Results are landing in waves until the end of September. What to do if you got in, what to do if you didn't, and the routes that still exist to a week on the Old Course next July.
Last updated 22 September 2026.
The short version: the public ballot for general admission tickets to the 155th Open at St Andrews, which runs from 11 to 18 July 2027, opened on 6 July this year and closed on 24 July. It is the only way to buy an ordinary day ticket to the championship. If you entered, you will hear by email by the end of this month; results have been going out in waves since August. If you did not enter, there is no general sale to wait for, and the remaining routes all cost more than a day ticket. Here is how it works.
If you entered the ballot
Check your email, including the folder you never open. Successful applicants get an invitation to buy the tickets they applied for, at face value, with a payment window of up to seven days. Miss the window and the allocation goes back into the pot for a later wave, not to you. The R&A has said every applicant will have a final answer by the end of September, so if you have heard nothing by the first week of October, assume you were unsuccessful in this round.
Face-value prices are worth knowing because they are the benchmark for everything else. Adults pay £40 for the Sunday practice day, £50 for the Monday, £60 for the Tuesday and £70 for the Wednesday; then £150 for each of the first two championship days, £170 for Saturday and £190 for the final round on Sunday 18 July. Under-16s go free with a paying adult, and 16-to-24-year-olds get a discounted ticket, which is why a family of four on a practice day is one of the better-value days out in British sport.
If you were unsuccessful, or missed it
Do not go to a secondary ticket site. The Open's tickets are issued through the One Club digital membership and tied to the applicant; the R&A cancels tickets it finds on resale sites, and St Andrews in Open week is full of people who paid a stranger four hundred pounds for a ticket that did not scan. Forfeited allocations return to later ballot waves, not to a public sale, so there is nothing to refresh.
What remains, in rough order of cost. Hospitality: the R&A sells day and week packages with a seat, a meal and a view, from the champagne-and-canapé end down to something closer to a very good lunch, and although these are selling at what the R&A calls a record pace, they are not gone. Ticket Plus, the tier between general admission and hospitality, is sold out for the four championship days with a waiting list you can join. Destination packages, which bundle guaranteed tickets with accommodation in and around St Andrews and transfers to the course, are sold through the R&A's official partner and are the most reliable way for an overseas visitor to secure the whole week in one transaction; a refundable £99 priority pass gets you first call on the next release. And the Open Camping Village, on the edge of town, which pairs a pitch with tickets and is the cheapest way a group under thirty can do the week.
There is one more, which is patience. In previous years an official resale, run by the R&A through One Club, has opened in the spring for ticket-holders who cannot attend to return tickets at face value. Nothing has been announced for 2027 yet. We will update this piece the day it is.
If you have tickets: sort the rest now
The championship is ten months away and the town is already largely booked. St Andrews has around 3,000 hotel beds for a week that draws 250,000 people, so the hotels beside the course — the Old Course Hotel by the seventeenth, Rusacks on the eighteenth, Hotel du Vin two minutes from the first tee — are package-only for Open week and have been for a year. What is left is in the wider town, the university halls, the East Neuk villages, Dundee and Cupar, and it goes weekly. Book somewhere refundable now and improve it later.
Getting there is the other thing to settle. No cars come into St Andrews during the championship; spectators use the park-and-ride sites on the edges of town, the shuttle from Leuchars station, or their feet. If you are staying in Dundee or Edinburgh, the train to Leuchars and the shuttle from there is the answer, and the overnight sleeper from London puts you at Leuchars for breakfast.
The dates, in one place
Sunday 11 to Wednesday 14 July 2027: practice days. Monday is the last-chance qualifier; Tuesday the champions' challenge.
Thursday 15 to Sunday 18 July 2027: the four rounds of the 155th Open.
Ballot: opened 6 July 2026, closed 24 July 2026. Final results to all applicants by 30 September 2026.
Official resale for 2027: not yet announced. Check back here.
Read next
The Open returns home: St Andrews 2027 — the feature on what the week is like.
Rusacks, the hotel at the end of the eighteenth · The Old Course Hotel, the hotel golfers aim over · Hotel du Vin, the wine hotel on the Scores [link when published]
The overnight train that takes you from London to St Andrews
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The Overnight Train That Takes You From London to St Andrews