Ahead of the final Grand Slam of the season landing in New York, we went digging through 25 years of US Open match data, every main-draw match, both the men’s and women’s events, from 2001 onward, and pulled out a handful of patterns that reshape how you should watch the tournament.
Two of them stand out immediately. On the men’s side, matches are getting relentlessly longer: the average men’s match now runs almost half an hour longer than it did at the start of the century. And deep in the draw, seeding means far less in the women’s event than the men’s: favourites hold firm in the men’s bracket year after year, both finalists have been seeded in every one of the last 25 editions, while the women’s late rounds are picked apart with a regularity that in 2021 left the final without a single seeded player in it.
Here’s what the data shows.
Men’s Matches Have Stretched by Nearly Half an Hour
The trend is hard to miss. The duration of an average men’s US Open match has climbed from 137.8 minutes in 2001, the shortest year in our analysis, to a peak of 174.2 minutes in 2022, a jump of more than 36 minutes, or roughly 26%. Even after easing back, the 2025 average sits at 162 minutes, still around 24 minutes longer than a typical match two decades earlier.
The climb isn’t perfectly smooth, and there are outliers like the 2012 edition, but the direction of travel is unmistakable, and it accelerates sharply from around 2018. Whatever is driving it (deeper fields, slower conditions, more physical baseline rallies), best-of-five tennis in New York is now a longer afternoon’s work than it has ever been.
The women’s event tells a quieter version of the same story. Best-of-three tennis keeps the numbers far lower; the women’s average runs between roughly 94 and 106 minutes, but it, too, is creeping upward. From a low of 93.9 minutes in 2013, the average rose to a high of 106 minutes in 2023, before settling at 101.5 minutes in 2025. The peak years, 2022 and 2023, line up neatly with the surge in the men’s event, which suggests the lengthening is a genuine cross-tour shift in how the modern game is played rather than a quirk of one format.
Unfortunately, match-duration data for the women’s event isn’t publicly available for tournaments before 2012.
Straight Sets Still Rule, But The Grind Years Leave a Mark
Breaking each year down by the number of sets played shows why the men’s matches have swelled. Straight-set (three-set) wins remain the single most common outcome, but their share swings hard from year to year, and the tell-tale sign of a brutal fortnight is the five-set line. In 2021, a full 26% of men’s matches went the distance to a fifth set, the highest share in our 25-year window, and straight-set matches fell to just 34.6%, their lowest. Furthermore, 2021 and 2022 are the only editions in which the share of 4-setters eclipsed that of 3-setters.
That’s the statistical fingerprint of a genuinely grueling tournament, and it’s exactly the year the average duration peaked during those two years.
The women’s split is naturally simpler; every match is either a two-set or a three-set affair, but the same competitiveness signal is there. Two-set matches dominate, ranging from 60% to 80% of the draw in any given year. The three-set share is the number to watch: it peaked at 39.4% in 2017, the most closely fought edition of the last quarter-century, and bottomed out at 19.7% in 2007, the most one-sided. When roughly four in ten women’s matches are being dragged to a deciding set, the draw is telling you something about how thin the margin between players has become.
In The Early Rounds, Seeds Fall, and They Fall Harder in The Women’s Draw
The first three rounds are where the seeded contenders are supposed to be safe, and in both draws, mostly they aren’t.
On the men’s side, an average of 20 of the 32 seeds are gone by the end of the third round, and in 18 of the last 25 editions the count has reached 20 or more. The attrition tends to arrive in concentrated bursts rather than a steady bleed: the men’s first round produced its most spectacular clear-out in 2021, when 12 seeds fell in the opening round alone, the single worst round of seed attrition anywhere in our data. In a quiet year, the men’s draw can lose as few as three first-round seeds (2001), so the men’s early rounds swing between calm and carnage.
The women’s early rounds look strikingly similar. An average of 19.6 seeds are gone by the end of the third round, a whisker below the men’s figure, and the women’s worst single first round, 11 seeds out in 2015, actually falls short of the men’s 2021 high. The women’s draw does edge ahead in the third round, claiming 7.8 seeds a year on average versus the men’s 7.5, hinting that the women’s seeds who survive the opening days are marginally more likely to be cut as the draw narrows.
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Deep in The Draw, The Men’s Seeds Hold, The Women’s Collapse
The women’s late rounds are a different world. Seeded quarterfinalists are fewer, and the drop-off is steeper, but the real story is the final itself. On five separate occasions, 2009, 2015, 2017 and 2020, the women’s final contained only one seeded player, and in 2021 it contained none at all, when unseeded Emma Raducanu beat unseeded Leylah Fernandez for the title. Our data has never shown a men’s equivalent. The women’s US Open, in other words, doesn’t just spring more early upsets; it produces champions and finalists that the seedings never saw coming.
What Have We Learned
- Men’s matches keep getting longer. The average has stretched from 137.8 minutes in 2001 to a peak of 174.2 in 2022, and remains near 162 minutes today, close to half an hour more than a generation ago.
- The women’s event is lengthening too, more gently, and the 2022 and 2023 peaks on both tours point to a real, game-wide shift rather than a format quirk.
- Five-set marathons flag the grind years. The 2021 men’s draw sent 26% of its matches to a fifth set, the highest share we found, the same year the duration record was set.
- Three-set women’s matches gauge competitiveness, peaking at 39.4% in 2017 and sinking to 19.7% in 2007.
- Seeds are far more vulnerable in the women’s draw, earlier, more often, and all the way to the final, where the women’s event has produced one-seed and no-seed finals that the men’s simply never has.
Vyom Chaudhary
Soccer Researcher
<p>Vyom Chaudhary is a football data journalist and digital PR specialist with more than a decade of experience producing data-driven sports research and editorial content. His work combines statistical analysis, original research and storytelling to uncover trends across football, with studies featured by leading international publications, including Reuters, Bloomberg, The Guardian, BBC, The Times, ESPN and many others.</p><p>After graduating with a bachelor’s degree in computer engineering, Vyom briefly worked as an IT systems engineer before transitioning into sports journalism to pursue his passion for football. Over the next six years, he wrote for publications including Tribal Football, FanSided, Betting.com, the Daily Mail and several other football and sports media outlets, covering everything from match analysis and transfers to betting, tactics and statistical features.</p><p>He later joined RunRepeat as head of football content and marketing, where he led original research projects and published data-driven studies on topics ranging from FIFA World Cups and player performance to football economics, transfers and fan culture. Many of these studies were widely cited by international media and generated coverage across hundreds of publications worldwide.</p><p>Today, Vyom works in digital PR, creating research-led campaigns across sports, gaming, finance, technology and entertainment. His expertise lies in transforming large data sets into compelling stories that generate editorial coverage and high-authority backlinks for global brands.</p><p>With an engineering background and years of experience in journalism and digital marketing, Vyom specializes in football analytics, historical research, data visualization and trend analysis.</p><p>📍 Based in: India</p><p>🌐 Languages: English and Hindi</p>
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