Here is a fun tennis fact. The face value of a Monday grounds pass to the 2026 US Open, as printed on the USTA’s own website, is sixty-five American dollars. This is the price the USTA charges for the physical experience of walking through the gates of Flushing Meadows on the first Monday of the tournament, watching first-round matches on the outer courts, eating a lobster roll priced like a small appliance, and going home.

Here is another fun tennis fact. The lowest price at which that same Monday grounds pass was actually available to the public for purchase, on Ticketmaster’s Verified Resale marketplace, was three hundred and sixty-three American dollars. This was not a courtside seat. This was not the men’s final. This was a piece of paper that let you into the parking lot with no guaranteed seat at any match played inside any of the actual stadiums.

The multiplier, for the math-inclined, is 5.58. The word for the multiplier is the market clearing price. The word for what people are actually feeling about the market clearing price is not printable in a family satirical tennis publication.

The Ackman Post

Bill Ackman, the hedge fund manager and occasional adult tennis player, posted the question on X that many other people were thinking:

“The USTA’s mission is to promote the sport of tennis. How is a $363 ground pass consistent with this mission?”

The answer, if you are the USTA, is that Bill Ackman is asking the wrong question. The USTA does not, mechanically, price the resale market. The USTA sells the tickets at face value, once, at the beginning of the sale window. The tickets then trade on secondary markets — StubHub, SeatGeek, Ticketmaster’s own Verified Resale — where prices are set by whatever the last person was willing to pay. The USTA gets a cut of Verified Resale (Ticketmaster’s official resale marketplace), but the underlying dynamic is fans reselling tickets to other fans at a markup.

The answer, if you are Bill Ackman, is that this is a distinction without a difference. If the USTA is the sole issuer of tickets to a wildly under-supplied event, and the USTA has partnered with a resale marketplace that takes a cut of the markup, then the USTA is — in the important sense — the entity setting the effective price. The word for that arrangement, in economics, is rent extraction. The word for it in sports is what every American major sports league has been doing for the last decade.

The Actual Numbers

The face value ranges from $65 (early-week grounds pass, weekday) to $135 (late-week grounds pass, weekend). Stadium tickets — actual assigned seats in Arthur Ashe, Louis Armstrong, or the Grandstand — start higher and rise from there. The men’s singles final, at face value, tops out in the low four figures for a courtside seat.

On the resale market, in the week leading up to the tournament, the following numbers were reported:

The average get-in price — the cheapest ticket available to any session, averaged across the tournament — was reported at $311 for 2026, up from $262 in 2025. That is a 19% single-year increase, which is a number that would get a landlord a stern letter.

What The USTA Says About This

The USTA has not, to date, publicly commented on the specific numbers. It has, at various points, released statements pointing out that (a) face value tickets are much cheaper than resale, (b) the resale market is a function of demand, (c) they have added additional sessions this year to accommodate more fans, and (d) the tournament has, in fact, sold out to record-breaking attendance.

All four of those statements are true. None of them address the actual complaint, which is that a person of ordinary income cannot, in 2026, casually decide to attend the US Open on a weekend. The tournament is now, effectively, an event for people whose disposable income exceeds one round-trip New York-to-London plane ticket per session. If you are in the ordinary median-income demographic that professional tennis has spent the last thirty years trying to develop as a fan base, the US Open is now, in practice, a television event.

The Wider Trend

The US Open is not, to be clear, alone here. Wimbledon operates a lottery system that keeps face value low and access constrained. The Australian Open is more affordable in absolute terms but reaches Australian working-class fans with much the same difficulty. Roland Garros prime sessions are no bargain either. The entire tennis Slam calendar has, over the last decade, priced itself into the exact demographic slice that also flies business class to watch it.

The problem, if there is one, is not that tennis costs money. The problem is that the USTA’s actual public mission — printed on their about page, cited in their non-profit filings — is to promote the sport of tennis. This is not aspirational language. It is the stated purpose of a tax-exempt non-profit. Bill Ackman’s question is annoying not because it is unfair but because it is exactly the right question to ask a mission-driven non-profit that is currently charging five times face value on tickets to their signature event.

The tournament, meanwhile, is going very well. Ratings are up. The seats are full. Somewhere in a corporate suite behind the umpire’s chair, someone with a ring light is filming a video. Everything is, according to the metrics, working.

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