Last updated: August 27, 2026

We have attended over forty Broadway shows this year; thirty-one of them were through Broadway lottery and rush programs for an average ticket price of about $47. Lottery and rush are both free to enter. Here is how the programs work.

I include Off-Broadway, so Little Shop of Horrors at the Westside and Heathers at New World Stages sit in these numbers alongside the Broadway shows.

In this guide

• The Broadway lottery is free to enter and there is no catch
• Which Broadway lottery platforms should you prioritize?
• Broadway lottery times: when results come out
• Digital rush is a great option
• The weekly lotteries, and why I have entered Hamilton 100 times
• Both of you should enter, and here is what actually happens when you both win
• What do Broadway lottery seats actually look like?
• Check whether your lead is on before you claim
• After you claim, work out how the ticket is going to reach you
• When the lottery is the wrong tool
• Reddit is how I found the Tony Awards lottery
• Every lottery and rush ticket we bought in 2026
• Broadway lottery FAQs
• Steal our lottery routine

Fleming mentioned in the pre-theatre restaurants post that we see a lot of Broadway, and that most of it comes from lotteries. This is the promised follow-up.

My experience with the Just in Time lottery shows the real benefit of the lottery. Fleming and I were heading to see Book of Mormon for a Sunday matinee and decided we could see a show Monday too. We entered the Just in Time lottery and won second row tickets. Great seats. They would easily sell for over $130 a ticket even with discounts. A couple of months later we wanted to take Fleming’s mom. Because we needed three tickets and we had a set day and time we had to buy in advance. Thankfully, the cheapest seats available were $99 each. Sometimes you can’t take advantage of the lottery because you need a specific time and more tickets. Parting note: the cheap last row seats for Just in Time were really good still; it’s a small theatre.

Just in Time, Orchestra Aisle, Row E. Won by lottery, on Fleming’s account. $49 all in.

Just in Time, Orchestra Aisle, Row K. Bought at full price. $99 all in.

The lottery seats were amazing and cost half as much.

Oh, Mary! is an even better win. On Monday, August 24, Fleming won the Telecharge lottery for Oh, Mary! at the Lyceum: two tickets, $94.00 all in, for the Tuesday, August 25, 7:30pm performance. That evening I opened the ordinary Telecharge sale page and priced the same seats for the same performance one week later, Tuesday, September 1. Two tickets, $450.00, with $44.00 of that in fees.

Oh, Mary!, Center Orchestra, Row O. Won by lottery, on Fleming’s account. $47 a seat, all in.

Oh, Mary!, the same seats one week later. Priced on the public sale page. $225 a seat, all in.

The same seats for $175 less is a major win!

By the time you read this, some of the shows named below will have closed. Death Becomes Her announced its closing in May and was gone by June, and I saw it twice. Moulin Rouge plays its final Broadway performance on August 30, and Chess closed in June. So treat the titles as examples. The platforms and the timings are the part that lasts.

The Broadway lottery is free to enter and there is no catch

Yes, it is free, and there is no catch. This is the first thing to tell anyone who has never done it. You can enter lotteries completely free and you only pay if (1) you win and (2) you choose to claim the win.

You do not put a card on file. You do not pay a deposit. You are not penalized for winning and then not paying. If you win and let it lapse, the seats go to a standby list and nothing happens to you. We have let thirteen wins expire this year, performances we won but could not attend.

Which means the correct strategy is to enter everything you are interested in seeing and think you can make. The biggest caveat is you can only win one show per timeslot per lottery platform. This means if you enter six Telecharge lotteries for Saturday at 7pm, you automatically lose the other five if you win one. You diminish your chances of seeing your number one show but maximize your chances of seeing a show at all.

Entries are for one or two tickets, and you pick the quantity when you enter. You cannot change it afterwards, so if you are going with someone, enter for two. I hear you can contact Telecharge if you win for two and want to change it, but I can’t personally verify that. Also I know a lot of people use the Theatr app to sell tickets (only allowed to sell at face value) and will sell unused lottery tickets in that manner. I haven’t yet bought or sold on Theatr but I check it.

Which Broadway lottery platforms should you prioritize?

There are five or six worth having, but two of them did almost all the work. Telecharge and Broadway Direct produced 18 of my 23 lottery wins, and 23 of my 31 discounted performances once you add Telecharge rush. Everything else is a secondary tier that is worth entering because it is free, not because I have won with it.

Platform	Account needed	Results	Time to pay	Typical price
Broadway Direct (Nederlander)	No, email only	Emails winners and losers	60 minutes	$35 to $55, fees included
Telecharge (Shubert)	Yes, free	Two draws daily, 10am and 3pm. Emails you either way	About 5 hours	$38 to $49, $5 fee included
Lucky Seat	No	Early afternoon, day before	A few hours	$29 to $49, plus $5 at checkout
TodayTix	App only	Varies wildly by show (lottery). Rush is separate and opens at 9am.	Assume 30 minutes	$30 to $49
Hamilton app	App only	Weekly. Opens Friday 10am, closes Thursday noon	2 hours	$10

Four differences that matter in practice.

Telecharge gives you two shots a day and offers a relaxed five-hour payment timeline. My Outsiders win arrived at 10:21am with a 3:00pm deadline. Broadway Direct only gives 60 minutes. I get a lot of my information from the Broadway subreddit and just saw a post complaining that the Broadway Direct wins land during Broadway matinees when your phone is off (a thread on the timing of Broadway lotteries). Unfortunate.

Every single one of them warns you in writing that your two seats may not be together. Lucky Seat goes furthest and reserves the right to put you anywhere in the theatre, including boxes reachable only by stairs, and standing room. In all of my wins I have never received seats that were separated.

As of August 16, 2026, Broadway Direct’s live prices were Aladdin and The Lion King at $35, Schmigadoon, SIX, Stranger Things and The Lost Boys at $45, MJ at $49, and Wicked at $55. Those numbers move. The structure does not.

The confirmation emails break that figure out, which is worth knowing before you budget. My Lion King entry for August 26 lists the ticket at $30.00 with a separate handling fee. Add them together and you are at the $35 that gets quoted. Broadway Direct is genuinely all-in at the number on the page; it is just built out of two.

Broadway lottery times: when results come out

Telecharge draws at 10am and 3pm. Broadway Direct reports at 2pm, 3pm or 4pm depending on the show, and gives you sixty minutes to pay.

So a Broadway Direct win that lands at 2:00pm expires at 3:00pm, which is the exact minute Telecharge announces its afternoon draw. You have to commit to one ticket without knowing whether you have also won the other.

August 13 is the textbook case, from my own inbox:

Time	What happened
2:00pm	Broadway Direct: won The Lost Boys for the 14th. $90 for two. Pay by 3:00pm
2:04pm	Paid. Committed
3:09pm	Telecharge results land. No win on Ragtime

It worked out. Had Telecharge come through, I would have missed Ragtime or had one set of tickets I couldn’t use.

What to do about it:

• Decide your priority order before 2pm. If a Broadway Direct result lands at 2:00 and you are also in for a Telecharge show that night, you are choosing blind. Know in advance which one you would rather see.
• The 10am Telecharge draw is the friendly one. It resolves before any Broadway Direct result, so you can enter the afternoon lotteries already knowing where you stand. I think the 10am draw is pretty limited; I usually win on the 3pm draw. Fleming, however, won the 10am draw for Oh Mary!
• A 4pm Broadway Direct result is the easy case. Telecharge has already reported.

The daily clock

Time (ET)	What is happening
12:01am	Telecharge posts performances one to two days ahead (enter any time before 10am for a shot at both drawings, or before 3pm for the main drawing).
7:00 to 10:00am	Broadway Direct entry windows open, varies by show
9:00am	TodayTix rush opens (unlock the show the night before). Popular shows can be gone within minutes
10:00am	Telecharge draw one. In-person box office rush opens (noon on Sundays)
11:00am	Telecharge digital rush opens and runs until 30 minutes before curtain
Around 12:30pm	Lucky Seat results for tomorrow
2:00pm	Broadway Direct results, some shows. 60 minutes to pay
3:00pm	Telecharge entries close, draw two lands, and the 2pm Broadway Direct window expires
3:00–4:00pm	Additional Broadway Direct lottery wins and/or standby win results.
30 min pre-curtain	Telecharge rush closes. Broadway Direct tickets go up at the box office

Digital rush is a great option

I refer people to the lottery, but digital rush is a great way to get discount seats to shows that have less than full capacity. I find digital rush tickets available all the time on rush.telecharge.com. Rush tickets cost about the same as lottery tickets.

On rush.telecharge.com, cancellation tickets are listed as a separate offer sitting next to the regular rush. On August 24 The Great Gatsby had two tiles up for the same 7:00pm performance, one headed “The Great Gatsby Cancellation Tickets” and one headed plainly “The Great Gatsby.” They are separate pools. The cancellation tickets are generally pricey depending on the show, $90 to $180ish. I haven’t tried for them and I don’t really intend to. Worth double checking to make sure you aren’t clicking cancellation instead of rush.

Here is a real Telecharge rush offer, transcribed off my phone:

TICKETS AVAILABLE

Maybe Happy Ending, Wednesday, August 12, 2026 at 2:00PM

10 rows from Stage

This seat offers a partial view of the stage. Moments on the extreme side of the stage may be out of view.

2 tickets. Offer available for 1:54

[ No Thanks ] [ Purchase ] $49.00, $5.00 fee included

The Telecharge rush tells you roughly what kind of seats you get and whether the view is obstructed, and the countdown in that box is two minutes.

A lottery win is take it or lose it, and you find out where you are sitting after you have paid. Rush is a decision made on full information. If you care what you are looking at, that is decisive.

One note on “partial view”. A lot of the partial views are still a great experience. If you are going to your dream show and only that show once, maybe buy a ticket at TKTS or another platform. But if you are looking to maximize bang for your buck, lottery and rush offer great tickets and obstruction usually isn’t that bad. At Lost Boys it was missing the top 5% of the stage during flying acts, at Aladdin it was a tiny half-inch pole eight rows in front of me. I think my worst obstructed views come from (un)luck of the draw when I have a particularly tall person sitting in front of me.

Nothing at 11am does not mean nothing today

Telecharge digital rush opens at 11:00 but that is not all the availability for the day.

On August 10 I checked Telecharge rush for The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at 11:00am. Nothing. Checked twice more around noon. Nothing. At about 12:53pm Fleming clicked and the tickets were there. We saw it that night from Left Orchestra, Row J, $49 a seat. Bonus: we got to see LJ Benet and Paul Alexander Nolan (from Lost Boys) as guest spellers since it was an off night for them.

Six days later, at 4:41pm on a Sunday, with 7:00pm curtains, there were two shows sitting available: Operation Mincemeat at Row 4 of the right front mezzanine, and Spelling Bee at five rows from the stage. Both $49.

The clearest version of this was Monday, August 24. Between 2:59 and 3:00pm, three separate rush offers were live at the same moment: The Great Gatsby at 16 rows from the stage, The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee at 5 rows from the stage, and The Play That Goes Wrong at 3 rows from the stage. Two tickets each. Three in the afternoon, four hours before curtain, on a Monday.

Telecharge rush inventory is not a single morning drop. It trickles in all day as holds are released and exchanges come back. Eleven o’clock tells you about eleven o’clock and nothing else. Check whenever you are free.

TodayTix rush runs on the opposite clock. It opens at 9am and the shows people want are gone shortly after. There is no all-day trickle, so if you want a TodayTix rush seat you set an alarm. Unlock the show in the app the night before.

I checked & Juliet at 9:04am on August 27 and the seats were still up: Orchestra Row Q, 105 and 106, $49 each. TodayTix gives you the actual seat numbers before you pay, which is more than Telecharge does. Telecharge tells you “10 rows from Stage”, not the exact tickets.

Two things about that $49. The fee inside it is $8 a ticket, not the $5 Telecharge takes, and the $49 was after a $10 Gold Rewards discount off $54. So the price without Gold Rewards is $54. Then the checkout starts its own clock. Mine said the seats were held for 4:35 (probably about 5 minutes and I let the clock run down) and the countdown was running while I read the page. All sales final, and rush tickets cannot be transferred.

The checkout page also told me the role of Lance would be played by Paulo Szot that night. It’s nice to have that information displayed up front.

The three-day cooldown

Telecharge’s own rush FAQ: “You are eligible for rush tickets three days after your last purchase.”

One digital rush purchase locks you out of Telecharge rush for a few days. This generally isn’t a problem unless you are traveling from out of town and want to do more than two shows with a partner (you can each purchase a rush).

The cooldown period is mostly meaningless for me as a local because Fleming can just check if I am on my cooldown.

It is Telecharge specific. TodayTix rush, box office rush and every lottery are unaffected.

The weekly lotteries, and why I have entered Hamilton 100 times

Telecharge and Broadway Direct require that you enter daily. A second tier runs on a much longer clock, which makes it nearly free in effort.

Hamilton, accessible only through the Hamilton app, opens Friday at 10am and closes Thursday at noon, covering the following week. Front row orchestra, $10. I have entered well over a hundred times and never won. Enter anyway, because it takes thirty seconds a week, but do not build a plan around it.

Harry Potter and the Cursed Child runs the Friday Forty: opens Monday at 12:01am, closes Friday at 1pm, winners notified that afternoon. Just like Hamilton you can enter for a week at a time. Unlike Hamilton, I have won this one three times, but two of those times Tom Felton was out, so I think my chances may have been higher. It is TodayTix app only.

Lucky Seat you can also enter about a week at a time; Hadestown and Book of Mormon are the big ones available through here (and previously Moulin Rouge, which closes on August 30). I have won Hadestown and Moulin Rouge on this one and Fleming has won Book of Mormon.

Both of you should enter, and here is what actually happens when you both win

Every platform caps you at one win per time slot per account. Not per household. So Fleming and I enter the same lotteries separately, and when both of us hit, we do not get two tickets. We get four. We almost always decline the second set if it’s for the same show or choose which show we want (in June we chose between The Outsiders and Death Becomes Her).

The best night of the year came out of it. Monday, June 15, Just in Time. Fleming won the 10am Telecharge draw. I won the 3pm draw, for the same performance. Four seats at $49 each. My sister and her boyfriend came with us. I found out about my half during intermission in the Eugene O’Neill watching The Book of Mormon.

We hit the double win four times this year and converted it into four seats exactly once. The strategy works perfectly. The problem is that the second pair is only useful if you have friends who are free on roughly eighteen hours’ notice. Three times out of four we did not, so one of us let the win lapse.

And the four seats are not together. Two separate orders are two separate orders, guaranteed. On June 15 my pair for Just in Time was Floor Seat Aisle 3, Row FB and Fleming’s was Orchestra Aisle, Row E. Different parts of the room. Everyone had a great time, but you won’t be sitting together.

The reverse case happens far more often, and it is just as much the reason to both enter. On August 24 Fleming’s Oh, Mary! confirmation came through at 10:23am for the next night’s performance. My own result for that exact same performance arrived at 3:05pm: “Unfortunately, you did not win.” One household, two accounts, one set of seats. Had only one of us entered, it was a coin flip whether we saw the show at all.

One more constraint: both of you have to claim inside the window, for Telecharge it is five hours but for Broadway Direct that is sixty minutes. Two people, two inboxes, one hour. Agree in advance who is buying if you both win.

What do Broadway lottery seats actually look like?

Of those thirty-one performances I have the section and row for twenty-four, taken off the actual stubs rather than from memory. By my reckoning nineteen were good or better, two were merely fine, and three were not great.

Most were better than they had any right to be:

• Heathers, Center Orchestra Rows D and E, twice, for $49 a seat. Fourth and fifth row, dead center. Both of those were rush rather than lottery. IMHO Heathers rush tickets have always been amazing.
• CATS: The Jellicle Ball, Stage Seating Row D, $49. On the stage, at an immersive production, in seats that normally price as premium.
• Just in Time, floor seats at Circle in the Square. These are prime seats on the floor. Typically priced at more than $150.
• Schmigadoon, Mezzanine Row A. Front row of the mezz, straight on. These seats were typically priced at $185 apiece.
• Aladdin, Balcony Right Row K, $35 all in. These seats weren’t actually great but you can’t beat the price. Most seats in a Broadway theatre are fine and for $35 I would be happy any day of the week.

Check whether your lead is on before you claim

Twice this year I got a “will not appear” email. Both times it was for a lottery win, and both times it arrived after I had paid.

Date	Show	Notice	Sent	Curtain
March 31	Chess	Nicholas Christopher will not appear	3:31pm	7:00pm
June 15	Just in Time	Jeremy Jordan will not appear	2:54pm	7:00pm

Christopher was Chess’s Tony-nominated lead. Jeremy Jordan is the lead in Just in Time. And the June 15 one is the double win, the night Fleming and I both drew the same performance.

I think a headliner being out loosens the lottery, because returns and exchanges flow back into the rush and lottery pools. I cannot prove it with two data points. But Just in Time’s own TikTok account promoted a standby performance with the line “A limited number of $40 rush tickets are available in-person at the Circle in the Square Box Office.” That is the production itself pairing “the star is out” with “cheap seats now.” Two of my Cursed Child wins came on nights Tom Felton was out. So did my brother’s only win. I am fairly sure the pattern is real.

For planned absences, the information is public before you pay. On the ordinary Telecharge ticket calendar, a performance with a principal out carries a small exclamation mark next to the time. Click it and it names the cover. I have now checked this across a lot of shows. And it is not only a same-day warning: on the Little Shop of Horrors calendar it told me “Jeff Sears will perform the role of Seymour at this performance,” with every date across a whole week carrying the mark, which is a scheduled absence rather than a sick day. Planned time off for a star shows up there in advance, which is worth knowing before you enter, never mind before you claim.

Shows with a real star draw often publish absences on their own websites. I won the Cursed Child lottery three times this year. Tom Felton was out for two of them. The one I claimed, July 17, is the one where he was on. The lottery kept handing me the nights he was not playing.

That being said, understudies and standbys bring a lot of energy and it’s great to see them perform. Matt Magnusson, who is Just in Time’s standby for Bobby Darin rather than an understudy (a standby covers a principal and does not otherwise appear; an understudy is usually in the ensemble), was terrific. Check who is on, then go anyway. Some of the best nights we had this year had a standby in the lead. I never mind seeing an understudy for lottery tickets but I am less thrilled sometimes if the purchase was $150–$250.

After you claim, work out how the ticket is going to reach you

Delivery varies by show, on the same platform, in the same week. Two Broadway Direct confirmations from consecutive days:

The Lost Boys, August 14: “Your tickets will be delivered to your email address from Broadway Direct 60 minutes prior to show time… these tickets must be displayed on your mobile device at the theatre and they cannot be printed.”

Aladdin, August 13: “You may pick up your tickets at the New Amsterdam Theatre Box Office beginning no sooner than 60 minutes prior to show time. Remember, a photo ID matching the name on the lottery entry MUST be presented at will call.”

Same platform. Opposite instructions. Read your confirmation email.

In practice I typically receive Telecharge lottery tickets the day before the show and Broadway Direct tickets 3-5 hours before the show.

Aladdin, Hadestown and Cursed Child all required in-person collection this year. And even the digital path for Telecharge and Broadway Direct lotteries have a in-person fallback: if the email does not arrive, you go to the box office with photo ID matching the name on the entry. This is in part why I wouldn’t risk trying to win lotteries for other people when I can’t attend the show.

Do not enter lotteries for shows you are not personally going to. In practice you can usually email a Telecharge PDF, and a Broadway Direct mobile ticket can normally be forwarded, so handing tickets to a friend often works. But Broadway Direct’s lottery terms say the prize is “non-assignable, non-transfer­able.”

Practical rules: bring photo ID to every lottery show even when the ticket is digital, charge your phone because Broadway Direct tickets cannot be printed, and if your ticket has not arrived an hour before curtain, walk to the box office rather than waiting.

When the lottery is the wrong tool

On August 29 we are paying $439.20 for four Saturday-evening seats to Schmigadoon. Full price.

Two friends are visiting from out of town. They are here for one window. It has to be Saturday evening. They want that specific show. And we need four seats together, which on the lottery would require both of us to win that exact performance.

The probability of getting four seats for a popular Saturday night show from the lottery is basically zero.

Look at some of my full-price shows this year and the same thing is true of three of them. The Book of Mormon at $223 a seat was the final performance of a one-week original-cast reunion for the show’s fifteenth anniversary, with Josh Gad and Andrew Rannells (of the original cast) back. Just in Time in August was three tickets, and the lottery cannot produce a party of three. Giulia: The Poison Queen of Palermo, Jennifer Nettles’s short run musical about the Palermo poisoner Giulia Tofana, played the Perelman Center, a venue that runs no lottery and no rush at all, which is a category of blind spot I will cover in the companion post.

So here is the rule I would actually give someone:

Lottery and rush are tools for flexibility. The moment you add a constraint, a fixed date, a specific show, a group bigger than 2, the lottery loses its value. Pay for those. Use the lottery for everything else.

In my opinion the discount channels are what make the full-price nights affordable. Averaging about $47 a seat across thirty-one performances is what let us spend $200+ for Ragtime, anniversary Book of Mormon tickets and the return of Aaron Tveit to Moulin Rouge.

Reddit is how I found the Tony Awards lottery

On May 27 somebody posted on r/Broadway (Reddit) that the Tony Awards were releasing a limited number of discounted tickets. I had been scoping it out on StubHub but the nosebleeds were like $900. I applied to the lottery that afternoon. Approved on May 29 at 7:52pm, card charged on approval. That is the one lottery in this post that requires payment information up front. On June 7 we were at Radio City Music Hall in black tie for the 79th Annual Tony Awards, hosted by P!nk.

$495 a seat, which is not cheap by any measure. But Tony Awards house seats do not otherwise reach the public at all, and the offer was not advertised on any of the six ticketing platforms I use. It surfaced on Reddit and was gone.

r/Broadway is a resource. Use it.

Every lottery and rush ticket we bought in 2026

Here is the whole list, rebuilt from our order confirmations. Thirty-one performances between March 25 and August 25, sixty tickets, $2,815.00 all in. That works out to $46.92 a seat, and the median seat cost $49. Prices below are per ticket with every fee included.

Date	Show	How	Per ticket
Mar 25	Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York)	Telecharge lottery	$48
Mar 31	Chess	Telecharge lottery	$49
Apr 15	Maybe Happy Ending	Telecharge rush	$49
Apr 16	Stranger Things: The First Shadow	Broadway Direct lottery	$45
Apr 24	Death Becomes Her	Broadway Direct lottery	$45
Apr 26	MJ	Broadway Direct lottery	$49
May 4	The Great Gatsby	Telecharge lottery	$45
May 5	Hadestown	Lucky Seat lottery	$49
May 10	Dog Day Afternoon	TodayTix rush	$42.50
May 11	Heathers: The Musical	Telecharge rush	$49
May 13	The Lost Boys	Broadway Direct lottery	$45
May 15	Chess	Telecharge lottery	$49
Jun 2	Just in Time	Telecharge lottery	$49
Jun 3	Proof	Telecharge rush	$69
Jun 6	Death Becomes Her	Broadway Direct lottery	$45
Jun 9	CATS: The Jellicle Ball	Telecharge lottery	$49
Jun 10	Moulin Rouge! The Musical	Lucky Seat lottery	$49
Jun 12	What Happened Was	TodayTix lottery	$35
Jun 15	Just in Time	Telecharge lottery	$49
Jun 27	The Outsiders	Telecharge lottery	$49
Jul 14	Every Brilliant Thing	TodayTix rush	$45
Jul 17	Harry Potter and the Cursed Child	TodayTix lottery	$40
Jul 20	Wicked	Broadway Direct lottery	$55
Jul 21	Are You Now or Have You Ever Been?	TodayTix rush	$49
Jul 23	Heathers: The Musical	Telecharge rush	$49
Jul 30	The Book of Mormon	Lucky Seat lottery	$49
Aug 10	The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee	Telecharge rush	$49
Aug 11	Schmigadoon!	Broadway Direct lottery	$45
Aug 13	Aladdin	Broadway Direct lottery	$35
Aug 14	The Lost Boys	Broadway Direct lottery	$45
Aug 25	Oh, Mary!	Telecharge lottery	$47

Twenty-three of the thirty-one came from a lottery and eight from rush. By platform: Telecharge fourteen, Broadway Direct nine, TodayTix five, Lucky Seat three. The cheapest seats of the year were $35, once for What Happened Was on TodayTix and once for Aladdin on Broadway Direct. The most expensive was $69, a single Telecharge rush seat to Proof. Nothing on this list cost more than $69, and the full-price equivalent of several of them ran past $150.

Broadway lottery FAQs

How much do Broadway lottery tickets cost in 2026?

Between $10 and $55 depending on the show and platform. My 2026 average across 31 lottery and rush performances is about $47 a ticket including all fees. Broadway Direct runs $35 to $55 with fees included. Telecharge runs $38 to $49 with a $5 fee included in that. Hamilton is $10.

Do you have to pay to enter a Broadway lottery?

No. Entry is free on every platform, no card is required, and you only pay if you win and choose to claim. Letting a win expire carries no penalty.

What time do Broadway lottery results come out?

Telecharge draws twice a day, at 10am and 3pm ET. Broadway Direct reports at 2pm, 3pm or 4pm depending on the show and gives you 60 minutes to pay. Lucky Seat results arrive the afternoon before the performance. Hamilton draws on Thursdays between noon and 4pm.

Is rush cheaper than the lottery?

No, they cost roughly the same. The difference is certainty: rush shows you the seat location and any partial-view warning before you pay, and lets you decline. The lottery tells you nothing until the ticket arrives. The tradeoff is flexibility: lottery draws are generally for the next day’s shows, while rush is same-day and you need to get to the theatre, usually before a 7pm curtain. Lottery is definitely the better bet if you don’t work in the city and are coming in from the suburbs. The two rush platforms are also not interchangeable. Telecharge releases seats all day. TodayTix opens at 9am and is usually finished by 9:30.

Can I enter a Broadway lottery for a friend?

You can, but I would not unless you are planning on going together. Tickets are non-transferable and collection requires photo ID matching the name on the entry if you do not receive tickets by email. Forwarding a PDF usually works. When it does not, there is no recourse. Enter as a pair with a friend to double your odds, but go with them.

Are Broadway lottery seats bad?

Mostly no. Of the 24 seats I have documented, 19 were good or better and 3 were “bad”. The bad ones were boxes and extreme side seats rather than cheap sections. The $35 balcony seat was acceptable, and my two best discounted seats of the year, fourth and fifth row center orchestra, were $49 rush tickets. Still I don’t regret using the “bad” tickets.

Can two people both win the same performance?

Yes. The one-win-per-slot cap is per account, not per household. We did it four times this year. The two orders will not be seated together. I have no idea how many lottery seats are available by show but it is typically more than four from what I can tell.

Steal our lottery routine

• Sign up once: Telecharge, Broadway Direct and Lucky Seat all run in a browser — rush.telecharge.com (free account), lottery.broadwaydirect.com (email only, no account) and luckyseat.com. TodayTix and Hamilton are app only, so install both before you need them.
• Every morning: enter everything open on Telecharge and Broadway Direct, for two tickets. It takes a few minutes.
• Every Friday: Hamilton opens at 10am. Thirty seconds.
• Once a week: open Lucky Seat and enter every date that is live.
• Both of you enter separately. Agree in advance who pays if you both win.
• Before you claim: check the show’s Telecharge calendar for the exclamation mark, and check the show’s own site if there is a star you are going for.
• If nothing lands and you have a hard date: TodayTix rush at 9am, then Telecharge rush at 11am, and again at lunch, and again at 5. Remember the three-day cooldown before you say yes.
• Bring photo ID. Every time. Even for a digital ticket.

Everything that is not a lottery or a rush ticket, meaning the TKTS booth, Broadway Week, discount codes, TDF and the under-30 programs, will be in the companion post. If you want to eat first, Fleming’s ten pre-theatre restaurants in the Theatre District covers where we actually go, and Lillie’s Victorian Establishment is a block off Times Square and worth it at Halloween and Christmas for over-the-top decor.

Some of the shows named here will have closed by the time you find this. If a time or a price has changed, tell us and we will fix it.

Nothing in this post is an affiliate link. We paid for every ticket mentioned.