Wimbledon Tickets: Ballot, Queue and What They Cost

Wimbledon has the widest access-price range of any event in world sport. At the 2026 Championships a Grounds Pass cost £33, an on-site resale seat on Centre Court about £15, and a debenture seat for the men’s singles final £9,995. The same afternoon, the same tennis.

More surprising still: the free route can get you the best seat in the building. All prices below are from the 2026 Championships, the most recent published, and the 2027 ballot is expected to open in early September 2026. Other major event windows are collected in our tickets hub.

The four ways in

Route	Cost	When to act
Public ballot	Free to enter; face value if successful	September, the year before
The Queue	Free to join; face value on the day	On the day, very early
On-site resale	~£15–£20 for a show court	During the day, once inside
Debentures	Six figures for a five-year bond	Any time, on the open market

Official hospitality packages sit alongside these and cost considerably more than face value. The ballot and the Queue are what almost everyone actually uses.

The public ballot, and the deadline before the deadline

The public ballot is free, random, and opens roughly ten months before the Championships. The 2026 ballot ran 2–21 September 2025, so the 2027 ballot should open in the first days of September 2026 and close about three weeks later.

That is an inference, not an announcement. The AELTC’s ballot page was 2027-facing but undated when we checked on 28 August 2026, so treat early September as an estimate until wimbledon.com publishes specifics.

Two things to do now, neither of which can be done later:

• Create a free myWimbledon account at wimbledon.com and opt in to ticket and ballot communications. You cannot enter the ballot without one.
• Check the separate LTA route if you are a member. The opt-in window for the LTA Advantage Wimbledon ballot runs 23 July to 31 August — a different mechanism, with a deadline that falls before the public ballot even opens.

If you are successful, you are allocated a specific court on a specific day. You do not choose. That is the trade-off for face-value access to the most oversubscribed tennis tickets in the world.

What Wimbledon tickets cost at face value

2026 ticket	Days 1–8	Days 9–11	Days 12–14
Grounds Pass	£33	£26	£21
No.1 Court	from ~£65	rising	to ~£155
Centre Court	from ~£70	rising	~£240–£315

Note what the Grounds Pass does: it gets cheaper as the tournament progresses, from £33 to £21, because fewer matches are played on the outside courts once the draw thins. Centre Court moves the opposite way, roughly quadrupling from first round to final.

For a first visit, the first week on a Grounds Pass is the best value in the sport. Sixteen courts are in play, you can stand courtside at matches involving seeded players, and it costs less than a Premier League ticket.

The Queue: free, and it works

The Queue is a genuine institution and the reason Wimbledon feels different from other majors. It is first-come, first-served, and it is free to join.

You enter Wimbledon Park via Gate 10 and are given a card showing your number. The AELTC holds tickets back specifically for the Queue — roughly 500 each for Centre Court, No.1 Court and No.2 Court, plus a large number of Grounds Passes.

The numbers translate directly into odds:

• Under 500: a strong chance of Centre Court.
• Under about 1,500: you will usually get a show court of some kind.
• Beyond that: a Grounds Pass, which is still a full day’s tennis.

Timing follows from that. Show-court tickets, and Centre Court in particular, normally require overnight queuing. For an early-round Grounds Pass, arriving between 5am and 7am is generally enough.

Camping is free and stewarded within Wimbledon Park, with two rules worth knowing: only two-person tents are permitted, and there is a storage facility where you leave tents and sleeping bags before going into the grounds, collecting them on the way out.

One requirement that has caught people out recently: for 2026 the AELTC asked all visitors to download the Wimbledon app and create a myWimbledon account before attending, because it is needed to buy a ticket and is scanned at the point of sale — in the Queue as well as elsewhere. Do it before you travel, not while standing in a field.

The £15 seat almost nobody mentions

This is the best-value ticket at Wimbledon and it is barely publicised.

Show-court ticket holders who leave before play ends drop their tickets into collection boxes on the way out. Those seats are then resold to people already inside the grounds on a Grounds Pass, typically for around £15 to £20, with the proceeds going to charity.

So the practical route to sitting on Centre Court without a ballot win or an overnight queue is: buy a Grounds Pass, get in, join the resale queue in the afternoon, and pay about £15 for a seat that a debenture holder paid six figures to guarantee.

It requires patience and it is not guaranteed. It is also the single cheapest show-court seat in elite sport.

Debentures, briefly, for scale

Debentures are not tickets. They are five-year bonds that guarantee a Centre Court or No.1 Court seat, and they exist mainly to fund capital works at the club.

The scale is worth stating because it frames everything above. The official issue price for a Centre Court debenture in the 2026–2030 series was £116,000 per seat, up 45% from £80,000 for the previous series, sold in pairs. On the resale market, brokered by Dowgate Capital, they traded as high as £380,000 in April 2026 — more than triple the issue price.

The purchase is staged rather than paid at once — the 2026–2030 series was structured as £29,000 on application, then two instalments of £43,500 in February 2025 and February 2026. That structure, plus a legal resale market, is why debentures are traded as an asset and not simply consumed as tickets. They are the only Wimbledon ticket you are permitted to sell on.

Individual debenture day tickets reach the open market too, at prices that make face value look like a clerical error: from about £2,495 for a round-match day on Centre Court, £3,995 and £4,995 for the quarter-final days, and £9,995 for the men’s singles final.

That is the range this event contains. Fifteen pounds to nearly ten thousand, for the same seats, on the same day.

How Wimbledon compares with other majors

Event	Public route	Cheapest genuine route
Wimbledon	Ballot + the Queue	~£15 on-site resale
The Masters	Ballot only	$125 practice round, if drawn
Ryder Cup 2027	Ballot only	€89 practice day, if drawn
Super Bowl	Random drawing, then resale	~$3,400 resale in game week

Wimbledon is the only one of the four with a same-day route that requires no advance luck at all. The Masters and Ryder Cup shut entirely once their ballots close — see our guides to Masters tickets and Ryder Cup tickets — and the Super Bowl leaves only an expensive resale market.

If you want to attend one major sporting event and you have not planned a year ahead, Wimbledon is the answer. For every other event’s application window, see our guide to sports ticket ballots.

How we checked these numbers

Ticket prices, Queue mechanics and the resale scheme are from the AELTC’s own ticketing information and from contemporaneous 2026 coverage by Tennis Majors, Londonist and Perfect Tennis. Queue allocation figures of roughly 500 per show court are the long-standing published pattern rather than a guaranteed annual number, and the AELTC does not commit to exact totals.

Debenture issue and resale prices are as reported by Bloomberg in June 2026, citing Dowgate Capital, Wimbledon’s official broker. Prices are in pounds sterling as published for the 2026 Championships; 2027 prices had not been released when this page was written.

The 2027 ballot date is an estimate carried forward from the 2026 cycle and is labelled as such wherever it appears. This page will be updated as soon as the AELTC publishes confirmed dates — expected within days of publication.

Review class: event-driven. Recheck when the AELTC confirms the 2027 ballot date, currently carried forward as an estimate.