. The Australian Open introduced a ten-point deciding-set tie-break in 2019, Wimbledon introduced one at twelve games all in the same year, and in March 2022 the governing bodies agreed a single rule for all four majors: a ten-point tie-break at six games all in the deciding set. The full mechanics of the serving rotation, the ends changes and why the two-point margin exists are set out in the guide to how a tennis tie-break is played.
The move to fifteen days, and what it bought
From 2025 the US Open started on a Sunday for the first time in the Open era, adding a fifteenth day and spreading the first round across three days rather than two.
The stated reasons were about congestion. First rounds crammed into two days force late finishes, and late finishes are bad for players and worse for broadcasters in a country spanning four time zones. Spreading 128 first-round matches in each draw across three days gives the schedulers room.
The unstated reason is simpler. A fifteenth day is another day of two ticketed sessions in a stadium seating more than 23,000, plus grounds admission, plus catering and merchandise across a site built for it. The tournament had been reporting record attendance, and the expansion converted that demand into an extra day of revenue.
It also brought the US Open into line with the French Open, which had moved to fifteen days back in 2006, and the Australian Open, which followed in 2024. Wimbledon is now the only major still running a fourteen-day main draw.
- Grounds open in the late morningTicket holders with a grounds pass reach the outside courts and the Grandstand. Play on the outside courts begins before either stadium session does.
- Day session in the two big stadiumsArthur Ashe and Louis Armstrong start their afternoon programmes, each requiring its own ticket. The outside courts keep running in parallel throughout.
- Outside courts finish as light and scheduling allowMatches on unlit or lower-priority courts are completed or suspended so that attention and staffing move to the stadiums.
- The stadium clears between sessionsDay-session ticket holders leave Arthur Ashe entirely and the bowl is cleaned. This turnover is why the two sessions are priced and sold as separate events.
- Night session beginsA fresh crowd enters for the evening programme, typically one men's and one women's match on the main court, timed to land in the domestic television window.
- The referee closes roofs as requiredRain or an extreme heat call moves matches under cover on the two roofed courts. A match that starts with a roof closed finishes that way.
- Play continues until the programme is completeThe night session has no fixed finish, which is the pressure the fifteen-day expansion was intended to relieve.
The standard structure on a main-draw day with two stadium sessions. Times vary by round and by broadcast requirements.
Fan Week: a major that opens its gates for free
The week before the main draw is when the qualifying event is played, and at most tournaments that is a private affair watched by coaches and a few hundred people. The US Open turned it into a public product.
Qualifying admission is free. The site opens, the practice courts are accessible, exhibition matches and player appearances are scheduled, and families walk around a Grand Slam venue at no cost while three rounds of genuine, high-stakes tennis are played on the outside courts. For a player trying to reach a main draw, those matches are worth more than any other three matches of their year.
Two things make this smarter than it looks. It builds an audience among people who would never buy a stadium ticket, and it fills a week in which the site is otherwise standing idle with staff already on payroll. Concessions and merchandise operate, so the week is not purely charitable.
It also gives the qualifying draw a crowd, and the atmosphere on an outside court during the final qualifying round is unlike anything else at the tournament. A player ranked outside the top hundred, one match from a guaranteed six-figure payment and a place in the draw, is playing in front of a few thousand people who wandered over. The stakes are visible in a way that a first-round main-draw match rarely matches.
The mixed doubles rebuild, and why it made people angry
In 2025 the US Open took its mixed doubles championship apart and reassembled it as something else.
The old event was a conventional draw of 32 teams played inside the main fortnight, mostly by doubles specialists, watched by a modest audience on the outside courts. The new one is a sixteen-team competition compressed into two days during qualifying week, before the main draw begins. Entry was based mainly on combined singles ranking: eight teams by that measure and eight wildcards. The scoring was shortened, with sets to four games, a sudden-death point at deuce and a ten-point match tie-break in place of a third set, though the final was played to six-game sets. The winners' cheque was raised to one million US dollars.
The intention was transparent. Put famous singles players in a mixed pairing, compress it into two days when the schedule is otherwise quiet, and produce a marketable event out of a competition that had become an afterthought.
The objection was equally clear, and it came loudest from the doubles specialists who had won the title under the old rules. A ranking-based entry criterion built on singles results excluded almost everyone whose career is doubles, in an event that is nominally a doubles championship. The reigning champions criticised the change publicly. Beyond the individual grievance sat a structural one: a major had removed a professional's realistic route to a Grand Slam title in order to stage a celebrity exhibition with a trophy attached.
The tournament's response for 2026 was a partial concession rather than a reversal. A separate qualifying competition was added, with eight teams playing on the Monday of the week and two progressing into the sixteen-team championship draw. That opens a door for specialists without restoring the old event. Whether the compromise holds depends on whether the shortened format keeps drawing the audience that justified it, and how the money moves through the sport is covered in the piece on where broadcast rights revenue actually goes.
The money, and what it is doing to the shape of the draw
Total player compensation at the 2026 US Open reached 108 million US dollars, with each singles champion taking 5.5 million and a first-round singles loser collecting 140,000.
That first-round figure is the one worth thinking about. A single match, lost, pays more than most players outside the top hundred earn in a season on the tours below. It is why qualifying is fought the way it is, why a wildcard is a genuinely valuable gift, and why the entry deadline matters so much to players hovering around the cut-off. The relationship between a ranking on a given Monday and a place in a draw is set out in the explainer on how the ATP and WTA ranking systems work.
There is a long-running argument about the distribution. Player groups have pushed for a larger share of tournament revenue and for more of it to reach the early rounds, on the reasoning that the top of the game is already well paid and the bottom of a major's draw is where the sport's workforce actually lives. The tournaments counter that they carry the cost of the facilities and that prize money has grown faster than inflation for a decade. Both statements can be true, and the negotiation runs every year.
The other draws, and where they sit in the fortnight
The singles competitions take almost all the attention, and the rest of the programme is arranged around them.
The men's and women's doubles draws hold 64 teams each, with sixteen places filled through their own qualifying event. Doubles at a major is best of three sets throughout for both draws, and it is played almost entirely on the outside courts and the Grandstand until the closing rounds. For a specialist, a run at a major is a substantial part of an annual income, which is the context for the anger about what happened to the mixed event.
The wheelchair competitions run through the second week, in men's, women's and quad divisions, in both singles and doubles. Wheelchair tennis allows two bounces rather than one, and the second bounce may fall outside the court, which changes the geometry of a rally entirely: angles that would be winners in the standing game are retrievable, and the player who controls the centre of the court controls the point.
The junior championships fill the same stretch of the calendar, and the site also stages exhibition and legends events that exist mainly to fill sessions the main draw has thinned out. By the final weekend the singles draws need only two courts, and the rest of the programme is what keeps a site of this size worth opening.
Where the tournament sits in the season
The US Open is the last major of the year, and its position does specific things to who arrives in what condition.
The North American hard-court swing runs through the summer and funnels into New York, so most of the field reaches the tournament having played several weeks on a similar surface in similar heat. That is the opposite of the problem the year's first major creates, and it means form arriving into Flushing Meadows is unusually readable.
It also means accumulated fatigue. Players reaching the last week in New York have been competing since January, through three previous majors and a full calendar of mandatory events, and the fifth set of a fourth-round match in humid conditions is where a season's mileage shows. The tournament sits far enough into the year that withdrawals and mid-match retirements are more common than at the Australian Open, and that is a calendar effect rather than a New York one.
For ranking purposes the timing is consequential in a different way. Points won here sit on a player's ranking for the following twelve months, and because the majors carry the largest allocation available, a deep run in September fixes a player's seeding at the next three majors. A first-round exit does the reverse, and the mechanics are set out in the piece on how ranking points are earned and dropped.
Electronic calling, the shot clock and the pace of play
The US Open has been consistently first to adopt anything that shortens a match or removes a human judgement.
It was an early adopter of the serve clock, which gives a player a fixed count of seconds between points and puts the enforcement on a visible timer rather than an umpire's discretion. It moved to automated line calling across its courts, dismissing line judges entirely, and the calls are announced by recorded voice with no challenge process because there is nothing left to challenge.
The effect on watching is real. Play moves faster, the ritual of the challenge and the crowd's slow clap while the animation loads has gone, and the ball-toss routines that used to stretch to twenty-five seconds have been cut back. Some of the theatre went with it. What replaced the theatre is a match that finishes closer to its scheduled slot, which for a tournament running two ticketed sessions a day in prime time is not a small thing.
What to watch for, and how to judge a session
Check the roof status before anything else. A closed Ashe is a different tournament from an open one: no wind, warmer air, a faster ball and a serve that gets more reward. If a match moves indoors mid-tournament, expect the bigger server to gain and the counterpuncher to struggle.
Watch the wind swirling in Arthur Ashe with the roof open. A bowl that tall and that wide does not produce a steady breeze; it produces eddies that change direction between the ends, so a player can be serving into a headwind at one end and across a crosswind at the other. Ball tosses drift, lobs land short, and the player who works out which end suits their serve usually holds more comfortably there for the rest of the match.
Watch which court a match is given. The scheduling tells you what the tournament thinks of a player, and a name moved from the Grandstand to the evening session in Ashe has been promoted in the eyes of the people who sell tickets. It also has consequences on court, because the two venues play differently and the atmosphere in a full night session in Ashe is unlike any other stadium in the sport.
Watch the changeovers on a hot afternoon. Ice towels, extended sitting, a player asking the umpire about conditions: those are the visible signals that the heat provision is in play. If the break comes after the second set, you are watching a match where the loser of the next set is likely to be the one who managed the break badly rather than the one who was outplayed.
Watch the second serve in the last two games of a set. Under a serve clock and in humid air, a tiring player's second-serve speed and placement decay before anything else does, and a returner stepping in on second serves is usually reading fatigue rather than gambling. That pattern is the single most reliable early warning that a set is about to turn, and it is visible several games before the scoreboard reflects it.
Watch the qualifying week if you can get to it. A free ticket, an outside court and three rounds of players fighting for the most valuable thing available to them is the best tennis-to-cost ratio anywhere in the sport.
The US Open is the major that has been most willing to change itself, and every change it has made points the same way: towards a product that fills a very large building twice a day and finishes when the broadcast says it should. Whether that has cost it something is a fair question, and it is one worth asking with the rest of our tennis coverage to hand. More explainers on the rules, the rankings and the surfaces are on the blog.
Common questions
How long is the US Open?
Fifteen days, since 2025. The tournament moved its start from Monday to Sunday that year and spread the first round across three days, joining the French Open and the Australian Open at that length and leaving Wimbledon as the only major still running fourteen days. Qualifying and Fan Week run in the week before that, so the site is open to the public for about three weeks in total.
What is the difference between a day session and a night session at the US Open?
They are separate ticketed events on the two biggest courts, with the arena cleared between them. A day-session ticket for Arthur Ashe Stadium admits you to the afternoon matches only, and the evening programme requires its own ticket. Grounds passes cover the outside courts and do not admit you to either session in the main stadium.
Which US Open courts have a roof?
Two. Arthur Ashe Stadium's retractable roof was completed for the 2016 tournament, and the rebuilt Louis Armstrong Stadium opened with one in 2018. Armstrong is naturally ventilated rather than air conditioned, so closing its roof keeps the rain out without turning it into a sealed indoor court.
Does the US Open have a heat rule?
Yes. When on-site conditions cross the referee's threshold, players are entitled to a ten-minute break away from the court: women after the second set and men after the third. The men's entitlement was added at the 2018 tournament, bringing the two draws into line.
What happened to US Open mixed doubles?
It was rebuilt in 2025 as a two-day event staged during qualifying week rather than inside the main draw, cut to sixteen teams, and given short sets with a match tie-break in place of a third. Entry was based mainly on combined singles ranking, which drew heavy criticism from doubles specialists, and a qualifying route was added for 2026 in response.
What is the US Open final set tie-break?
A deciding set that reaches six games all is settled by a tie-break to ten points, won by two clear. The US Open has used some form of deciding-set tie-break since 1970, longer than any other major, though the specific ten-point version dates from the 2022 agreement that made all four events match.
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