Most Broadway lottery advice assumes a daily rhythm: enter in the morning, find out in the afternoon, repeat tomorrow. That is how most of the board works, and it is why people burn out on it after two weeks.
But a handful of shows do not run that way at all. They draw once a week, or once a month, and the entry windows are long enough that you can set them and forget them. These are the lotteries for people who have jobs.
Hamilton — one entry, five days to make it
Hamilton‘s Ham4Ham digital lottery is the big one, and its shape surprises people. Entries open Friday at 10 AM ET and stay open until the following Thursday at noon ET. Winners hear back Thursday afternoon.
That is a five-day window for a $10 ticket. Ten dollars, to Hamilton, still, in 2026. The odds are the worst on Broadway by a distance, but the effort is one tap a week, and a lottery you enter 52 times a year is a completely different proposition from one you enter twice and give up on.
Read the rules on this one carefully: 18 and over, one entry per performance, two tickets max, and the photo ID at the window has to match the entry name. That last clause has cost real people real seats.
Harry Potter and the Cursed Child — the Friday Forty
Forty tickets at $40 each, drawn once a week. Entries open Monday at 12:01 AM ET and close Friday at 1 PM ET, with winners notified between 1 and 5 PM that afternoon.
Cursed Child runs this through TodayTix and only through TodayTix, so you need the app. Two tickets per winner.
The thing that makes this one worth your Monday morning: $40 for a seat at the Lyric, which is one of the largest and most technically absurd houses on Broadway, is a genuinely good number. And a four-and-a-half-day entry window means missing it is a choice, not an accident.
The Book of Mormon — the $15 draw, once a month
This is the cheapest ticket in this entire piece and almost nobody knows it exists. It is also not the Lucky Seat draw above — it is a completely separate program the show runs itself, for its fifteenth year on Broadway.
The $15 lottery lives on the show’s own site, and it runs on a monthly cycle: entries close at 11:59 PM ET on the 14th of the month, winners are drawn by 3 PM ET on the 15th and emailed a link to buy up to two tickets for select performances the following month. US residents, 18 or older, one entry per drawing.
Fifteen dollars. Once a month. Set a recurring calendar reminder for the 13th and you have added a $15 shot at a Broadway show to your year for the cost of thirty seconds of setup. The show also runs a separate $49 Lucky Seat draw, which is the ordinary per-performance kind — different program, different site, and entering one does not affect the other.
Operation Mincemeat — the draw that is not on Telecharge
Operation Mincemeat‘s ordinary lottery is a daily one, run through Telecharge at $59, and it belongs to the everyday grind rather than to this piece. The Ticket Draw is the one that fits here.
It is $79, it covers the next two weeks of performances at once, and it runs periodically rather than daily — the next draw date is posted on the show’s own tickets page. Winners get 24 hours to buy before the seats go back to the public. It is not run through Telecharge, so if you have only ever looked there, you have never seen it.
Sign up on the show’s tickets page. Two weeks of performances in one draw, from a door most people do not know is there.
The monthly releases that are not lotteries but act like them
Two more worth putting on a monthly cycle, even though they are technically discount programs rather than draws.
Wicked releases a $59 student rate and a $79 military rate monthly, for select Tuesday through Thursday performances. Valid ID required, two per ID. These go quickly and they go on a schedule, so the people who get them are the people who checked on release day rather than the people who wanted it most.
Wicked also runs a daily $55 Broadway Direct lottery — the priciest lottery on the board, and still less than a third of what the show asks at the window.
How to actually run this
Four calendar entries and you have covered everything above:
- Monday morning — enter the Friday Forty in TodayTix. Closes Friday at 1 PM.
- Friday morning — enter Ham4Ham. Window stays open until Thursday noon.
- The 13th of every month — enter the Book of Mormon $15 draw.
- The 1st of every month — check the Wicked student and military releases.
That is about four minutes of work a month covering four shows, including the two hardest tickets on Broadway. Compare that to the daily grind of entering fifteen lotteries every morning and you can see why I think most people are working the wrong end of this.
The daily lotteries are still worth doing — they are where the wins actually come from, and the routine for running those is worth reading. But the weekly and monthly draws are free upside on top, and they are the only part of this you can genuinely run off a calendar.
Everything currently running is on the lottery board. If you are setting up accounts for the first time, start here, and the platform guide explains who runs what.
