Olympic Tickets: The LA 2028 Draw and What They Cost

LA 2028 does not run a ballot for Olympic tickets. It runs a draw for a shopping appointment — and if you are drawn, you get roughly 48 hours to buy whatever is left.

Both public sales so far have closed. Drop 1 ran 9–19 April 2026 and Drop 2 ran 10–20 August 2026. Further first-come-first-served sales are scheduled for 2027, along with the first Paralympic drop. The Games themselves run 14–30 July 2028. All dates and prices below were checked on 28 August 2026.

How the LA 2028 system actually works

This is not the mechanism most people expect, and the difference changes what you should do.

1. Register free at tickets.la28.org. No payment, no ticket selection. This only enters you into a draw.
2. The draw allocates time slots, not tickets. For Drop 2, registration closed 22 July and successful registrants were notified on 6–7 August.
3. Your slot is an appointment of about 48 hours. Within it you log in and buy from remaining inventory, up to a purchase cap. Outside it you cannot buy.

Two consequences follow, and both are counter-intuitive.

Registering early does not help. The draw is random, so day one and the final day carry identical weight. What matters is registering at all before the deadline — and note how early that deadline falls: Drop 2’s registration shut on 22 July, more than a fortnight before the sale opened on 10 August.

Speed inside your slot matters less than flexibility. With 48 hours you are not racing a queue. You are choosing among whatever sessions remain, which rewards people who will take Tuesday-morning handball over Saturday-night athletics.

What LA 2028 tickets cost

Prices start at $28 and reach $5,519 for premium opening ceremony seats. LA28’s published distribution:

Price band	Share of Olympic tickets
Under $200	Nearly half
Under $400	More than 75%
Over $1,000	About 5%

Within a single session the spread is wide, because each session is split into categories. Two real examples from the 2028 schedule:

Session	Categories	Top price	Entry price
Athletics, LA Memorial Coliseum, 16 July afternoon	9	$2,460.76 (Cat A)	$104.19 (Cat I)
Swimming, SoFi Stadium, 22 July qualifying	8	$1,116.27 (Cat A)	$49.61 (Cat H)

In Drop 1 the effective floor was $49.61 for a preliminary session and $104.19 for a final.

One detail deserves credit, because it is rare. A mandatory service fee of about 24% is already built into the prices you see while shopping. The figure displayed is the figure you pay — unlike the resale platforms behind most Super Bowl tickets, where a listed price and a checkout total can differ by a third.

The affordability argument

Both sides of this are worth stating, because the headline numbers support either.

LA28’s case. Nearly half of Olympic tickets under $200, a $28 entry point, and every price all-in with no fee surprise at checkout. Against a $7.145 billion budget that leans on roughly $2.5 billion from tickets and hospitality, that is a defensible spread — and that budget has risen from $5.3 billion since 2017, as our guide to the cost to host the Olympics sets out.

The criticism. Premium pricing drew a backlash — $5,000-plus ceremony seats prompted a public response from LA28 — and commentators have questioned whether the structure serves local fans, with reporting after Drop 1 arguing that Angelenos were left locked out of events staged near them. The cheap seats exist, but they are the smallest categories in the least contested sessions.

Both can be true. A $28 ticket and a $5,519 ticket are sold for the same Games, and which one you encounter depends on the session you want and the slot you are given.

Where the events actually are

More than 40 venues, and “Los Angeles 2028” is doing some work in that title.

• Swimming is at SoFi Stadium — the same building hosting Super Bowl LXI in February 2027, and the most expensive stadium ever built. Its capacity is covered in our guide to the largest NFL stadiums.
• Athletics is at the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, which along with the Rose Bowl will host a third Olympic Games — a distinction no other stadiums in the world hold.
• Softball is in Oklahoma City, roughly 1,400 miles from LA.
• Preliminary football is spread across New York, Columbus, St Louis, Nashville, San Diego and San Jose.

LA28 is building no new permanent structures — the first Summer Games to manage that since London 1948. That is why the venue list reads like a national tour: existing buildings, wherever they happen to be.

For a ticket buyer this is a practical warning, not trivia. Check the venue before you buy a session, because “attending the LA Olympics” may involve a domestic flight.

Scale, and why the mechanism exists

Registrations passed 12 million, and more than 4 million tickets had sold by the time the second phase opened.

No conventional on-sale survives numbers like that. The draw-then-appointment model exists to spread demand across days rather than collapsing under it in the first ninety seconds, and it is why the Olympics behaves differently from every other event on this site — a genuine ballot like Wimbledon’s awards a ticket; LA28’s awards a turn.

What to do now

The honest position in late August 2026 is that there is nothing to buy today. What you can do:

1. Register at tickets.la28.org if you have not. It is free, it carries no obligation, and you cannot participate in a future drop without being in the system.
2. Watch for the 2027 sales. LA28 has confirmed first-come-first-served sales for 2027 plus the first Paralympic drop. First-come is a different game from a draw — for those, speed genuinely will matter.
3. Decide your flexibility in advance. Which sports, which sessions, which price categories, and how far you will travel. The 48-hour slot is not the moment to start deciding.
4. Treat the Paralympic drop as the real opportunity. It has never been run for these Games, demand is lower than the Olympic drops, and the sport is the same standard of elite competition.

For every other major event’s application window, see our guide to sports ticket ballots.

How we checked these numbers

Registration and drop dates, the time-slot mechanism and the price distribution come from LA28’s own newsroom and ticketing pages and from Olympics.com’s ticketing explainers. The per-session category prices for athletics and swimming, and the roughly 24% embedded service fee, are as reported by The Sports Examiner from the live sale. Criticism of premium pricing is from Inside the Games and contemporaneous commentary after Drop 1.

Prices are in US dollars as published for the 2028 Games. Because inventory is released in drops, any given session may be listed in one phase and gone in the next — figures here describe what was offered, not what remains.

This page will be updated when LA28 announces its 2027 sales dates and the Paralympic drop.

Review class: event-driven. Recheck when LA28 announces its 2027 sales dates and the Paralympic drop.