How to buy World Cup 2026 tickets: Prices, dates and everything to know

Tickets to the 2026 World Cup are not yet on general sale, but soon, the yearslong wait will end.

After months of confusion and silence, FIFA on Wednesday revealed timelines, basic ticketing details and some initial prices for the tournament, which begins next June in the United States, Canada and Mexico.

The opening of a presale application window on Sept. 10 will mark the start of a multi-phase process that is now more defined, but still requires lots of explanation.

So, the following is an attempt to explain it.

How to get World Cup tickets

There are multiple avenues to World Cup tickets. They come with varying degrees of certainty and cost. They are:

• Official “presale” phases: From September 10-19, fans can enter a “Visa Presale Draw” — essentially a lottery with a catch: you must have a Visa credit card, debit card or prepaid card to participate. FIFA will then randomly select an undisclosed number of entrants, and give them a date and time slot in October “to purchase tickets (subject to availability).” At the conclusion of that phase, a similar “early ticket draw” will follow — essentially the same lottery without the Visa card requirement.

• Wait for the World Cup draw: After matchups, dates and locations are determined by the World Cup draw on Dec. 5, there will be another lottery phase.

• Wait until the ‘last minute’: If you miss the lotteries or get unlucky, in the spring, there will be a final “first-come-first-served” phase, or a “last-minute sales” phase, where the remaining tickets go on sale to the general public, just like they would for most other American sporting events.

• The resale market: FIFA will operate its own resale platform within its ticketing website and app. That will likely be the most trustworthy place to buy tickets on the secondary market. Popular resale sites like StubHub will also advertise tickets — and, in fact, already are advertising them. But FIFA’s decision to not cap prices on its own resale platform should keep most sellers and buyers within the FIFA ticketing ecosystem.

• Country allocations: FIFA typically allocates thousands of tickets per match to the two participating nations. Their national soccer federations — e.g. U.S. Soccer or the English FA — then help sell and distribute those tickets via separate processes to their own registered fans. FIFA said in its Wednesday release that “additional products, including supporter tickets (for fans who want to sit with others cheering for the same team) and conditional supporter tickets (for supporters who want to reserve a seat for one of their team’s potential matches in a knockout round) are expected to be available closer to the tournament.”

When do tickets go on sale?

The “Visa Presale Draw” opens at 11 a.m. ET on Sept. 10, but you do not need to rush to your computer or smartphone that day. You can enter anytime between then and Sept. 19. No preference will be given to earlier applicants, FIFA says.

The first official purchases of tickets, by the successful applicants, will then happen in October.

For non-Visa cardholders, a nearly identical phase will open on or around Oct. 27, with purchasing time slots in November and early December.

Somewhat soon after the World Cup draw — after which we’ll learn the teams, dates, times and locations for all 72 group-stage games — will be your first opportunity to secure seats for a specific matchup.

Until then, you are buying tickets for a game between unknown opponents (with the exception of the U.S., Canada and Mexico, who, as co-hosts, already know when and where they’ll be playing).

How to prepare for ticket sales

To receive updates directly from FIFA, you can “register your interest.”

You can also create a “FIFA ID,” an account that you’ll need to eventually buy tickets on the official platform.

And if you don’t have a Visa credit or debit card, but would like to enter this first lottery, you could buy a Visa prepaid card, which, according to the company, will make you eligible.

So I really need a Visa card to enter the first ticket phase?

Yes. (Visa is a FIFA sponsor, hence the scheme.)

A FIFA official said Tuesday that the ticketing system will process a $0.00 charge to the card of any applicant, to ensure that only Visa cardholders get access.

But in all subsequent phases, you can use other cards or payment methods.

How many tickets can I buy?

FIFA officials say you can buy up to four apiece for up to 10 matches — so, 40 tickets in total per person.

If you’d like to go to a game with a larger group, you’ll need to have multiple people register, apply, and buy tickets with distinct FIFA IDs.

What, exactly, can I buy in the first ticket phase?

You’ll have three options, per FIFA:

1. Buy tickets to a specific match. (All matches, including the final, will supposedly be available, but supply could run out before the time slot that FIFA gives you.)
2. Buy a venue-specific package that includes all group games and the first knockout game in a given city. (The openers in Mexico City, Los Angeles and Toronto aren’t included in these packages, per FIFA spokespeople.)
3. Buy a team-specific package that includes a given team’s three group games. (You can buy this for any country that could still qualify for the World Cup. If the country doesn’t ultimately qualify, you’ll be reimbursed, FIFA says.)

You won’t have to choose between these options until October. When you apply, you’re merely applying for a place in line — for a time slot. During the application process, you’ll be asked about your ticket preferences, but these won’t impact the lottery, FIFA says.

How much do World Cup tickets cost?

The cheapest tickets to group games will start at $60. Most tickets, though, will be more expensive, and probably much more expensive. FIFA hasn’t yet revealed a full set of prices.

And all of those prices could change. FIFA will use “variable pricing,” also known as dynamic pricing, for World Cup tickets. “We will adapt prices as per the demand we see, as per the remaining inventory,” a FIFA official said. By December, prices for popular teams like Argentina will almost certainly rise, while prices for games that aren’t selling well could fall, like they did for a majority of Club World Cup matches this past spring and summer.

The highest price for the 2026 World Cup final will start at $6,730, FIFA said Wednesday. That’s more than four times the price of a Category 1 ticket to the 2022 World Cup final, which cost $1,605.

In general at the Qatar World Cup, the most expensive to date, Category 1 tickets for group matches were roughly $220; Category 2 tickets were roughly $165; Category 3 seats, the cheapest available to international fans, were roughly $69.

The 2026 prices will almost certainly surpass those, perhaps by significant margins.

Wait, what are World Cup ticket ‘categories’?

U.S. sports fans are accustomed to buying specific seats in a specific row and section.

For major international soccer tournaments like the World Cup, though, tickets are typically divided into three or four categories, and fans must buy them without knowing the exact location of their seats.

A Category 1 ticket, for example, might be in the 20th row of the lower bowl in a sideline section level with the penalty box; or it might be on the second deck closer to midfield.

Category 2 and 3 tickets are usually in the corners or behind one goal, but FIFA has adjusted its categorizations to align with what it says are American preferences. “Fans value the front-row seat much higher,” an official said, “than the seats that have a technical view of the pitch.” So, rather than sideline vs. endline, the delineation will generally be lower level (Category 1), second deck (Category 2) and upper deck (Category 3 and 4).

FIFA will release maps of each stadium showing which sections belong to which categories, like it did for Qatar 2022.

How will this be different from buying U.S. sports tickets?

In the U.S., most single-game tickets to an NFL or NBA game are sold on a “first come first served” basis. If, say, you’d like to go to the Dec. 7 game between the Seattle Seahawks and Atlanta Falcons, you go to Ticketmaster, the NFL’s “official ticketing partner”; you see a variety of tickets available, both “verified tickets from Atlanta Falcons” and “verified resale tickets”; you pay for them (including taxes and a fee to Ticketmaster); and the tickets show up, digitally, in your Ticketmaster account and mobile app.

Or, alternatively, you could go to resale sites like StubHub and find hundreds of similarly priced tickets. The main difference there is that the transfer of tickets into your account and app depends on the seller, and isn’t always immediate. (More on that below.)

For the 2026 World Cup, it’s unclear how FIFA will list and distribute tickets, but one strategy might surprise American fans: there’ll be a lag time between purchase and distribution. FIFA and other international soccer organizers typically won’t deliver your actual tickets until closer to gameday, in part to prevent illegal duplication and creation of fake tickets, in part to restrict the resale market.

“You will get your ticket in the app at a later stage, not at the moment of the purchase,” Jean-Marie Tardy, a FIFA ticketing manager, said of the system generally on a TicketCo podcast in 2023. “And once the ticket is loaded into your app … you’ve got all the information about all your tickets — the seat category, the stadium, the match, even the seat details — but you don’t get anything that can get scanned at that moment.”

How will the 2026 World Cup ticket resale market function?

FIFA can’t fully stop resale sites from accepting and advertising World Cup tickets. And many sites are already doing that. StubHub, SeatGeek, TickPick, Vivid Seats and others show tickets available for “TBD vs. TBD” on June 13 at Gillette Stadium in Foxborough, Mass., and for most, if not all, of the 104 matches.

FIFA, rather than battling those sites technologically or legally, has essentially decided to match their offering. It will operate its own resale platform, which won’t cap markups (except for fans in Mexico). The reason, World Cup chief operating officer Heimo Schrigi explained, is that if there were a cap, “people would go to other resale platforms, and would try to find other ways of reselling the ticket, which obviously is something we don’t want. We want to keep a safe and secure and regulated environment for fans to be able to resell their tickets.”

So, there will still be StubHub listings, but buying on a third-party site carries some degree of uncertainty. Those sites, and the sellers, can’t 100% guarantee that you’ll actually get your tickets. FIFA can.

FIFA, in statements over the past year, has warned fans to “be wary of unofficial ticketing sites claiming to be already selling tickets.”

How are tickets already being re-sold if they’re not on sale yet?

Those sites don’t require a seller to upload the digital ticket to list it.

They threaten to impose penalties on the seller if a re-sold ticket ultimately isn’t delivered to the buyer, and promise to compensate the buyer in a variety of ways if that happens. But nothing prevents a fan or speculator from selling tickets that they don’t yet have.

So, there are tickets available on several resale sites, often for upward of $1,000. And there are four main theories about what, exactly, those “tickets” are:

1. Corporations and their employees, including FIFA partners, could be listing tickets that FIFA has promised them.
2. Some, though certainly not all, could be hospitality tickets that have already been purchased.
3. A collector or scalper could have purchased a “right to buy” token, then vaguely listed a “Category 3” or “Category 1” ticket, knowing they will be able to buy that ticket eventually.
4. They could be “spec tickets.” Matt Ferrel, an executive at TickPick, explains the concept generally: “If you think about ticketing in comparable language as the stock market, it’s like calls and puts. It’s options trading for tickets. It’s, ‘I believe I can sell a ticket for higher than what I’ll ultimately be able to fill that ticket for, and [arbitrage] some sort of value.” This means the seller doesn’t yet have any guaranteed route to the ticket; instead, they’re “speculating” on what the price will be and listing tickets on re-sale sites for more than that. (“TickPick is not a speculative ticket proponent,” Ferrel clarifies.)

Will fans in the U.S., Canada, Mexico get special access?

That remains up in the air. A World Cup official said there have been discussions about sales phases that would specifically incentivize fans from the three co-host countries, but those discussions remain ongoing.

At previous World Cups, there were “Category 4” allotments reserved for residents of the host country at lower price points. But in those countries, the average citizen had less purchasing power than the typical World Cup tourist. Here, FIFA won’t need to give Americans a discount. It might, though, offer some sort of priority access in a later phase.

What about visas for international fans? Does a ticket guarantee entry into the U.S.?

No. FIFA has always clarified: “A match ticket does not guarantee admission to a host country.”

The U.S. government has no known plans to ease its visa application process or entry requirements for World Cup fans.

When will we get more ticket info from FIFA?

The Visa presale draw opens Sept. 10. Fans will learn whether their applications were successful by Sept. 29. It’s unclear if we’ll get more information between now and then. A full price list likely won’t be revealed until the first sales slot opens on Oct. 1.

(Top photo: Tariq Zehawi/NorthJersey.com/USA TODAY Network/Imagn Images)