The U.S. Open likes to sell itself as tennis's most democratic major — take the 7 train to Flushing Meadows, grab a $65 grounds pass, spend the day a few feet from the world's best players. That pitch is getting harder to make. This year, entry-level grounds passes have been showing up on the resale market for well north of $300, and the tournament's own executives, elected officials, and even a hedge fund billionaire have all weighed in on how a nonprofit governing body ended up presiding over a scalper's market.

The public blowup started when Bill Ackman objected to a $363 listing for a day-one grounds pass, arguing it was hard to square with the USTA's stated mission of growing the sport. Days later, New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani carved out 1,000 Open tickets for city residents at $100 each — an offer that reportedly drew well over 300,000 applicants. It's a strange coalition: a billionaire and a democratic socialist mayor, united by sticker shock at a tennis tournament.

The gap between what the USTA charges and what fans actually pay is the real story. The face value on a grounds pass hasn't moved much — it's still $65 — but almost as soon as low-tier inventory goes on sale, bots and resellers scoop it up and relist it at multiples of face value. It's the same dynamic that's driven years of controversy around Ticketmaster and dynamic-pricing blowups at concerts, just playing out on a tennis calendar instead of a tour schedule.

Here's the part that should get more attention: New York's ticket resale law is loose enough that scalping itself is essentially unregulated, and Ticketmaster — the Open's official ticketing partner — operates both the primary sale and the resale marketplace where those same tickets get relisted. The USTA has confirmed it takes a cut of Ticketmaster's fees (not the resale price itself) every time a ticket changes hands on the platform. That means a single grounds pass can generate revenue for the USTA twice: once at face value, and again when it's flipped.

The USTA won't say how large that cut is. Multiple outlets have asked for a dollar figure or a percentage share and been rebuffed; the organization's most recent publicly available tax filing lumps box-office and resale-fee revenue into a single ticketing line, with no breakout. What is public: total ticket revenue climbed from roughly $151.7 million in 2021 to $208.5 million in 2024 — a 37% jump — while broadcast revenue over the same stretch was essentially flat. Sponsorship and hospitality revenue have grown even faster, with hospitality and service revenue more than doubling. The Open now accounts for close to 90% of the USTA's total operating revenue.

The USTA's public position is that it's essentially a bystander — resale is legal in New York, it can't police what a ticket-holder does after the sale, and shutting off Ticketmaster's resale marketplace would just push transactions to less secure third-party sites. There's some truth to that. But it's also an incomplete answer, and not one that necessarily holds up against how other rightsholders have handled the same problem.

Artists including Billie Eilish and Pearl Jam have negotiated resale caps directly with Ticketmaster. AMC's CEO has drawn similar lines around predatory movie-ticket resale. And unlike the Open, the other three tennis majors — Wimbledon, Roland Garros, and the Australian Open — either bar resale outright or cap it close to face value, with correspondingly lower prices and less reseller profit. The USTA has more leverage over its own ticketing terms than its public messaging suggests; it's simply chosen, so far, not to use much of it. Purchases are currently capped at eight tickets per session, a limit that does little against bot-driven bulk buying, and incoming USTA CEO Craig Tiley has said the organization is "looking into" a lower per-buyer cap for 2027.

The resale market isn't the only thing pushing prices up. Arthur Ashe Stadium is in the middle of an $800 million renovation that leaves total capacity roughly unchanged but reshuffles who sits where: about 3,500 moderately priced loge seats are being eliminated while courtside inventory — including roughly 2,000 more seats — expands. The old loge seats averaged around $291 a session; the seats replacing much of that inventory average north of $560, with hospitality packages running above $2,300. That's not a resale story, it's an inventory story: thousands of mid-tier seats are simply being converted into expensive ones.

What separates this from, say, Knicks ticket inflation is the USTA's tax status. It's a 501(c) nonprofit that plays up its youth and community tennis programs while staging its marquee event on city parkland in Flushing Meadows-Corona Park, paying the city a small percentage of revenue over a threshold in return. Asking families to pay resale-inflated prices to watch the sport the USTA says it's trying to grow — while the organization's net assets have nearly doubled over the past decade to more than $700 million — is a harder position to defend than it would be for a for-profit operator.

Even the USTA seems to know this. A spokesperson has said ticketing policy is "on the table" for reassessment once the tournament wraps, and Tiley — who previously ran the Australian Open through a similar transformation into a broader entertainment festival — has acknowledged the secondary market is one of the organization's "biggest challenges," even as he's floated an expansive vision for the Open's future as something closer to a year-round entertainment brand than a two-week tennis event.

To the USTA's credit, it hasn't simply repriced entry-level tickets to capture the resale premium itself — a $65 grounds pass could easily be sold at $300 from the start, and it isn't. The organization also points to Fan Week, when grounds access is free, as evidence that affordability remains part of the model. Whether that's enough to offset a resale market this overheated is the question the USTA says it will revisit after the tournament — and the one that will determine whether 2027 looks any different.

Bottom Liine: This is the same resale-fee-scrape dynamic we've tracked with StubHub and Ticketmaster in the concert business — a rightsholder profiting on both the primary and secondary sale of the same inventory, with limited disclosure on how much. Worth watching whether the USTA's ticketing review after this year's Open produces any real structural change, or just a lower per-buyer cap that bots route around anyway.