US Open Qualifying: Format, Wild Cards and Lucky Losers
How US Open qualifying works in New York: 128 players, three rounds and 16 main-draw places per field, plus the USTA's wild cards and lucky loser rules.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished US Open & American Tennis26 min read
- Qualifying field
- 128 players per draw
- Rounds
- 3
- Main-draw places
- 16 per draw
- Match format
- Best of three sets
Two hundred and fifty-six players arrive at Flushing Meadows the week before the US Open with no place in it. Thirty-two leave that week with one.
US Open qualifying is a pair of 128-player tournaments, one for men and one for women, played over three rounds on the outside courts of the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center in Queens, New York. Win three matches and a player takes one of the 16 qualifiers' places in the 128-player main draw. Lose any of them and the tournament is over, unless a late withdrawal opens a door for a "lucky loser." Every match is best of three sets, men's included. Admission is free. The rest of each singles draw is filled by 104 direct entrants and eight wild cards handed out by the United States Tennis Association, and how those eight are chosen is the other half of this page.
US Open qualifying in one paragraph: 128 players, three rounds, 16 places
- 128Players who start
- 3Rounds to win
- 16Places in the main draw
- 32Seeded players
Figures apply to each singles field, men's and women's alike. The seed and wild card counts are those used in recent US Opens.
The design is as plain as a tournament can be. There are 128 players, so 64 matches in the first round, 32 in the second and 16 in the third. The 16 winners of the third round qualify. There is no fourth match, no playoff among the winners and no ranking of qualifiers against each other afterward. One through sixteen are equal.
It is also two tournaments, not one. The men's field and the women's field are drawn separately, seeded separately and played side by side on the same courts across the same days, under the Grand Slam rule book that governs all four majors. There is no qualifying for doubles. Doubles teams enter the main draw directly on their combined rankings.
Nobody gets a bye. The top seed in qualifying, usually a player ranked just outside the main-draw cut, plays the same three rounds as a college sophomore on a wild card.
- Direct entry by ranking104
- Qualifiers16
- Wild cards8
The standard composition of each main draw. Lucky losers and alternates replace withdrawn players and do not add to the total.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| Direct entry by ranking | 104 |
| Qualifiers | 16 |
| Wild cards | 8 |
The 16 places are one-eighth of the main draw. The proportion matters, because it means qualifiers are not a novelty in the first round: about one first-round match in four has a qualifier in it, and a few have two. A player who comes through has also just won three matches on these courts, in this weather, with these balls. The opponent across the net may not have played a competitive match in two weeks.
The same structure is used across professional tennis at smaller scale, and the general mechanics are set out in our explainer on how a tennis qualifying draw works. What follows is the New York version, and the parts of it that are particular to the USTA.
Who gets into the qualifying field: cut-offs, alternates and the ranking it takes
Entry is by ranking, and the ranking that counts is an old one.
The main draw is settled first. The Grand Slam rules take the ATP and WTA rankings from six weeks before the tournament and admit the top 104 players who have entered. That list is fixed on that date. A player who wins a title in the weeks after it does not move in, and a player whose ranking collapses does not move out.
The qualifying list is cut later, about four weeks before the main draw under the same rule book, from the next players down the rankings. A qualifying field of 128 with nine places held back for wild cards leaves 119 spots by ranking. Players returning from long injury layoffs can enter with a protected ranking, a frozen figure from before they were hurt, which takes some of those spots.
Roughly where the line falls
The cut-off is not a fixed number. It depends on who enters, who is injured and how many players ahead in the line have already been lifted into the main draw. As a guide, the last direct entrant to a major's main draw is usually ranked somewhere around 100, and the last direct entrant to its qualifying somewhere in the low-to-middle 200s. A player ranked 150 is comfortably in. A player ranked 260 is watching the withdrawal list. How those rankings are built in the first place is covered in our guide to how the ATP and WTA rankings work.
The alternates
Both lists move constantly between the entry deadline and the first ball. When a main-draw player withdraws before qualifying begins, the next player on the ranking list is promoted from qualifying into the main draw, and that promotion opens a qualifying place for the first name on the alternates list below. A single withdrawal at the top can ripple down through three or four players' travel plans.
Alternates who have not been promoted by the time they would need to fly can come to New York anyway and sign in on site, hoping for a last-minute opening. It is an expensive gamble for someone ranked 240.
One more thing about that six-week gap. It produces, most years, a player in qualifying who is plainly too good to be there: someone who was ranked 140 at the deadline and has since won two Challenger titles, or a former top-twenty player whose protected ranking has run out.
The 32 seeds and the 16 sections of the qualifying draw
A 128-player draw splits naturally into 16 sections of eight players, and the whole point of the seeding is to make each section produce exactly one qualifier in an orderly way.
| Round | Players left | Matches played | What it leaves in each section of eight |
|---|---|---|---|
| First round | 128 | 64 | Four players |
| Second round | 64 | 32 | Two players |
| Final round | 32 | 16 | One player, who qualifies |
| Main draw | 16 qualifiers | None | Each is drawn into a vacant line of the main draw |
Thirty-two players are seeded, using the rankings from the week before qualifying starts instead of the older list that decided entry. Seeds 1 through 16 are placed at the top of the 16 sections, one each. Seeds 17 through 32 are drawn to the bottom of the sections, one each. Two seeds per section, at opposite ends.
The consequence is that seeds cannot meet before the final round. If the seeding holds, every one of the 16 last-round matches is a top-16 seed against a seed from the 17-to-32 group, and the unseeded players have been cleared out by then. It rarely holds completely, because the gap between a seed and a non-seed at this level is thin.
The 96 unseeded places
Everyone else is drawn at random into the remaining lines: the unseeded direct entrants, the wild cards, the alternates. There is no separation by nationality, so two Americans, or two players who share a coach, can be drawn together in the first round.
Seeding in qualifying protects a player from other seeds for two rounds and does nothing more. It confers no advantage in the main draw.
Where a qualifier lands
The main draw is made while qualifying is still in progress. Sixteen lines in it are simply marked as belonging to a qualifier, and when the final round is complete, the 16 winners are drawn at random into those lines. A qualifier might land next to another qualifier, which is the best case, or directly opposite the top seed on Arthur Ashe Stadium, which is the worst case for the result and the best for the bank account and the memory.
Main-draw seeding is a separate process with its own logic. The qualifiers are outside it entirely.
Best of three sets, a final-set tiebreak and three wins in a week
Every qualifying match at the US Open is best of three sets. That holds for the men, who will play best of five from the first round of the main draw onward.
All three sets use a tiebreak. In the first two, a standard first-to-seven tiebreak is played at six games all. In the third, the tiebreak is first to ten points, win by two, the format all four majors adopted together in 2022. A qualifying match in New York cannot run to a marathon final set. It can still run close to three hours on a slow, humid afternoon, and many do.
The courts are the same acrylic hard courts used for the main draw, with the same electronic line calling, which the US Open has used on every court since 2021 in place of line umpires. The ball is the same. The way the surface itself has changed over the decades is the subject of our guide to the US Open court surface.
Why three matches is harder than it sounds
On paper, three best-of-three wins is a light week. A main-draw champion wins seven matches, the men's over five sets.
The difficulty is in who the three opponents are and what is riding on it. Nearly every player in the field is ranked between about 100 and 250, and at that level the differences are small. There are no easy rounds of the kind a top seed gets in the first week of a major. A qualifier's three opponents are, in ranking terms, three versions of the same player.
Then there is the pressure, which increases in the wrong direction. The first round is one match among sixty-four. The final round is played for a main-draw place that carries a guaranteed check large enough to underwrite months of travel, plus ranking points and a chance at more of both. Players who are loose in the first round routinely tighten in the third. Final-round qualifying matches at the majors are some of the most nervous tennis played all year.
The calendar squeeze
The three rounds are spread over four or five days, with each round usually taking two days to complete across both fields. A player's matches can fall on consecutive days. In late August in Queens that means heat, heavy air, and afternoon thunderstorms that have no roof to stop them on the outside courts. A wet day compresses everything. In 2025 rain pushed the end of qualifying back by a day, and players who had expected two days of recovery before the main draw got less.
Where and when it is played: Fan Week at the National Tennis Center
Qualifying occupies the week immediately before the main draw. The USTA brands the whole period as Fan Week, and the central fact about it is that the gates are open and nobody is charged to walk through them.
The matches are spread over the field courts, with the more attractive ones put on the larger outside stadiums: the Grandstand, with its 8,125 seats, and Court 17. Seating is unreserved. A spectator can sit in the front row of a court on which, six days later, the same seat would need a reserved ticket.
The two big stadiums are in use as well, but for practice. The top seeds for the main draw are on site by then, and they hit on Ashe and Armstrong in sessions that the public can watch.
How the week has grown
Fan Week has been built up steadily, and it is no longer a quiet preamble. In 2025 the USTA moved the mixed doubles championship out of the main fortnight and into this week, as a short-format event played in the two main stadiums with many of the leading singles players entered. Events staged in the stadiums can carry their own ticket. The qualifying itself has stayed free.
The stadium that looms over it all is described in our guide to Arthur Ashe Stadium.
The Roehampton comparison
Wimbledon cannot do this. Its grass courts have to be kept fresh for the main draw, and 256 qualifiers playing three rounds would wear them out before the first Monday. So Wimbledon's qualifying is held a few miles away at Roehampton, on a sports ground with limited spectator room, and the players who survive it do not play a match at the All England Club until the main draw begins.
A hard court does not wear out in a week. That one physical fact lets the US Open keep its qualifying on site, in front of crowds, on the courts where the tournament proper will be played.
Main-draw wild cards: the eight places the USTA gives away
A wild card is a place in the draw awarded at the organizer's discretion to a player whose ranking would not have earned it. Each US Open singles draw has eight. The USTA owns the tournament, so the USTA gives them out.
In principle they can go to anyone. In practice the association uses them for a small number of purposes that have not changed much in decades.
Young Americans come first. The USTA's job is to develop American players, and a main-draw wild card is the most valuable thing it has to offer an 18-year-old: the prize money, the points and the experience of playing a major at home. Most of the discretionary cards go this way.
Returning veterans are the second group. A former champion or long-time fixture who is coming back from injury or a layoff, and whose ranking has fallen out of range, is a natural recipient. Kim Clijsters is the best illustration of what such a card can do. She came out of retirement in 2009 without a ranking, was given a wild card into the US Open, and won the tournament, the first wild card to do so. More recently the USTA has given cards to former champions from abroad, Stan Wawrinka and Dominic Thiem among them in 2024, and to Venus Williams in 2025.
The complaint about wild cards
Every wild card given is a place denied to someone who would otherwise have had it on merit, usually the player ranked 105th, who drops into qualifying. Since the cards go overwhelmingly to players from the host nation, the four majors are, in effect, four federations giving their own players a head start. An American ranked 300 can play the main draw of the US Open. A Serbian or an Argentine ranked 110 has to win three matches first.
It is a fair criticism and nothing is likely to change. The federations that own the majors are not going to surrender the most useful development tool they have. What the USTA has done is tie a number of its eight cards to results, so that fewer of them are a matter of opinion. The general practice across the sport is covered in our explainer on tennis wild card entries.
The fixed routes to a US Open wild card
Before the USTA's player-development staff choose anyone, several of the eight places in each draw are already spoken for.
| Route | Places per singles draw | Who receives it |
|---|---|---|
| Reciprocal agreement with Tennis Australia | One | An Australian player named by Tennis Australia |
| Reciprocal agreement with the French Tennis Federation | One | A French player named by the French federation |
| US Open Wild Card Challenge | One | The eligible American with the best results in a set of summer events |
| USTA 18s national champion | One | The winner of the Boys' 18s or Girls' 18s national singles title |
| NCAA singles champion | By custom, when the champion is American | The reigning college singles champion |
| USTA discretion | The remainder | Chosen by the association |
The federation swaps
Three of the four Grand Slam federations trade wild cards with one another. The USTA gives one men's and one women's main-draw card at the US Open to Tennis Australia and one of each to the French Tennis Federation, which pass them to players of their own choosing. In return, an American man and an American woman receive wild cards into the Australian Open and the French Open. Wimbledon stays outside the arrangement.
Two of the eight cards in each draw therefore go abroad every year before a single American has been considered.
The Wild Card Challenge
For its own side of those swaps, and for one card at its own tournament, the USTA runs a points race. The US Open Wild Card Challenge takes a defined run of professional events on North American hard courts in the weeks before the Open and awards the card to the American, not already in the main draw, who collects the most ranking points across his or her best results in that window. One man and one woman win it.
It rewards form, and it removes an argument. A player who wins the challenge has earned the card on the court in July and August, in the same stretch of tournaments described in our guide to the US Open Series, and nobody can say a committee preferred somebody else.
Juniors and college players
The USTA's national championships for players 18 and under carry a prize no other junior event in the country can match. The winner of the Boys' 18s singles, played at Kalamazoo, Michigan, receives a wild card into the men's main draw of the US Open. The winner of the Girls' 18s, played in San Diego, receives one into the women's. Learner Tien won at Kalamazoo in 2022 and again in 2023 and played the main draw in New York both years as a teenager.
College tennis has a similar path, held by custom more than by written guarantee. The USTA has long given a main-draw wild card to an American who wins the NCAA Division I singles title. Danielle Collins got one in 2014 after winning the title for Virginia. Emma Navarro did in 2021, and Ben Shelton in 2022 after winning for Florida. The custom applies to Americans. The college game those players come from uses a scoring system of its own, explained in our guide to college tennis scoring rules.
Add those up. Two cards to the federations, one to the challenge winner, one to the 18s champion and often one to the NCAA champion: five of eight are settled by agreement or by results. The USTA's free choice is closer to three or four places than to eight.
Qualifying wild cards and the players who use them
The qualifying draws have wild cards as well, nine in each field in recent years, and they serve a different population.
A main-draw wild card goes to a player the USTA believes can compete at a major now. A qualifying wild card goes to a player who is a step or two short of that. In practice the nine are spread among a few recognizable groups: the runners-up and semifinalists from the 18s nationals, the best American college players who did not win the NCAA title, teenagers whom the USTA's coaches regard as the next group through, and older professionals ranked in the 300s who have had a good summer.
For a college player the card is an audition. Three qualifying matches against full-time professionals ranked between 100 and 250 will tell a 20-year-old, more accurately than any ranking or rating, how close he or she is to making a living at the sport. A player who wins a round or two goes back to campus with ranking points and a different idea of the future.
The public route that used to exist
For a decade there was a way into US Open qualifying for literally anyone. The US Open National Playoffs, which the USTA began in 2010, were open-entry tournaments held in the association's sections around the country, feeding a national final whose winner received a wild card into qualifying. Teaching professionals, former college players and a few optimists entered alongside ranked pros. The event did not return after the pandemic, and the purely open door closed with it.
How often they come through
Qualifying wild cards seldom qualify. The players who hold them are, by definition, ranked below the field, and three wins against that field is a great deal to ask. When one does come through, it tends to be a sign of something. A teenager who wins three rounds of qualifying at a major has announced an arrival more convincingly than any junior title could.
Lucky losers: how US Open qualifying fills a late withdrawal
- Lose in the final roundThe 16 players beaten in the third round of qualifying are the only ones eligible. Earlier-round losers are not considered.
- The list is orderedThe losers are ranked for priority, with a random draw among the highest-ranked of them deciding the top of the order.
- Sign inA lucky loser has to sign in at the referee's office each day to remain available, and be on site ready to play.
- A main-draw player withdrawsAn injured or ill player pulls out after qualifying has finished and before his or her first-round match.
- The substitutionThe first signed-in name on the list takes the withdrawn player's line in the draw and plays that opponent.
- The door closesOnce the first round is complete, no further replacements are made.
The general lucky loser procedure under the Grand Slam rules. Sign-in deadlines and the exact method of ordering the list are set out in each year's rule book.
A lucky loser is a player who lost in qualifying and is in the main draw anyway. It happens because main-draw players get hurt or sick between the end of qualifying and their first match, and an empty line in the draw has to be filled by somebody.
Only the 16 players who lost in the final round are eligible. They have come the closest, and they are still in town.
How the order is decided
The obvious method would be to take the highest-ranked loser first, and for many years that was the rule. It created a problem. A highly ranked player going into the final round, knowing that several main-draw withdrawals were already likely, could be almost certain of getting in whether he won or lost. That is a poor incentive to carry into a match, and after an episode at Wimbledon in 2005 the majors changed the procedure.
Since then the top of the list has been settled partly by lot. The highest-ranked of the final-round losers are entered in a random draw to determine their order, and the remaining losers follow by ranking. A player cannot know before the match where on the list a defeat would leave him. The Grand Slam rule book is the authority on how many players go into that draw and how withdrawals at different moments are handled, and readers who need the current wording should check the book itself.
Waiting on site
Being on the list is not enough. A lucky loser has to sign in by a daily deadline and has to be physically ready to walk onto a court, sometimes with less than an hour's notice, to play an opponent for whom there has been no time to prepare. Players in this position spend the first days of the tournament practicing in the morning and sitting near the referee's office in the afternoon.
Several get in most years. In 2025 four men entered the main draw as lucky losers. It is common enough that a final-round loser ranked near the top of the field does not book a flight home.
The withdrawal rule that helped
Until 2018 an injured main-draw player had a strong reason not to withdraw: first-round prize money went only to those who walked on court. Some hurt players started matches they could not finish, collected the check and retired after a few games, which cheated the spectators and kept a fit lucky loser out.
The majors now split the money. A main-draw player who withdraws on site after the draw is made, before the first match, keeps half of the first-round prize money. The lucky loser who replaces that player receives the other half, plus whatever is earned by winning. Withdrawals went up and mid-match first-round retirements went down, as intended.
What qualifying is worth in ranking points and prize money
Points
The two tours score qualifying differently, and the women's table is the more generous at every step. On the tables used in 2025 and 2026, a man who qualifies earns 30 ATP points and a woman 40 WTA points. Losing in the final round is worth 16 and 30 respectively. A first-round loss in men's qualifying earns nothing at all.
Those points are then added to main-draw points. A first-round loss in the main draw is worth 10 on either tour, so a male qualifier who loses his first match leaves with 40 and a female qualifier with 50. One main-draw win takes a man to 80 and a woman to 110.
For a player ranked 180, those are not small numbers. Players at that level typically hold a few hundred points in total, gathered a handful at a time at Challenger and ITF events across the year. Qualifying and winning a round at a major can be a tenth or more of a season's ranking in one week, enough to move a player thirty or forty places and change which tournaments he or she can enter for the following twelve months.
Money
The prize money is published every summer and changes every year, so no figures are given here. The structure is what matters, and it has been stable.
Every round of qualifying pays, with each round paying more than the last. A first-round qualifying loser's check covers a good part of the cost of the trip. A final-round loser's covers a good deal more.
The real jump comes with the main draw. A first-round loser in the singles main draw of a major receives the largest single payment that most players ranked outside the top 100 will see all year, and a qualifier receives it on top of nothing else, because reaching the main draw replaces the qualifying prize money with the larger main-draw amount. For a player who travels without a full-time coach, shares rooms and books budget flights between Challengers, one main-draw appearance in New York can pay for the next six months of trying.
In several recent years the USTA, like the other three major-owning federations, has directed a disproportionate share of its prize money increases toward qualifying and the early rounds, on the argument that the sport's depth depends on players ranked 100 to 250 being able to afford to keep going. It is one of the better decisions the majors have made.
How far qualifiers have gone, from deep runs to Raducanu in 2021
For the first 53 years of Open tennis, the answer to "has a qualifier ever won a major" was no. Then an 18-year-old ranked 150th in the world won ten matches in New York without dropping a set.
| Player | Major | Year | How far a qualifier went |
|---|---|---|---|
| Emma Raducanu | US Open | 2021 | Champion |
| John McEnroe | Wimbledon | 1977 | Semifinal |
| Filip Dewulf | French Open | 1997 | Semifinal |
| Alexandra Stevenson | Wimbledon | 1999 | Semifinal |
| Vladimir Voltchkov | Wimbledon | 2000 | Semifinal |
| Nadia Podoroska | French Open | 2020 | Semifinal |
| Aslan Karatsev | Australian Open | 2021 | Semifinal |
The table lists the best-known runs and is not a complete record of every qualifier to reach the last four of a major.
Before 2021
The standard had been set by an American. John McEnroe was 18 and an amateur when he came through qualifying at Wimbledon in 1977 and reached the semifinals, where Jimmy Connors beat him. For decades that was the ceiling. A handful of players matched it, among them Filip Dewulf in Paris, Alexandra Stevenson and Vladimir Voltchkov at Wimbledon, and Nadia Podoroska at the pandemic-delayed French Open of 2020. Aslan Karatsev did it on his main-draw debut at the 2021 Australian Open. Nobody went further.
At the US Open the ceiling had been lower. Qualifiers had reached the quarterfinals in New York, Nicolas Escude in 1999, Gilles Muller in 2008 and Kaia Kanepi in 2017 among them, but none had made the semifinals in the Open era.
Raducanu's ten matches
Emma Raducanu arrived in New York in August 2021 having played one major, as a wild card at Wimbledon that summer. She was ranked 150th, which put her in the qualifying draw. She said afterward that her flight home had been booked for the end of qualifying week.
She won three qualifying matches in straight sets. Then she won seven main-draw matches in straight sets, including a quarterfinal against the Olympic champion Belinda Bencic and a semifinal against Maria Sakkari, and beat Leylah Fernandez of Canada 6-4, 6-3 in the final. Ten matches, twenty sets, none lost. She was the first qualifier, male or female, to win a major singles title in the Open era.
In the same tournament a Dutch qualifier, Botic van de Zandschulp, reached the men's quarterfinals.
What it does and does not prove
Raducanu's title is sometimes read as proof that three extra matches sharpen a player for the main draw. The evidence does not go that far. In more than half a century of Open tennis, through 2025, one qualifier has won a major and a few have reached a semifinal. Almost all of the 32 qualifiers each year lose in the first or second round to players ranked well above them.
What her run shows is narrower and still worth saying. The gap between the player ranked 150 and the player ranked 15 is real but it is not fixed, and qualifying is the mechanism that lets the tournament find out, in a given fortnight, when it has closed. The home players who have won the title across the same era are listed in our guide to American Grand Slam champions.
US Open qualifying against the other three majors
All four majors now use the same outline: 128 players per singles field, three rounds, 16 places. The differences are in where it is played and under what conditions.
| Major | Where qualifying is held | Surface | Men's final qualifying round |
|---|---|---|---|
| Australian Open | Melbourne Park, the tournament site | Hard | Best of three sets |
| French Open | Roland Garros, the tournament site | Clay | Best of three sets |
| Wimbledon | Roehampton, away from the All England Club | Grass | Best of five sets |
| US Open | Flushing Meadows, the tournament site | Hard | Best of three sets |
Site and atmosphere
Three of the four hold qualifying where the tournament is played. Wimbledon, for the reasons already given, does not, and its qualifying has a character all its own: small crowds, courts side by side with no stands to speak of, and a prize at the end that includes the right to walk through the gates of a club most of the field has never played at.
Melbourne and Paris, like New York, have turned their qualifying weeks into public events. Roland Garros sells inexpensive tickets to its opening week. The Australian Open, where qualifying was free for many years, has in recent editions folded it into a ticketed opening week of its own. The US Open's remains free, which makes it the most accessible of the four for a spectator.
Schedule and conditions
The Australian Open's qualifying is played in early January in conditions that can be fiercely hot, at the very start of the season when nobody has match form. The French Open's is in May on clay, where best-of-three matches run long and the physical cost of three wins is highest. Wimbledon's is in late June on grass that few of the players have set foot on for a year, and it alone asks the men to play five sets in the last round.
New York's comes at the end of the North American summer, on a surface the players have been competing on for a month. Form is established. Bodies are tired. The humidity is the main opponent in the afternoon, and the outside courts, unlike the two big stadiums, have nothing overhead when the storms arrive. For matches under lights, the evening conditions described in our guide to the US Open night session apply to the field courts just as they do to the stadiums.
Of the four, the US Open's qualifying is the one that most resembles the event it leads to, which is why a first-round match between a top-ten player and a qualifier on a hot Monday in Queens is never quite the formality the rankings suggest. More of our tennis coverage is collected on the tennis hub, and the full set of American sports guides is on the USA page.