The US Open opened this year's tournament with a record $108 million total prize pool, a 20 percent increase over last year's purse and the largest in Grand Slam history, the USTA announced ahead of play. [1] What the headline figure obscures, according to Sportico's own breakdown of the numbers, is that the players most responsible for the tournament's television ratings and ticket sales are getting a shrinking share of that record pot, even as the total keeps climbing. [1]
The pattern shows up cleanly once the raises are broken down by round. First-round losers in the men's and women's singles draws will earn $140,000, up 27 percent from last year — the largest percentage increase anywhere in the purse. [1] Every subsequent round gets a smaller raise than the one before it: the runner-up payout of $2.8 million rose just 12 percent, and the champion's $5.5 million prize rose only 10 percent from 2025. [1] Sportico's data shows that ten years ago, the men's and women's singles winners took home 18.3 percent of all payouts distributed to singles players; in 2026 that figure has fallen to 12.9 percent. [1]
That decline sits inside a broader fight the Grand Slams have been having with their top players all year. In March, 20 of the sport's leading players signed a letter to the four majors demanding a larger share of tournament revenue, arguing that all four events pay out below the 22 percent revenue-share standard common on the ATP and WTA tour circuits. [1] The French Open's 9.5 percent prize increase for 2026 triggered a player protest — players limited their press conferences to 15 minutes in response — while Wimbledon's 20 percent raise avoided a similar backlash. [1] Multiple players told reporters in recent weeks they would not rule out a protest at the US Open if the new purse fell short of the same 16 percent revenue-share threshold that last year's $90 million pool approximately matched. [1] The USTA has not published the tournament's actual revenue figures for 2025 or projected 2026 revenue, meaning it remains impossible to confirm whether this year's $108 million purse actually clears that threshold or merely gestures at it. [1]
The unresolved math is the same one this paper flagged in July, when the Women's British Open opened at Royal Lytham with a headline $10 million purse increase and no published revenue breakdown, a gap the paper described at the time as "gross is not net." The US Open's $108 million follows the identical structure: a record dollar figure that generates the headline, alongside a percentage-of-revenue question the tournament organizer declines to answer.
Sportico's coverage led with the record purse and a genuine milestone — the tournament also announced a new $2 million Player Support Program and a joint Grand Slam Player Advisory Council giving athletes formal input into tournament governance for the first time. [1] Both are real gains. But Sportico's own round-by-round data, shared widely on X the day the numbers were announced, tells a second story underneath the first: the players whose fame and performance drive the tournament's revenue growth are capturing a smaller slice of it than they were a decade ago, and the organization setting their pay still will not say what percentage of the pie the record number actually represents.
-- AMARA OKONKWO, Lagos