Here is a thing every Broadway box office knows and no lottery platform will ever tell you: the week after Labor Day is the softest week of the year. The summer tourists went home Sunday. The fall shows haven't opened yet. Deadline's box-office column has called this frame the same thing for years, the "back-to-earth post-holiday" week, and in the Septembers it has tallied, the whole roster has dropped close to 10% from Labor Day week in one shot. Sales pick back up as the new season's shows start previews, but that takes a few weeks.
What does that have to do with you and your phone? Fewer people in town means fewer people entering. I can't prove it with entry counts, because Lucky Seat, Broadway Direct and TodayTix don't publish them and nobody outside those companies has ever seen them. What I can tell you is that my own win log going back to 2016 has a September cluster in it most years, and that the mechanism makes sense: the same number of lottery seats gets drawn from a smaller pile of names. So if you've been losing all summer, this is the month to enter everything. Here's everything.
The board this week: 22 lotteries, 25 shows
I pulled this from our catalog on Monday morning, which tracks every running Broadway show's lottery and rush entries. Twenty-five shows are running. Twenty-two of them have a digital lottery. The three that don't are & Juliet, Chicago and Just in Time, all of which have a rush instead. Sorted by price, cheapest first:
Under $30
- Hamilton — $10, Ham4Ham, weekly. Opens Friday 10 in the morning, closes Thursday noon. The hardest lottery in the city, and the one where a thinner September pile helps you most.
- The Book of Mormon — $15 monthly draw (entries close 11:59 at night on the 14th; the next one is a week away), plus a separate $49 daily Lucky Seat.
- Maybe Happy Ending — $20.64, the Club 2064 lottery, drawn the day before at 10 and 3.
$30 to $40
- The Rocky Horror Show — $30 on TodayTix, drawn before each performance. Closes Nov 29, so the clock is running here too.
- Aladdin and The Lion King — $35 each on Broadway Direct, 9 in the morning to 3 the day before. The Disney pair are the best value-per-seat on the board and September is when families have gone back to school.
- Paranormal Activity — $40 on Lucky Seat, all-in including fees, which almost nobody else says. Weekday entries close 9:30 the morning before; weekend and Monday entries close 9:30 the Friday before.
- Harry Potter and the Cursed Child — $40 Friday Forty on TodayTix. Enter Monday through Friday 1 in the afternoon, winners that afternoon.
$45 to $49
- $45: The Great Gatsby, Schmigadoon!, Six, Stranger Things and The Lost Boys. Six now has a closing date of Jan 3, 2027, which will start pulling entries up as it gets closer; enter it now while it's still just a show that's been running since 2021.
- $47: Oh, Mary!, drawn 10 and 3 the day before.
- $48: Two Strangers (Carry a Cake Across New York), Telecharge.
- $49: Buena Vista Social Club, Hadestown, MJ, The Outsiders, and Titanique, which plays its last performance Sept 20 and is the single best September play on this list, for a reason I'll get to.
Over $50
- Wicked — $55 on Broadway Direct. It went up from $45 this summer and it's now the most expensive of Wicked's own four cheap doors, which is a sentence I never expected to write.
- Operation Mincemeat — $59 Telecharge lottery, plus a periodic $79 Ticket Draw. Its $49 rush is cheaper than its lottery. Do the rush.
The September edge, show by show
Titanique is the one to hit. A closing show's lottery gets harder in its final week, not easier, because everybody who put it off finally enters. But that surge is a last-few-days thing. The two weeks before the surge, when the tourists have left and the locals haven't panicked yet, are the softest window that show will ever have. That's now. Its $49 Lucky Seat lottery runs to the end, and there's a $49 TodayTix rush and a $45 in-person rush at the St. James behind it if the draw doesn't go your way.
The Disney shows. Aladdin and The Lion King are the two lotteries most driven by family tourism, and family tourism is the exact thing that just left town. If you've never bothered with a $35 Disney lottery because you assumed it was hopeless, September is the month to test that assumption.
Hamilton. The weekly draw means one entry covers a whole week of performances, so a soft week is a soft week across eight shows at once. This is the only lottery where I'd bother reorganizing my life around the entry window.
What doesn't get softer: the new shows. Paranormal Activity opened two weeks ago and its lottery is new, so it's collecting curious entries from everyone who read about it. School Girls; Or, The African Mean Girls Play started previews at the Friedman this week with no lottery at all, just MTC35 for the 35-and-unders. Enter the new stuff for fun; enter the long-runners to win.
The routine for a soft month
Enter everything, every day, for three weeks, and then look at your results. Three weeks is roughly the window between the post-Labor Day dip and the fall openings, when the crowds come back. If you go three weeks of daily entries on twenty lotteries without a single win, something is wrong with your setup, not with the odds, and the complete guide has the five mistakes that cause it. If you've never set up the accounts at all, the platform guide gets you on Lucky Seat, Broadway Direct and TodayTix in about ten minutes.
One warning that doesn't change with the calendar: every one of these draws happens the day before, and you have a claim window measured in minutes or hours, not days. September doesn't help you if you win a Tuesday matinee for Aladdin and don't see the email until Wednesday. Turn the notifications on.
And when a win lands, log it in the tracker. I'd like to see whether the September theory holds for someone other than me.
Prices, windows and closing dates pulled from our catalog the morning this was written. A show's own lottery page wins if it disagrees.
