The US Open Prize Money Guide — What Players Earn at Flushing Meadows

Update — Aug. 26, 2026: The Full 2026 Distribution

The USTA has published the complete round-by-round breakdown for the 2026 US Open. The tables in the snapshot below now carry the confirmed 2026 figures, with the 2025 column retained alongside them — the increases are not uniform across the draw, and the shape of that gap is the most revealing part of this year’s announcement.

The USTA announced on Aug. 20, 2026, that total player compensation at this year’s US Open will reach $108 million, a 20% increase on 2025 and a 44% rise over two years. The men’s and women’s singles champions will each earn $5.5 million, the largest winner’s payment in the history of the sport, up from $5 million last year.

Confirmed 2026 singles figures: champion $5,500,000; runner-up $2,800,000; semifinalist $1,450,000; quarterfinalist $780,000; first-round main draw $140,000, a 27% increase and the largest first-round payment in Grand Slam history. In doubles, the winning teams in the men’s, women’s and mixed events split $1 million, with runners-up earning $500,000. Wheelchair singles champions earn $104,000.

The package also includes a new Player Support Program, seeded with an initial $2 million split equally between men and women players and held in escrow while its terms are settled. It is designed to complement existing end-of-career pension arrangements and to cover mid-career transitions, and eligibility is not tied to ranking tiers. Separately, all four majors announced the formation of a Grand Slam Player Council giving players a formal channel into tournament decisions.

One caveat on the headline number: some USTA material describes the $108 million as total player compensation and some as a prize money pool, and the two are not identical — compensation includes support paid to players beyond the purse itself. The round-by-round figures below are the distribution figures and are unaffected by that distinction.

Every player who competes at the US Open — from the qualifier who falls in the first round at Flushing Meadows to the champion who lifts the trophy on Arthur Ashe Stadium — leaves New York with a cheque. The US Open prize purse has grown into the largest in tennis, and the way the USTA distributes that money tells the story of how American tennis has positioned itself commercially and ideologically over more than half a century.

This is a complete guide to what players earn at the US Open, how the figures are structured, and how the tournament’s prize money has evolved into what it is today. The confirmed 2026 figures are in the snapshot below, and the sections that follow explain the structure and the history behind them.

Season Snapshot — 2026 US Open Prize Money (confirmed Aug. 20, 2026)

• Total: $108 million — a 20% increase on 2025 and a 44% increase on 2024
• Singles champions (equal, men’s and women’s): $5,500,000 each — the largest singles champion’s cheque at any of the four Grand Slams, and the largest winner’s payment in the history of the sport
• Minimum for a main-draw singles player: $140,000, the largest first-round payment at any Grand Slam
• Main draw: Sunday, Aug. 30 to Sunday, Sept. 13, 2026
• Defending champions: Carlos Alcaraz and Aryna Sabalenka. Jannik Sinner, the 2025 runner-up, is not in the field — see the full US Open withdrawals list

Singles prize money by round, 2026 (identical in the men’s and women’s draws):

Doubles prize money, 2026 (per team):

• Doubles caveat: the USTA has not published a separate round-by-round table for the men’s and women’s doubles, and the intermediate rounds are shown above as unconfirmed rather than carried over from 2025. The doubles pools were left close to flat for 2026, with only marginal increases in the early rounds
• Mixed doubles (2026): a 16-team event played during Fan Week, with a further $20,000 for a second-round qualifying exit and $10,000 for a first
• Wheelchair (2026): singles champions earn $104,000
• Qualifying (2026): $32,000 for a first-round qualifying loss, $48,000 for the second round and $66,000 for reaching the final qualifying round. A qualifier who then loses in the first round of the main draw combines $66,000 with $140,000

How the four Slams compared in 2025 — the last cycle for which all four are confirmed. The US Open figure has since risen to $108 million and $5.5 million; the other three majors have not all published 2026 totals, so they are not shown here rather than estimated:

• US Open: $90M total / $5M singles champions
• Wimbledon: ~$73M total / £3M (~$4M) singles champions
• Roland Garros: ~€56M total / €2.55M (~$3M) singles champions
• Australian Open: ~A$96.5M total / A$3.5M (~$2.25M) singles champions

How the US Open Distributes Its Money

The US Open’s distribution model is distinctive in two ways. First, it consistently leads the four Grand Slams in headline prize money — both the largest total purse and the largest individual cheques. Second, the USTA has, in recent years, made aggressive double-digit percentage increases across nearly every round, including substantial growth in the earliest rounds and qualifying.

Every player who reaches the main singles draw — including those who lose in the first round — takes home a six-figure sum. The first-round prize is one of the highest at any Grand Slam, reflecting a deliberate USTA strategy to support lower-ranked players who travel to compete on the North American hard-court swing. The distribution is, in shape, top-heavy at the champions’ end and increasingly bottom-heavy at the qualifying and first-round end — a structure the USTA has pushed further in recent years than any other major.

Where the Money Is Actually Moving

The headline figure conceals the more interesting decision. The 2026 increases are not applied evenly across the draw; they run in a near-perfect gradient, largest at the bottom and smallest at the top. A first-round loser gained 27%. A quarter-finalist gained 18%. The runner-up gained 12%, and the champion 10% — the smallest raise anywhere in the singles draw.

That is deliberate, and it is the continuation of a decade-long trend rather than a one-year gesture. Ten years ago the men’s and women’s singles winners took 18.3% of everything paid out to singles players. In 2026 that share is 12.9%. The purse has grown enormously and the champion’s slice of it has shrunk by nearly a third.

The argument for the shift is straightforward. A player ranked outside the top 100 can lose money over a full season once coaching, travel and support costs are counted, while the players at the very top earn far more from endorsements than from prize money in any case. Moving a percentage point from the trophy to the first round changes nobody’s life at the top and changes several at the bottom. How professional players actually earn a living explains why that gap matters more than the headline cheques suggest.

Doubles is the exception, and the exception is pointed. The winners’ cheques in the men’s, women’s and mixed events all stayed at $1 million, with only marginal movement below. The long-run picture is starker still: at the 2000 US Open, the winning men’s and women’s doubles teams earned 43% of what the singles champions earned. That figure is now around 18%. It is worth watching against the backdrop of an ATP proposal, published a month before this announcement, to cut doubles prize money and halve doubles draw sizes by 2028. That proposal does not cover the Grand Slams, which is where doubles specialists have always earned most of their money and drawn most of their audience. A flat year at Flushing Meadows is not evidence of anything on its own. Two would be.

Equal Pay for Men and Women — The 1973 Milestone

The US Open was the first Grand Slam — and the first sporting event of any kind — to offer equal prize money to men and women, adopting the policy in 1973. That year, John Newcombe and Margaret Court each received $25,000 in winners’ prize money. The other Grand Slams would not follow for decades: Roland Garros adopted equal pay in 2006, Wimbledon in 2007, and the Australian Open in 2008.

The 1973 decision was driven by Billie Jean King, who had publicly threatened a boycott by the top women players if the prize money was not equalised. King met with US Open tournament director Bill Talbert in 1972 with three things: data from a fan survey showing women’s matches were nearly as popular as men’s, a list of female stars (including Chris Evert, Rosie Casals, Evonne Goolagong, Margaret Court, and herself) prepared to skip the 1973 tournament, and a $55,000 commitment from sponsor Ban Deodorant to help fund the gap between men’s and women’s prize pools.

The USTA accepted. The policy took effect at the 1973 US Open and has been maintained without exception every year since — the longest-standing equal-pay policy in any major professional sport.

The 2006 renaming of the USTA National Tennis Center as the USTA Billie Jean King National Tennis Center — the first major sports venue in the United States named after a woman — was a direct acknowledgment of King’s role in pushing tennis toward equal pay before any other professional sport had even seriously considered the question.

Qualifying, Wheelchair, and Other Events

The US Open’s qualifying tournament, held on-site at the Billie Jean King National Tennis Center during Fan Week before the main draw begins, distributes a substantial purse of its own — among the highest qualifying payouts at any Grand Slam (current figures in the snapshot). A player who comes through qualifying and then loses in the first round of the main draw combines both cheques into a meaningful total, reflecting the USTA’s deliberate strategy of putting more money into the early rounds, where lower-ranked players need it most.

Beyond the singles and doubles events, the US Open’s prize money also covers gentlemen’s and ladies’ wheelchair singles and doubles, the quad wheelchair events, and junior competitions, with wheelchair purses growing substantially in recent years as the USTA has expanded both draw sizes and total prize money. The tournament additionally provides hotel accommodation, per diem allowances, and travel expenses to a wide range of competitors — direct costs not reflected in the headline figures but materially significant to the financial picture of competing at Flushing Meadows.

How the US Open’s Purse Compares to the Other Grand Slams

The US Open’s purse sits at the top of the four-Slam standings, and has done so consistently in recent years (the current-year comparison is in the snapshot). As the final Grand Slam of the season — and the largest in capacity and attendance — the USTA has positioned the tournament as the commercial leader of the four-major calendar. Wimbledon, Roland Garros, and the Australian Open have each closed part of the gap over the past decade, but the US Open has retained both the highest total purse and the highest singles cheque.

The History of Prize Money at the US Open

The US Open paid no prize money at all for its first 87 years. From 1881 to 1967, the tournament was contested by amateur players only, and the trophy was the only reward. The Open Era arrived in 1968, and that year’s tournament — the first after the tournament’s renaming from the U.S. National Championships — became the first to distribute prize money.

The total purse in 1968 was $100,000. The men’s champion was slated to receive $14,000, the women’s champion $6,000.

But the 1968 men’s champion, Arthur Ashe, never collected his prize money. Ashe was still officially classified as an amateur — he had served as a U.S. Army officer through the tournament and was not yet professionally registered. Under the rules of amateur status, he could not accept the $14,000 cheque. Instead, the winner’s prize was awarded to the runner-up, Tom Okker, who held the status of “registered player” — an amateur permitted to accept prize money at certain events.

Ashe took home a per-diem payment of $20 per day for his appearance at the tournament — a total of roughly $280 for becoming the first Black man to win a Grand Slam singles title. Virginia Wade, who won the women’s title that year, did collect her $6,000 — making her, by an accident of amateur eligibility, the first US Open champion to actually receive a winner’s cheque in the Open Era.

The numbers from that first year now read almost as a different sport. By 1973, equal prize money meant Newcombe and Court each receiving $25,000. The men’s and women’s champions earned six figures for the first time in 1983 ($120,000). They earned seven figures for the first time in 2003 ($1 million each). The decades since have seen continuous growth, broken only briefly by the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 — when the US Open went ahead behind closed doors and total prize money was reduced from the projected total but still distributed to players who competed in the modified tournament.

What Players Actually Take Home

The prize money headlines do not, of course, reflect what players ultimately keep. US Open prize money is paid in US dollars, and players from outside the United States face tax obligations in both their home countries and the US — though double tax treaties typically prevent the same income from being taxed twice.

After tax, agent fees, coaching costs, travel, and the considerable expenses of competing on tour, the practical take-home for a US Open competitor is meaningfully less than the headline figure. For champions, this is largely academic — a multi-million-dollar cheque remains a transformational sum after every deduction. For first-round losers, the six-figure cheque, while substantial, can be largely absorbed by the costs of a season on the road.

The Honey Deuce and the Economics of the Tournament

The Honey Deuce — the tournament’s signature cocktail, sold at $23 per drink in 2025 — generated roughly $17 million in revenue that year, more than enough on its own to cover the $14.1 million paid to all 128 first-round singles losers combined. The economics of the tournament have, in this respect, become a story of their own, and a useful illustration of why the USTA can keep pushing the purse higher: the event’s commercial engine now dwarfs the prize money it distributes.

The Bottom Line

The US Open’s prize money has grown from $100,000 in 1968 — when Arthur Ashe couldn’t even collect his $14,000 cheque — to the nine-figure purse of today, the largest total and the largest individual singles cheque of the four Grand Slams. Equal pay, settled in 1973, remains the longest-standing equal-pay policy in any major professional sport. And the shape of the distribution — top-heavy at the champions’ end, bottom-heavy at the qualifying and first-round end — continues to shape who can afford to be a professional tennis player at all.

Related reading

• US Open Records — Titles, Matches and Statistics
• US Open Guide — Format, Hard Courts, Draws and Prize Money
• What Makes Arthur Ashe Stadium So Important
• How the Billie Jean King Cup Works
• Grand Slams Explained