I was today days old when I learned the US Open is the only major in professional golf you can actually try to qualify for. Not get invited to. Not earn a tour card to enter. Try out for. Any golfer — amateur or professional — who meets the USGA’s handicap requirement can pay an entry fee and begin the qualifying process. Around 10,000 people enter every year. At the end of it, 156 make the field. This week, those 156 are at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club in Southampton, New York for the 126th US Open Championship, which tees off Thursday, June 18.
The contrast with the other majors:
The Masters is by invitation only. Augusta National invites who it wants. There is no application, no qualifying, no path in except an invitation from the club. The PGA Championship is the “members’ major” — primarily for PGA of America card-holding club professionals and tour winners, not a public qualifying process. The Open Championship (the British Open) does have a qualifying system, but the majority of the 156-player field arrives via tour exemptions; the qualifying spots are limited and primarily reserved for those already in the professional system. The US Open is genuinely different. The USGA has run an open qualifying process since the very beginning — the idea that the national championship of golf should be open to anyone good enough to earn their spot.
How qualifying works:
The qualifying process has two stages. First is local qualifying: 18 holes at courses spread across the United States, held in mid-to-late April and through May. The vast majority of the roughly 10,000 entrants compete at this stage and are eliminated here. Those who make it — a much smaller number — advance to the second stage.
The second stage is final qualifying, which the USGA calls “Golf’s Longest Day.” It is 36 holes played in a single day at sites around the world. For 2026, final qualifying ran from May 18 through June 8, with 13 sites worldwide: sites in England (Walton Heath Golf Club), Japan (Hino Golf Club), and Canada (Lambton Golf and Country Club), plus ten sites across the United States including Dallas, New York, North Carolina, Ohio, Maryland, Florida, Georgia, Oregon, and California. Everyone competing at final qualifying plays 36 holes that day. The survivors punch their tickets to the US Open.
The USGA confirmed 43 players advanced from final qualifying into the 2026 field at Shinnecock Hills — nearly a third of the 156-player roster earned their spot the hard way, through both stages of qualifying, competing against thousands of others for a handful of berths.
A history worth knowing:
The open-qualifying ethos is built into the championship’s DNA. Ben Hogan, one of the greatest ball-strikers in the history of the sport, came up through the Texas caddy circuit and qualified his way into early US Opens before winning the championship four times — in 1948, 1950, 1951, and 1953. The 1953 win, coming 16 months after a nearly fatal car accident that left doctors unsure he would ever walk again, is widely considered the greatest individual achievement in golf history. He qualified. Ken Venturi won the 1964 US Open at Congressional Country Club in Washington, D.C. in sweltering heat so severe that doctors were monitoring him on the course — completing 36 holes in one day under conditions that nearly required him to withdraw. He had fallen out of tour status in the years prior and qualified his way in. He won.
Where to follow:
The 126th US Open is live at usopen.com with tee times, live scoring, the full field list, and video coverage. The USGA also maintains qualifying results, local and final qualifying site information, and historical championship records at usga.org. The tournament runs June 18–21 at Shinnecock Hills Golf Club, which is hosting its sixth US Open — and the only venue to have hosted the national championship in three different centuries (1896, 1986, 1995, 2004, 2018, and now 2026).
Why it matters:
In professional sports, access to the highest level of competition is almost universally gated by contracts, draft picks, league memberships, or invitations. The US Open is one of the very few exceptions — a legitimate major championship where the field is assembled in part by a public qualifying process that anyone good enough can enter. The USGA has held this line for more than 125 years. Three of the four players in this week’s field who reached Shinnecock Hills through alternates from final qualifying were regular amateurs and lower-tier professionals who had never been to a major. The open-qualifying structure is what makes that possible. No other major works this way.