The US Open's record $108 million purse is up 20% year on year, with $5.5 million to each singles champion. Players are not primarily asking for more money; they want a fixed revenue-sharing percentage, moving from roughly 15% at the Slams toward the 22% already standard at top ATP and WTA events. Why a share differs from a raise, and why tennis has no bargaining unit to negotiate one.
The 2026 US Open will distribute $108 million to players, a record and a 20% increase on last year's $90 million. Each singles champion takes $5.5 million. A first-round main-draw loser takes $140,000 — more than most professional tennis players earn in a season. The runners-up get $2.8 million, semi-finalists $1.45 million, quarter-finalists $780,000. A separate $2 million player welfare fund was announced alongside it.
The players' joint response called it 'important progress.' Not a settlement, not an agreement — progress. That word was chosen carefully, and it points at the actual dispute, which is not about the size of the number.
What top players have been requesting, in a letter signed by 20 of them to the four Grand Slam organisers in March and in conversations running roughly eighteen months, is a revenue-sharing percentage: a fixed share of tournament revenue, agreed in advance, that moves automatically as revenue moves.
Reporting puts the current share of revenue reaching players at the Slams at around 15%, with the players seeking 22% by 2030. The 22% figure is not arbitrary and is not aspirational in the way it sounds: it is roughly the standard already in place at the highest-profile events on the ATP and WTA tours. The players are asking the four biggest tournaments in the sport to match what the tier below them already does.
The distinction between a record purse and a percentage is not rhetorical. A purse announced each spring is discretionary. It can be larger this year and smaller next year. It is decided by one party and communicated to the other. Crucially, it makes the recipient a supplicant: the correct posture toward a gift is gratitude, and the correct posture toward a formula is arithmetic. A percentage converts the relationship from petition to contract, and that is worth more than the delta in any single year's cheque.
It also transfers risk in both directions, which is a genuine argument against it and is rarely made honestly on the players' side. A fixed share means players absorb downside when a tournament has a bad year — weather, a broadcast renegotiation that goes badly, a sponsorship market that softens. Several years of guaranteed record increases may in fact pay individual players more than a share of a flat or falling revenue base would. The players are trading expected value for control, and they should be understood as knowing that.
Two percentages, two denominators. The 15%-toward-22% pair is the Grand Slam revenue share players negotiate against. Separately, Sportico calculates that this year's $108 million purse equals 19.3% of the US Open's $559.7 million operating revenue — but that revenue figure is from 2024, the latest publicly available, and is a different base. The two numbers are not comparable and should not be read as one.
Set the tennis numbers against the North American team leagues and the gap is startling. Under collective bargaining, players in the NFL, NBA, NHL and MLB receive roughly half of defined league revenue. The precise definitions differ and each agreement has its own carve-outs, but the order of magnitude is consistent: around 50%.
Tennis players are asking to move from about 15% to about 22%. Even their target sits at less than half what unionised athletes in other sports have taken as a baseline for decades. That is not because tennis players are timid negotiators. It is structural, and the structure is worth explaining properly rather than treating as a grievance.
Team-sport athletes are employees. They have employers, they have a union, and federal labour law gives that union the right to bargain collectively and the leverage to strike. The 50% figure is what that machinery produced over decades of disputes, lockouts and litigation.
Tennis players are independent contractors. They are not employed by the tournaments they enter; they enter them. The calendar is run by two tours and four independent Slam organisers, none of which controls the others, and the Slams are separately owned by four national federations in four countries with different governing structures and different commercial interests. There is no bargaining unit, because there is no common employer to bargain with. A player who wanted to organise a strike would have to coordinate across two tours, four majors and a ranking system that punishes absence individually rather than collectively.
That is the whole reason the ask is 22% rather than 50%. It is not a modest request; it is the largest request the sport's structure can currently carry.
“There is no bargaining unit, so there is nobody to sign a collective bargaining agreement with.”
Announced alongside the purse, and receiving perhaps a tenth of the attention: all four Grand Slam organisers will establish a joint player council.
On its face this is the smallest concession available — a consultative body with no stated authority to bind anyone, of a kind that sports organisations create routinely when they want to defuse pressure without conceding anything material. Treated as a win, it would be a thin one.
Treated as an institution, it is more interesting than the money. It would be the first structure in the sport's history through which players interact with all four Slams at once, in one room, on the record. That is the missing precondition for everything else. A body that meets regularly, accumulates institutional memory, develops shared positions and eventually retains its own advisers starts to acquire the properties of a bargaining unit even without the legal status of one. Unions in other industries have grown out of works councils and staff associations that began with no more formal power than this.
The counter-argument, which the Slams presumably understand as well as anyone, is that such bodies are also excellent at absorbing energy. A council gives grievances somewhere to go that is not a press conference, and a forum that meets quarterly can convert an eighteen-month campaign into an indefinite process. Whether it becomes a bargaining structure or a pressure valve depends almost entirely on whether the players staff it seriously and fund it independently.
The compensation conversation in tennis is only loud while a major is being played, which is why announcements land in tournament weeks and why the same cycle has repeated for two years. Three things would indicate the structure is actually shifting rather than the number:
The generalisable point outlives tennis. In any compensation dispute, the headline number is the concession the paying party finds cheapest to make, because it resets to zero every cycle. The structural change — the formula, the recognised body, the audited base — is what does not. When you next see a labour dispute settled with a record figure and a warm statement about progress, the question worth asking is whether anything was agreed that survives to next year.
Reporting puts the players' share at Grand Slam events at roughly 15% of revenue, with players seeking 22% by 2030 — approximately the share already standard at the highest-profile ATP and WTA tour events. Separately, Sportico calculates the 2026 US Open's $108 million purse as 19.3% of the tournament's $559.7 million operating revenue, but that revenue figure is from 2024 and uses a different base from the 15%/22% negotiation.
DrafterDaily covers the business of sport — ownership structures, labour economics and the contract terms behind the headline figures.
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