Your US Open sweepstake, sorted.
The US Open is the loudest, latest-night Slam of the year - and the last chance for an office sweepstake until the Australian Open in January. Here's everything you need to run one for the 2026 tournament: the key dates, how the draw works, and how to have your sweep ready the moment the players are announced.
The dates that matter in 2026
- Monday 24 August - the ATP and WTA rankings that decide the seedings are published.
- Thursday 27 August- the draw ceremony. This is the big one for sweepstake organisers: the full 128-player Men's and Women's Singles draws are published.
- Sunday 30 August - first day of main-draw singles at Flushing Meadows.
- Saturday 12 & Sunday 13 September- the Women's and Men's Singles finals.
The sweet spot for your sweepstake is the window between the draw ceremony and the first ball - set it up then and every name in the hat is a real entrant. SlamSweep loads the official 128-player draws as soon as they're published, so you can add your people now and pull the draw the moment the players land.
The 2026 storylines your office will care about
Carlos Alcaraz and Aryna Sabalenka arrive as the defending champions - Alcaraz beat Jannik Sinner in four sets in the 2025 final, and Sabalenka saw off Amanda Anisimova to become the first woman to defend the title since Serena Williams. Whoever draws either of them out of the hat will be unbearable, and rightly so.
The biggest story broke the day before Fan Week: Jannik Sinner withdrewfrom the 2026 tournament with a knee injury, blowing the men's draw wide open. With the world number one out, the seedings shuffle up - Alexander Zverev (this year's Roland Garros champion) and Alcaraz lead the field, with Novak Djokovic still lurking and every seed below them suddenly a live ticket. In sweepstake terms: there has rarely been a better year to draw a mid-ranked seed.
On the women's side, Sabalenka has been world number one for nearly two years, but 2026's majors have been shared around - Elena Rybakina took the Australian Open (beating Sabalenka in the final), teenager Mirra Andreeva won Roland Garros, and Linda Noskova won Wimbledon. Four different women's champions in 2026's first three Slams plus the US Open field means genuinely anyone in your office could end up holding the winner.
Setting up your US Open sweep
- Open the US Open sweepstake generator and add everyone taking part - paste the list straight from your group chat if you like.
- Pull the draw. Once the official draw is out, each person gets a real US Open player at random - one each by default, or two or three each so nobody is out after round one. Before it's published, you can add players to the hat yourself (the seeds make a fine early hat).
- Share the link. The whole draw is encoded in it - everyone sees the same result, nothing is stored, and it still works when the final rolls around on 13 September.
US Open sweep tips
- Mind the time difference. New York is five hours behind the UK, and US Open night sessions finish in the small hours of the British morning. Post your sweep updates at breakfast - overnight results are half the fun.
- Agree the withdrawal rule up front.Sinner's late withdrawal is exactly why: decide before you draw what happens if a player pulls out before their first match (usual rule: redraw from the hat).
- Two weeks, two hats.Run the Men's and Women's Singles as separate draws so everyone has two players and two finals to care about - see our rules and variations guide for more ways to play.
- First time organising? The full checklist - money, deadlines, live draws, keeping it fun - is in how to run an office sweepstake.