LTA Advantage Wimbledon Ballot: How Members Get Tickets

Every year the All England Club hands its surplus from the Championships to the Lawn Tennis Association, and it has done so for long enough that the arrangement is one of the defining features of how tennis is funded in this country. Rather less well known is that money is not the only thing that travels down that pipe. A quantity of tickets goes with it, and the association distributes those to its own members and to the clubs registered with it, by a draw that most people who play tennis in England have never got round to entering.

That draw is the subject here. It is not a secret, it is not a loophole, and it is not a way of buying a ticket that the public cannot have. It is a members' benefit attached to a membership that costs less than a decent racket, and it is chronically under-entered relative to the number of people eligible for it.

What LTA Advantage is, and what it replaced

The Lawn Tennis Association has been the governing body for tennis in Great Britain since 1888, and for most of its history individual affiliation ran through clubs rather than directly. The association later built a direct individual scheme, first under the British Tennis Membership name and then, after a rebuild of the whole offer, as LTA Advantage.

Advantage is a consumer membership rather than a licence to compete. It carries a membership number, an online account, and a bundle of benefits that varies by tier: entry to LTA competitions, a rating and ranking record where you play, insurance in some tiers, retail and coaching discounts, and the ticket ballots. Playing tennis is not a condition of joining. A great many members are spectators who joined for exactly one of those benefits.

The reason the ticket ballot exists as a members' benefit is structural rather than promotional. The LTA receives an allocation of Championships tickets as part of its relationship with the All England Club, and it has to distribute them somehow. Handing them to members by random draw is the least contentious method available and the one that most obviously connects the tournament's proceeds to the people who play the game. What the association does with the rest of the Wimbledon money — the coaching, the facilities, the pathway — is set out in our guide to what the LTA does for British tennis.

There is a second distribution channel worth naming now because it confuses people later. LTA-registered venues, meaning clubs and centres formally affiliated to the association, receive their own allocations and run their own internal draws among their members. If you belong to a tennis club, you may have two entirely separate routes without realising it, and the club one is often far less competitive because fewer members bother.

The membership tiers and where the ballot sits

Advantage has been sold in tiers, with a free entry level and paid options above it. The ticket ballots have consistently sat with the paid tiers rather than the free one, which is the single most important thing to establish before you assume you are covered.

The naming has moved around. The scheme has used labels along the lines of a supporter or fan level, a full individual level and a competing-player level, and the association has revised both the names and the benefit bundles since launch. Rather than trust a description written at any particular moment, including this one, read the current membership page and look for ballot entry listed explicitly among the tier's benefits. If it is not named, it is not included.

Tier type	Typical purpose	Ballot access
Free entry level	Newsletter, offers, basic account	Generally not included
Paid individual level	Spectator and recreational player benefits	Generally included
Paid competing level	Ratings, competition entry, insurance	Generally included
Registered venue membership	Belonging to an affiliated club	Separate club allocation, run by the club

The registered venue route, which is not the same thing

A registered venue is a club, park site or indoor centre formally affiliated to the association, and affiliation carries its own ticket entitlement. The venue receives an allocation, decides how to distribute it among its members, and administers that itself. Some clubs run a straightforward random draw. Some weight it by committee service, by years of membership, or by who worked the bar at the summer tournament. A few operate a rotation so that everybody gets a turn over a period of years, which is the fairest system anybody has devised and the one least likely to be adopted by a club with three hundred members and eight tickets.

None of that is the LTA's business and the association does not police it beyond requiring that the tickets are not sold on. What it means for you is that a member of an affiliated club has a second, entirely separate route, and that route is often less contested than the national draw because a proportion of the membership never asks. If you play at a club, find out who handles the Wimbledon allocation and get your name on whatever list they keep. It is frequently a spreadsheet maintained by one person, and being on it costs nothing.

The practical upshot for the national scheme is that the cheapest paid tier is normally the one to buy if tickets are the motive, because ballot entry does not improve at higher tiers. You do not get more entries by paying more. A more expensive membership buys competition eligibility, insurance and other things unrelated to the draw, and a member who joins purely for the ballot and buys the top tier has spent money on benefits they will not use. The full spread of what each level contains is covered in our guide to LTA Advantage membership.

Who is eligible to enter

Four conditions have to hold at once, and missing any of them is the reason most disappointed members were never actually in the draw.

You must hold a qualifying membership tier. You must hold it on the date the LTA specifies as the qualifying date, which is usually set before the opt-in window closes rather than at the moment of the draw. You must be over eighteen, because the ticket is a contract and the association will not form one with a child. And you must complete the opt-in.

That last one deserves emphasis, because it is the single largest source of confusion. Membership does not enter you. A member who joined, paid, and did nothing else is not in the ballot and will not be told they are missing. The opt-in is a separate, deliberate action taken inside your LTA account during a window, and it has to be repeated each year.

Junior members and household accounts

Junior members exist and can hold ratings and enter competitions, but the ballot entry is an adult matter. Where a family has an account structure covering several people, the adult account holder is the one who opts in and the one to whom any successful offer is made. Tickets obtained through the ballot are then used by whoever the member takes, subject to the normal conditions of entry, which do not require every occupant of a seat to be an LTA member.

One consequence is worth spelling out for households. Two adults in the same house, each holding their own qualifying membership and each opting in, are two entries rather than one. That is not a loophole and the association does not treat it as one — they are two members who have each paid a subscription. It does mean that a couple deciding whether to hold one membership or two should understand that the second one is buying a second entry, which changes the arithmetic on whether it is worth the money.

Residency, age and the small print

The association's terms set out where members must be resident and how the age condition is applied, and both are the sort of clause that is uninteresting until it disqualifies you. Read them once when you join. The ballot terms may also require you to hold your membership continuously between the qualifying date and the draw, which catches members who let a subscription lapse for a fortnight while a card is replaced. Automatic renewal, unglamorous as it is, removes most of that risk.

The opt-in window, and the only date that matters

The association opens a window each year in which eligible members can opt into the Wimbledon draw, and it closes that window on a stated date. Miss it and there is no appeal, no late entry and no reserve list. That deadline is the only date in the whole process that has any consequence for you.

1. 1MembershipHold a qualifying paid Advantage tier, and hold it on the qualifying date the LTA names.
2. 2Opt-in window opensMembers are emailed and can enter through their LTA account. Entry is a separate action from being a member.
3. 3Opt-in window closesThe deadline is absolute. Members who did not opt in are not in the draw and receive no further contact about it.
4. 4The drawNames are drawn at random from the eligible pool. Position in the queue to opt in has no bearing on the outcome.
5. 5NotificationSuccessful members are emailed an offer of a specific day and court, with a deadline to accept and pay.
6. 6Purchase and issuePayment is taken at the ticket's face value and the ticket is issued to the member, non-transferable, in the usual way.

The sequence the LTA has followed. The calendar dates for each stage are set fresh each year by the association and are deliberately not reproduced here.

The window itself tends to fall well before the grass season, months ahead of the Championships, which surprises people who imagine ticket allocation as a spring activity. It is not. The whole ticketing apparatus for a fortnight in early summer runs on a timetable that starts in the previous calendar year and is largely settled long before anyone has hit a ball on grass.

The association notifies members by email when the window opens. That notification is the thing to make sure you receive, which means checking that your account email is current and that LTA mail is not being filtered. A membership renewed by direct debit and forgotten about is a membership whose email address may be three jobs out of date.

Why entering on the first morning gains you nothing

This needs saying plainly because the belief is remarkably persistent: the LTA ballot is a random draw, not a queue. A member who opts in within four minutes of the window opening and a member who opts in on the final afternoon have identical prospects.

The same is true of the length of your membership. The association has described the draw as random among eligible entrants, and it has not published any weighting for tenure, for having been unsuccessful previously, or for how much you have spent with it. If it ever introduces one, it will say so, because a weighted ballot is a selling point and no governing body hides those. Until then, the assumption to work on is a flat draw.

What early entry does buy is insurance against yourself. Windows close, emails get buried, and the failure mode for almost everyone who wanted tickets and did not get them is not bad luck in the draw but never having been in it. Opt in on the day the email arrives, treat it as a two-minute administrative task, and then forget about it.

There is one legitimate way to improve your position, and it is not a trick. Enter every draw you are eligible for. Members frequently opt into the Wimbledon ballot and ignore the ballots for the grass-court events, the Davis Cup and Billie Jean King Cup ties, and the other competitions the association allocates tickets for, which is leaving a substantial part of the benefit unused.

How the draw is run and how you are told

The LTA closes the window, draws from the eligible pool, and emails the results. Successful members receive an offer rather than a ticket: a specific day, a specific court or ticket type, and a deadline by which to accept and pay.

Two features of that offer catch people out. The first is that you do not choose. As with the club's own public draw, the day and the court come to you, and a member hoping for the second Wednesday on Centre Court may be offered a first-week Tuesday on No.3 Court. Declining is permitted and the ticket goes to somebody else. The second is that the deadline is short. An offer sitting unread in an inbox for a week is usually an offer that has lapsed.

1. 1An offer, not a choiceA named day and a named court or ticket type, allocated by the draw rather than selected by you.
2. 2A short acceptance windowA deadline to confirm and pay. Missing it releases the ticket to another member.
3. 3Face valueThe price is the club's published price for that ticket. The ballot is not a discount scheme.
4. 4Named and non-transferableThe ticket is issued to the member and cannot be resold. Taking guests is fine; selling the seat is not.
5. 5No substitutionYou cannot swap the day or the court, and there is no waiting list for a better offer.

The shape of a typical successful outcome. Court, day, quantity and the acceptance period are determined by the LTA's allocation in the year concerned.

Unsuccessful members are normally told as well, which is a courtesy the association does not have to extend and one that at least closes the loop. There is no carry-over. Being unsuccessful this year gives you nothing next year beyond the same odds as everybody else, which is a source of some frustration among long-standing members and an entirely defensible position for a body distributing a scarce public good.

Coaches, officials and volunteers

Beyond the general members' draw sit several allocations aimed at the people who keep the sport running, and they are meaningfully easier to succeed in because the eligible pools are so much smaller.

Accredited coaches registered with the association have their own route, tied to holding a current accreditation rather than to Advantage membership as such. Officials — umpires, referees and the people who run competitions — are treated similarly, with allocations connected to activity and licensing status rather than to a paid membership tier. Volunteers at registered venues and in county structures have been recognised through nomination-based schemes, where a club or county puts names forward rather than individuals applying.

The logic behind these allocations is worth understanding, because it explains why they are structured as recognition rather than as a benefit you can buy. Officiating and volunteering in British tennis are overwhelmingly unpaid. County competitions, junior circuits, club leagues and the whole apparatus of recreational play run on people who give up weekends for expenses at best, and a governing body with a scarce and highly desirable asset in its gift has an obvious use for some of it. A Centre Court ticket is a thank-you the association can afford to give and the recipient could not otherwise obtain.

That framing also sets the expectation correctly. These routes are not a shortcut for someone who fancies a ticket and notices that officials have better odds. Accreditation and licensing involve training, assessment and continuing activity, and the ticket is a consequence of doing the work rather than a reason to start. Anyone genuinely interested in the officiating side will find the path described in our guide to becoming a tennis official in Britain, and the tickets are the least interesting thing about it.

The mechanics vary and the association changes them from time to time, so the correct move for anyone in these groups is to ask through their own channel — the coaching accreditation portal, the officiating structure, the county association — rather than assuming the general members' page describes their position. The qualification routes themselves are covered in our guide to LTA coaching qualifications.

There is also a competitor route worth knowing about, distinct from all of the above. Players who compete in the association's competition structure interact with the ticketing system through their playing record rather than their spectator membership, which is a different subject and one tied to the performance pathway rather than to the Advantage scheme.

Entering the LTA ballot and the public ballot together

These are two separate draws, run by two separate organisations, against two separate allocations. Entering one does not disqualify you from the other, does not reduce your chances in it, and is not detected by anything.

• 1888LTA founded
• 1877First Championships
• 14Days of play

Foundation dates and the length of the Championships, which are fixed. The allocation each body distributes is not published in a form worth charting.

The public ballot is the All England Club's own, open to anyone who registers an account, run months in advance, and covering the great majority of publicly available seats. It has its own eligibility rules, its own window and its own persistent myths, which we have taken apart in our guide to how the Wimbledon ballot works.

The members' ballot is smaller, drawn from a much smaller pool of entrants, and the sensible interpretation is that your individual odds in it are probably better — though neither body publishes the numbers that would let anyone state that with confidence, and it would be dishonest to pretend otherwise. What can be said with certainty is that entering both gives you two independent chances instead of one, at a cost of a few minutes and a modest membership fee.

Feature	LTA members' ballot	Public ballot
Run by	Lawn Tennis Association	All England Lawn Tennis Club
Who can enter	Eligible paid Advantage members who opt in	Members of the public with a registered account
Cost to enter	Membership fee, no separate entry charge	Free to enter
Choice of day or court	None, allocated by the draw	None, allocated by the draw
Effect on the other draw	None	None

Add the two other public routes and you have four independent shots at the fortnight. The Queue takes commitment rather than luck and is described in our guide to the Wimbledon Queue. Grounds admission plus the afternoon resale scheme is the cheapest way onto the site at all, and how far it goes is set out in our guide to the Wimbledon ground pass. Anyone determined to attend should be using all four rather than picking one.

Ballots beyond Wimbledon: the British grass season

Members who treat their Advantage account as a Wimbledon lottery ticket and nothing else are missing the better half of the benefit. The association allocates tickets for events across the British calendar, and the grass-court tournaments in particular are a great deal easier to get into.

The June grass season runs through a set of events in the weeks between the French Open and the Championships: the men's and women's tournaments at the Queen's Club in west London, the combined event at Devonshire Park in Eastbourne, and the tournaments at Nottingham and at the Edgbaston Priory Club in Birmingham, with the challenger-level week at Ilkley in Yorkshire alongside them. The structure of that fortnight and why it is so compressed is explained in our guide to the English grass court season.

These events sell tickets openly and rarely sell out in the way the Championships do, so a members' ballot for them is less a lottery than a priority window. Where they are genuinely competitive is the finals weekend at Queen's, which has the smallest capacity of the main grass venues and the most concentrated demand. Our guides to the Queen's Club Championships and to Eastbourne go into which days are worth targeting at each.

Great Britain's home ties in the Davis Cup and the Billie Jean King Cup are also allocated to members, and those are the events where membership pays for itself most obviously. Home ties are staged at varying venues around the country, capacities are modest by comparison with a Grand Slam, and the atmosphere at a home tie is unlike anything at Wimbledon. The history of both campaigns is covered in our guides to Great Britain in the Davis Cup and the Billie Jean King Cup.

There is a scheduling point that makes the grass ballots more useful than they first appear. Because the warm-up events run in the two weeks immediately before the Championships, the fields at Queen's, Eastbourne, Nottingham and Birmingham contain a substantial proportion of the players who will be seeded at Wimbledon a fortnight later, playing on the same surface with the same preparation. A Thursday at Devonshire Park costs a fraction of a Championships day and puts you within a few metres of players who will be on Centre Court before the month is out. Anyone whose interest is the tennis rather than the occasion should be entering those ballots first and treating Wimbledon as the bonus.

The corollary is that the two are not substitutes. Nobody attends Eastbourne instead of Wimbledon and comes away feeling they have been to Wimbledon, because the thing being sold at SW19 is partly the institution. But a member who enters every ballot the association runs will end most years having seen live tennis of a high standard, and a member who enters only the Wimbledon draw will end most years having seen none.

What membership costs, and how the tiers are structured

Prices change annually and this page does not carry them, for the same reason it does not carry ticket prices: a figure written down here would be wrong within a year and would be quoted anyway. What can usefully be described is the shape.

The free tier costs nothing and delivers communications, offers and an account. The paid tiers are annual subscriptions in the range of a club membership rather than a season ticket — the sort of sum that a single ticket to the Championships would cover several times over. There have generally been two or three of them, differentiated by whether you compete, whether you want insurance cover for coaching and play, and how much of the retail and partner discount programme you expect to use.

The structural question for someone joining purely for the ballot is whether the cheapest qualifying tier includes the entry. Historically it has. Because that is precisely the sort of detail an association reviews when it restructures a membership scheme, verify it on the day you join rather than relying on the arrangement holding for ever.

Two further points on value. Renewals are usually automatic, which is convenient and also the reason people discover in June that they have been paying for four years without once opting into a ballot. And membership is annual rather than tied to the Championships cycle, so joining in the wrong month can mean paying for a year that spans only one opt-in window. If tickets are the motive, join in time for the window rather than in the week you remember that Wimbledon exists.

Is it worth joining for the tickets alone

On a narrow reading, the answer is a qualified yes, and the qualification matters.

The cost is small and the entry is free once you have paid it, so the expected value calculation is unusually favourable even at long odds. One successful draw across several years of membership pays back the subscription comfortably, and you can use the same membership to enter the grass-court and cup ballots, where the odds are considerably kinder and where nobody has to be lucky at all to get a seat at Nottingham or Ilkley.

The honest caveat is that nobody outside the association can tell you the odds. Neither the size of the members' allocation nor the number of members who opt in is published in a form that allows a probability to be worked out, and anyone quoting you one has made it up. What is knowable is the direction: the members' pool is far smaller than the public one, and a benefit that most eligible members forget to claim is a benefit whose effective competition is lower than its nominal competition.

The dishonest version of this advice would be to promise that joining gets you into Wimbledon. It does not. It buys one more entry in one more random draw, alongside the public ballot, the Queue and the resale scheme, and the correct posture is to hold all four and expect none of them in any particular year. What membership definitely does is put a small amount of money into the body that runs the courts most of us actually play on, which is a better reason to join than the tennis you might get to watch. The rest of what that organisation does with it is in our tennis section and across the wider England guides.