Wimbledon Order of Play Explained: How Matches Are Scheduled
The Wimbledon order of play explained in full: who compiles it, why Centre Court starts late, what not before means, and how rain forces matches to move.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Wimbledon Explained22 min read
- Match courts
- 18
- Outside courts start
- 11am
- Local curfew
- 11pm
- Schedule set by
- The Referee
At some point every evening during the Championships, a small office inside the grounds decides what several hundred thousand people will do the following day. Which matches go on Centre Court. Which of the two remaining British players gets the show court and which gets court twelve. Whether the doubles pair who have waited two days will finally get on. The document that comes out of that room is a single page of court numbers and names, and it is the most consequential piece of paper at the tournament.
It is also widely misread. The order of play looks like a timetable and behaves like an intention, and the gap between those two things is where most spectator frustration at Wimbledon lives.
Who compiles it, and when it appears
The tournament Referee is responsible for the order of play. That is a formal role under the rules governing Grand Slam events, not a courtesy title, and it comes with real authority: the referee's office decides which matches are played, on which courts, in what sequence, and whether play continues, is suspended or is abandoned.
The schedule for each day is compiled after that day's play has concluded, for the simple reason that it cannot be compiled before. Until the last ball is struck, the office does not know for certain which matches finished, which were suspended overnight, which players are still in two events, or how far behind the doubles draws have fallen. The document is published in the evening. The exact hour has moved around over the years and is not a rule of the competition, so it is safer to expect an evening release than to set an alarm for a particular time.
Overnight revisions happen. If a match is suspended and has to be resumed, or a player withdraws, or the forecast changes materially, the published order can be amended before play starts. Anyone travelling in should check the schedule again in the morning rather than relying on what they saw the night before.
- Play finishesThe office learns which matches completed, which were suspended, and which players are still alive in more than one event.
- Incomplete rounds are foundAnything unfinished is identified first, because it blocks every round behind it.
- Singles are placedRemaining singles matches are allocated to courts, with the show courts built as three or four match cards.
- Doubles and juniors fill the gapsThe other events take whatever court time is left, weighted heavily towards the second week.
- Constraints are resolvedRest intervals, players in two draws, broadcast slots and heavily worn courts are worked through against each other.
- The schedule is publishedReleased during the evening, and open to revision overnight if a match or the forecast changes.
The sequence the referee's office works through each evening, described from the published rules rather than an internal document.
What the office is actually solving
The referee's office is working on a constrained scheduling problem with several objectives that pull against each other:
- Every remaining match in five singles and doubles events has to be fitted onto eighteen courts within the available daylight, or under a roof.
- Players need adequate rest between matches, and players in more than one event need their commitments spaced.
- Attractive matches should be distributed across the grounds rather than stacked on one court, so that ground-pass holders and show-court ticket holders both get something.
- Broadcast requirements have to be accommodated on the show courts.
- Courts that have taken heavy wear need to be rested where possible.
- And the whole thing has to leave enough slack to absorb rain.
No solution satisfies all of those. What gets published each night is a compromise, and the referee is generally candid about it being one.
The referee's other powers
Scheduling is only part of the role. The same office rules on whether conditions are fit for play, orders suspensions, decides when a roof closes, grants or refuses requests to move a match, applies the code of conduct where a chair umpire escalates, and administers withdrawals and walkovers. Deputy referees handle individual courts and report upward, which is how a tournament with eighteen simultaneous matches maintains a single consistent standard on questions like light and playability.
Understanding that the scheduler and the on-court authority are the same office explains a good deal about how the day runs. When rain arrives, the person deciding whether court fourteen is playable is also the person who has to rebuild the afternoon if it is not, and those two judgements inevitably inform each other. A referee who suspects the weather will worsen will make different calls at two o'clock than one who expects it to clear.
Why Centre Court starts after everything else
The outside courts begin at 11am. The show courts start considerably later, with Centre Court last of all, traditionally at 1.30pm. To a spectator holding a Centre Court ticket, this can look like an odd piece of ceremony. It is not.
The logic is arithmetic. Centre Court and No.1 Court host three matches each on a typical day, and those matches are the long ones — best-of-five men's singles, high-quality women's matches, occasionally a marquee doubles. Three men's five-setters back to back will comfortably exceed nine hours of court time once changeovers, sets and rest periods are counted. Start such a programme at 11am and you finish at eight in the evening on a good day; start it later and, without a roof, you would not finish at all.
The outside courts host four matches each and need every hour of daylight to get through them. They therefore start as early as the rules and the grounds staff allow. The show courts, which have floodlights and, on two of them, roofs, can afford to begin later because they have a mechanism for extending the day at the other end.
The second reason, which is about the audience
There is a commercial and practical layer too. A show-court ticket is expensive and is bought as a day out; a start in the early afternoon lets ticket holders travel, eat and be in their seats without an unreasonable morning. It also concentrates the biggest matches into the part of the day when the largest television audience is available, which matters to the broadcasters who fund a good deal of the tournament.
A later start means the last match on Centre Court frequently runs into the evening. That is not an accident of scheduling; it is the design, and it is what makes the curfew such a live issue.
The show-court hierarchy
Wimbledon has eighteen match courts, and they are not equal. The distinctions matter because they determine who can watch what.
| Court | Roughly what it hosts | Access |
|---|---|---|
| Centre Court | The biggest matches, all singles semi-finals and finals | Show-court ticket only |
| No.1 Court | High-profile matches, quarter-finals, some finals | Show-court ticket only |
| No.2 Court | Strong match-ups, four matches a day in week one | Show-court ticket only |
| No.3 Court | Strong match-ups, four matches a day in week one | Show-court ticket only |
| Courts 4 to 18 | The bulk of the early rounds, doubles, juniors | Ground pass |
Centre Court and No.1 Court both have retractable roofs, Centre since 2009 and No.1 since 2019, and both have floodlights. The other courts have neither, which is the single most important fact about how a wet day unfolds. What each court is like to sit in, and which ones are worth queuing for inside the grounds, is covered in our guide to Wimbledon's show courts and outside courts.
How a court gets its programme
Centre Court typically carries three matches, and the convention is to open with a strong but not necessarily the strongest fixture, place a contrasting match second, and finish with something that will hold an evening audience. No.1 Court is built the same way. No.2 and No.3 carry four matches each and take the overflow of high-quality fixtures that will not fit on the top two, which is why they are frequently the best-value show-court tickets at the tournament.
The outside courts take everything else, and in the first week that includes a great deal of excellent tennis. A first-round match between two unseeded players on court sixteen is still a Grand Slam match between two of the best few hundred players alive.
What "not before" actually promises
The clause that causes the most confusion is the smallest one on the page. A match listed as "not before 2pm" will not begin earlier than two o'clock. That is the entire commitment. It says nothing whatsoever about how much later than two o'clock the match might start.
The clause exists because some matches cannot be scheduled by position alone. A player who is also in the doubles cannot start a singles match while their doubles is still on court. A match involving a player whose previous round finished late may need a guaranteed minimum interval. In each case the referee protects the match with a time floor rather than a queue position.
| Notation | What it means | What it guarantees |
|---|---|---|
| First match, 11am | Play starts at the court's opening time | A start time, weather permitting |
| Followed by | Begins after the preceding match on that court ends | Sequence only, no time |
| Not before 2pm | Will not start earlier than 2pm | A floor, not a start time |
| To be arranged | Court and time not yet fixed | Nothing |
The practical advice for a spectator is straightforward. Treat "not before" as the earliest possible moment you need to be in your seat, and assume the match will start later. On a day where a preceding five-setter goes the distance, a not-before-2pm match can begin three hours after its stated time and no rule has been broken.
A worked example of how a day slips
Take a No.2 Court card of four matches, opening at 11am. The first is a women's singles that goes to a deciding set and takes two and a quarter hours, so the second match begins around a quarter past one rather than the hour or so after eleven that an optimistic spectator assumed. That second match is a men's five-setter and takes four hours. It is now past five o'clock, and the third match on the card has not started.
Nothing has gone wrong. No rule has been broken, nobody is at fault, and the day is running exactly as tennis runs. But a spectator who arrived at three for the third match has been standing for two hours, and a spectator who came for the fourth may not see it at all, because the light will beat it. This is the ordinary arithmetic of a sport with no clock, and it is the reason experienced Wimbledon-goers plan around the first match on a court rather than the last.
Balancing five competitions on eighteen courts
The singles draws get the attention. They are not the scheduling problem.
The men's and women's singles run to seven rounds each from draws of 128, which is a large but predictable volume that shrinks by half every round. The difficulty comes from everything else: men's doubles, women's doubles, mixed doubles, the junior singles and doubles events, the wheelchair competitions and the invitation doubles, all of which have to be threaded through whatever court time the singles leaves.
The ordering principle is a hierarchy of protection. Singles matches are scheduled first and protected most. Doubles fill the gaps. Junior and invitation events are largely confined to the second week, when the singles draws have thinned and courts start coming free. The wheelchair events also sit in the second week and have their own compressed timetable.
The player in two events
The hardest individual case is the player competing in both singles and doubles, or in doubles and mixed. Their matches cannot be adjacent, cannot overlap, and cannot be scheduled so that a long singles match leaves them walking onto a doubles court twenty minutes later. Every such player constrains the schedule of three or four other people, and in the second week, when a handful of players are in multiple draws simultaneously, those constraints propagate through the whole day.
This is one of the underrated arguments for the fourteen-day format. An extra day of court time gives the office more room to separate a player's commitments, which is part of why the shift away from the old rest day helped the doubles draws more than it helped the singles — a change explained in full in our guide to Wimbledon's middle Sunday.
British players and the show-court question
The suspicion is perennial: that British players get show courts they have not earned. The reality is more mixed and more defensible than either the accusation or the official line suggests.
Home interest is a legitimate scheduling factor and every major applies it. A tournament exists partly to be watched by the public in the country that hosts it, and a British player in the second round is a bigger domestic draw than a higher-ranked player nobody in the audience has heard of. The referee weighs that alongside seeding, the quality of the match-up, and the need to distribute good matches across the grounds.
What does not happen is automatic promotion. A British wild card in the first round will very often be on an outside court, sometimes on court eighteen, playing in front of a few hundred people. Show-court allocation tends to arrive after a win, when a player has both demonstrated they belong in the round and generated the interest that justifies the seat allocation. Seeding also constrains the picture more than most spectators realise, since seeded players carry an expectation of show-court exposure regardless of nationality — the mechanics of which are set out in our explainer on how Wimbledon seeding works.
The cost of a show court to the player
It is worth noting that a show court is not universally desired. Centre Court is a slower environment to play in than an outside court, with a longer walk-on, a formal introduction, a larger and more attentive crowd, and — in the late match — the possibility of a suspension for bad light or a mid-match roof closure. Some players prefer the anonymity and the rhythm of court twelve, and say so. The referee's office is scheduling for the tournament rather than for any individual's comfort, but the assumption that every player wants the biggest stage is not reliable.
Men's and women's matches, and who gets Centre Court
A Centre Court card of three matches has to be divided between two singles draws, and the division gets noticed. Somebody counts every year, and the count is usually published before the second week is out.
The referee's office does not work to a quota. It works to a set of factors — round, seeding, likely quality, home interest, broadcast, and the need to leave a ground-pass holder something worth watching — applied to whichever matches are available on a given day, with no rule stating that the opening or closing slot belongs to either draw. That absence is deliberate. It is also why the argument never resolves: a discretionary system produces outcomes that can be counted, and a count with no stated target to measure it against will always look like evidence of something.
Two structural reasons keep the numbers from coming out even, and they are worth separating from the discretionary ones. Men's singles is best of five and women's best of three, so a card that finishes at a defensible hour cannot be three men's matches; some mixing is forced by the clock rather than chosen. And in the first week both draws are running the same round simultaneously, which hands the office a genuine choice, whereas from the quarter-finals onwards the two draws play on alternate days and the composition of a card is settled by the calendar before anyone exercises judgement at all.
The AELTC's public position has been that the two draws are treated equally and that any imbalance on a particular day reflects the matches available. Players, including champions of both draws, have said at various times that they do not accept it. Both things can be said in good faith, because they are about different objects: the club is describing a process, and the players are describing an outcome.
The finals weekend is the one part of the schedule where treatment is fixed rather than discretionary. The ladies' singles final closes the second Saturday, the gentlemen's the second Sunday, and neither has ever had to compete for a slot. Everything before that is judgement, exercised nightly by an office with more tennis than court time, and judgement does not produce tidy splits.
What the broadcasters get
Broadcast rights fund a substantial part of every Grand Slam, and rights holders have input into show-court scheduling at all four. Pretending otherwise would be naive.
What separates Wimbledon from the other majors is what the broadcasters do not get. There is no night session. The Australian Open, the US Open and Roland-Garros all sell a separate evening ticket that puts a marquee match on court after the day session has cleared, generating a second full house and a prime-time audience. Wimbledon does not, and the eleven o'clock curfew makes it structurally impossible to introduce one.
That single absence shapes the whole schedule. Without a night session there is no incentive to hold back a match for a later slot, so the strongest fixtures go on in the afternoon and the day builds towards an evening finish rather than restarting for one. It is a commercial sacrifice, and it is one of the more concrete examples of the club declining revenue in order to keep the tournament's shape.
Rain, reallocation and moving a match
The moment rain arrives, the published order of play stops being a schedule and becomes a starting position.
Two things happen. On Centre Court and No.1 Court the roofs close and play continues, which takes perhaps half an hour including the time needed to condition the air underneath. On the other sixteen courts, covers go on and everything stops. The referee's office then begins rebuilding the day around the courts that still work.
Matches get moved. A fixture scheduled for court six can be reassigned to No.1 Court if a slot opens; a match on a show court can be pushed to a later day; a match already in progress on an outside court, if suspended, will usually resume on the same court but does not have to. Players are notified, given a warm-up allocation and expected to be ready. There is no appeal.
What gets prioritised in a backlog
When there is more tennis than daylight, the ordering is broadly this: matches already in progress, then singles matches from the earliest incomplete round, then doubles, then everything else. The reasoning is that an incomplete round blocks the round after it, so a backlog at the front of the draw is worth clearing before anything glamorous is added. It also explains why, on a badly disrupted day, the roofed courts sometimes host a match between two players nobody has heard of while a headline fixture waits: the unheralded match is holding up a round, and the headline one is not. The full procedural picture, including what happens to tickets, is in our guide to Wimbledon rain delay rules.
Suspension, resumption and the curfew
Play on the outside courts continues until the light goes. There is no floodlighting on courts 2 to 18, so the limit is genuinely the ability to see the ball, and the umpire and referee take that decision jointly with the players' safety in mind. A suspended match resumes the following day from the exact score, with the players getting a fresh warm-up.
The roofed courts operate differently. With the roof closed and the lights on, play can continue well into the evening, and it does. What stops it is not darkness but a planning condition: an eleven o'clock curfew agreed with the local authority, which exists to limit the impact of the tournament on the surrounding residential streets.
The curfew is close to absolute in practice. A match in progress at eleven does not get to finish; it is suspended and resumed the next day, however cruel the score. That has produced some genuinely painful endings over the years — a player two points from victory, sent off court until the following afternoon. The rule holds anyway, because it is a condition of the club's permission to have a roof at all rather than a preference it could revise. The background to it, and the handful of occasions it has caused real controversy, is covered in our Wimbledon curfew explainer, and the mechanics of roof closure itself in our Centre Court roof guide.
Why the office schedules backwards from eleven
Knowing the curfew exists, the referee's office builds the show-court programme with it in view. A three-match Centre Court card starting in the early afternoon has to be plausible within roughly nine and a half hours, which is one of the quiet constraints on what gets scheduled there. If the office suspects a day will run long, it can move a match to another court or another day in advance rather than risk a suspension at eleven.
That is also why the last match on Centre Court is not always the most attractive one available. A five-set epic scheduled third risks being cut in half by the curfew, and there is a reasonable argument that the best match of the day should not be the one at risk.
What a resumption actually resets
A resumed match is not a fresh start, and the asymmetry in it is why players dislike being sent off. The score carries over exactly, so somebody two points from victory on the Tuesday evening is still two points from victory on the Wednesday. Everything around the score has changed. Both players have slept, eaten and been coached. The court is cooler, the air heavier, the sun somewhere else entirely. Momentum, which is a loose word for a real thing, does not survive eighteen hours.
Who benefits is not predictable, and it depends almost entirely on which way the match was running when it stopped. A player being overrun tends to be glad of the interruption. A player in control almost never is. The referee's office takes no view on that, because taking one would amount to scheduling for a result.
The knock-on is felt more by spectators than by players. A suspended match resumes the next day, sometimes on a different court, and always at an hour that has to be found inside a card which was already full before it arrived. One overnight suspension on the first Thursday can still be pushing the outside-court schedule around on the Saturday.
How the second week changes everything
The scheduling problem in week one is volume. In week two it is scarcity.
By the second Monday the singles draws are down to sixteen players each, and by midweek to eight. There are more courts than there are singles matches, which sounds like a relief and is actually a different kind of difficulty: the tournament now needs to fill eighteen courts and a full day of broadcast with a shrinking number of fixtures.
| Stage | Singles matches remaining | Typical courts used |
|---|---|---|
| First round | 128 across both draws | All 18 |
| Fourth round | 16 across both draws | Show courts plus a few outside |
| Quarter-finals | 8 across both draws | Centre and No.1 |
| Semi-finals | 4 across both draws | Centre Court |
| Finals | 2 | Centre Court |
The gap is filled by the events that were squeezed in week one. Doubles moves onto the show courts. The junior draws take over the outside courts. The wheelchair competitions and the invitation doubles run through the closing days. From the quarter-finals onwards the singles is effectively a Centre Court and No.1 Court tournament, and the outside courts belong to everyone else.
Why the second week is a better ground pass than people think
Conventional wisdom holds that a ground pass is worth having in week one and worthless in week two, on the grounds that the singles has moved indoors to the show courts. That is only half right. What the second week loses in singles it gains in variety: doubles semi-finals, junior matches involving players who will be seeded at majors within a few years, wheelchair tennis played at a level that rewards close attention, and invitation doubles featuring former champions who can still play.
The crowds are also thinner on the outside courts, which means a seat rather than a scrum. Anyone whose priority is watching tennis at close quarters rather than seeing a famous name across a stadium will often get more from the second Wednesday than from the first.
The compression at the end
There is one structural squeeze at the finish. The men's singles semi-finals are played on the second Friday and the final on the second Sunday, giving those players a day between; the women's semi-finals are on the Thursday with the final on the Saturday. Both sets of finalists therefore get one clear day, which is deliberate and consistent. Doubles finals fill the remainder of the two closing afternoons, scheduled around the singles rather than in competition with it.
Reading the order of play with a ground pass
For a ground-pass holder the order of play is not a document to admire but a planning tool, and reading it well is the difference between a good day and a frustrating one.
Start by ignoring the show courts entirely. Courts 4 to 18 are your tournament, and each carries four matches beginning at 11am. Identify the two or three matches you most want, note which courts they are on, and check whether they are first, second, third or fourth in their court's sequence. A first match starts on time. A fourth match on a court with three preceding fixtures could begin anywhere between mid-afternoon and never.
Then think about geography. The outside courts are clustered, and moving between courts eight to eighteen takes a couple of minutes; moving from there to the No.2 Court queue takes longer. A realistic day involves two or three anchor matches and a willingness to be diverted by whatever you walk past.
The single best piece of practical advice is to arrive for the 11am start. The first hour is when every outside court is playing simultaneously, the crowds have not yet settled, and the courts are at their emptiest. By mid-afternoon the good matches have drawn crowds and standing room on the popular courts is gone. What a ground pass includes, where the standing areas are, and how the resale system feeds show-court seats back to ground-pass holders are all covered in our Wimbledon ground pass guide.
One more thing worth internalising. The order of play is a set of intentions published the night before by people who cannot control the weather, the length of a tennis match, or whether a player wakes up injured. It is remarkably accurate given those constraints, and it will still be wrong about something most days. Plan for that rather than against it. More of these guides are gathered on our England sport hub, and the broader tennis section covers the game beyond SW19.