What is a Grand Slam in tennis? The four majors explained

"Grand Slam" is the most overloaded phrase in tennis. It names the four biggest tournaments, it names the feat of winning all four in one year, and it turns up in a family of related terms, career Slam, Golden Slam, Channel Slam, that sound alike and mean different things. This guide separates them and lists, with dates, who has actually done what.

What is a Grand Slam in tennis?

In everyday use, a Grand Slam is one of the four major tournaments. The 2026 Grand Slam Rule Book defines them as "the four official International Championships of Australia, France, Great Britain and the United States", better known as the Australian Open, Roland-Garros (the French Open), Wimbledon and the US Open. Players and the press also call them the majors.

In the strict sense, the Grand Slam is an achievement: winning all four in a single calendar year. The phrase came from contract bridge. According to Wikipedia's history of the term, it was applied to tennis in 1933, when the Australian Jack Crawford had won his home title, the French Championships and Wimbledon and needed only the US Championships; the New York Times' John Kieran wrote that completing the set "would be something like scoring a grand slam on the courts". Crawford lost the final. Don Budge became the first to complete the set, in 1938.

How many Grand Slams are there?

Four every year, always in the same order, on three different surfaces.

The dates are those of the main draws, taken from Wikipedia's tournament pages; qualifying is played in the week before each one. They shift slightly each year: the official sites already show 11 to 31 January 2027 for the next Australian Open and 17 May to 6 June 2027 for the next Roland-Garros. The first major of the year therefore ends in the last days of January or, as in 2026, on 1 February, which is when the record chases described below are settled or restarted.

Each tournament lasts two weeks. The surfaces were not always as they are now: the US Open moved from clay to hard courts in 1978, and the Australian Open from grass to hard in 1988, which is why winning a major on all three surfaces only became possible in the late 1970s.

What makes a Grand Slam tournament different?

The majors are not part of the ATP or WTA tours. They belong to their national federations and coordinate through Grand Slam Tennis, a board of the four tournament chairs that writes the Grand Slam Rule Book; the rules of the game itself come from the International Tennis Federation. How the men's tour is organised around them is a separate story. The Rule Book fixes what makes them distinctive:

• Singles draws of 128 players, with a 128-player qualifying event and a 64-team doubles draw. Entry is open to anyone ranked 500 or better; wild cards are at each tournament's discretion; the draw is seeded, with a minimum of 16 seeds; and a qualifier who loses in the final round can still enter the main draw as a lucky loser when someone withdraws.
• Men's singles matches are the best of five sets. Every other match, women's singles included, is the best of three.
• Since 2022, every final set that reaches six games all is decided by a 10-point tiebreak, a change the four tournaments announced jointly on 16 March 2022. How the scoring works is covered in its own guide.
• The winner earns 2,000 ranking points on either tour, twice the reward for the next tier of event, according to the points tables in the ATP and WTA rulebooks.

What is a calendar Grand Slam?

Winning all four majors in the same year. Only five singles players have done it, according to the list of Grand Slam records that Wikipedia maintains: Don Budge in 1938, Maureen Connolly in 1953, Rod Laver in 1962 and again in 1969, Margaret Court in 1970 and Steffi Graf in 1988. Nobody has done it since. Laver is the only man to have done it twice, and Court is the only player to have completed a calendar Slam in two disciplines, singles and mixed doubles.

What is a non-calendar-year Grand Slam?

Holding all four titles at once after winning them in a row across two seasons. The distinction has a history. In 1982 the ITF offered a one-million-dollar bonus to any player who held all four titles consecutively, and Martina Navratilova collected it after the 1984 French Open, having won Wimbledon, the US Open and the Australian Open in 1983. Whether that counted as a Grand Slam was argued in print for years; in 2012 the ITF settled it by writing "in one calendar year" into its constitution.

The singles players who have held all four at once without a calendar Slam are Navratilova (1983 Wimbledon to 1984 Roland-Garros), Graf (1993 Roland-Garros to 1994 Australian Open), Serena Williams twice (2002 Roland-Garros to 2003 Australian Open, and 2014 US Open to 2015 Wimbledon) and Novak Djokovic, the only man, from Wimbledon 2015 to Roland-Garros 2016.

What is a career Grand Slam?

Winning each of the four majors at least once at any point in a career. It is the most common of the Slam achievements and still rare: nine men and ten women in singles. The completing tournament is the one listed.

Men: Fred Perry (1935 Roland-Garros), Don Budge (1938 Roland-Garros), Rod Laver (1962 US Open), Roy Emerson (1964 Wimbledon), Andre Agassi (1999 Roland-Garros), Roger Federer (2009 Roland-Garros), Rafael Nadal (2010 US Open), Novak Djokovic (2016 Roland-Garros) and Carlos Alcaraz, who beat Djokovic 2-6, 6-2, 6-3, 7-5 in the 2026 Australian Open final on 1 February to become, at 22 years, 8 months and 27 days, the youngest man to complete the set. It was his seventh major.

Women: Maureen Connolly (1953 Roland-Garros), Doris Hart (1954 US Championships), Shirley Fry Irvin (1957 Australian Championships), Margaret Court (1963 Wimbledon), Billie Jean King (1972 Roland-Garros), Chris Evert (1982 Australian Open), Martina Navratilova (1983 US Open), Steffi Graf (1988 US Open), Serena Williams (2003 Australian Open) and Maria Sharapova (2012 Roland-Garros).

Some have gone round more than once. Djokovic completed a third career Grand Slam at Roland-Garros in 2023, Nadal a second at the 2022 Australian Open, and Emerson and Laver each did it twice in the 1960s. Graf holds four complete sets, Court and Serena Williams three each, Evert and Navratilova two.

What is a Golden Slam?

A Golden Slam adds the Olympic gold medal to the four majors in a single year. Steffi Graf is the only singles player to have achieved it, in 1988, with the gold medal in Seoul; in wheelchair tennis, Diede de Groot and Dylan Alcott completed Golden Slams in 2021.

The career version, all four majors plus Olympic gold at any point, has five singles owners: Graf; Andre Agassi, whose 1996 gold preceded his career Slam in 1999; Rafael Nadal, gold in 2008 and the set completed at the 2010 US Open; Serena Williams, who completed hers with gold at London 2012; and Novak Djokovic, who completed his with gold at Paris 2024, according to the career Golden Slam table.

Two smaller terms are worth knowing. A Channel Slam is Roland-Garros and Wimbledon in the same year, hard because clay and grass reward different games and only a few weeks separate them. A Surface Slam is a major on clay, grass and hard court in one season.

Who has the most Grand Slam titles?

Novak Djokovic holds the men's record with 24 singles titles, made up of a record 10 Australian Opens, three Roland-Garros, seven Wimbledons and four US Opens, according to Wikipedia's champions list. Rafael Nadal has 22, including a record 14 at Roland-Garros, and Roger Federer 20, including a record eight at Wimbledon. Behind them come Pete Sampras with 14, Roy Emerson with 12, and Rod Laver and Björn Borg with 11 each.

The women's record is Margaret Court's 24. Serena Williams has 23, the most since the Open Era began in 1968, according to the women's champions list. Steffi Graf has 22, Helen Wills Moody 19, and Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova 18 each.

Where 2026 stands

All four of this year's majors have been played. Alcaraz's Australian Open completed his career Slam. Alexander Zverev won his first major at Roland-Garros in June, lost the Wimbledon final to Jannik Sinner in July and then won the US Open on 13 September, beating Ben Shelton 6-3, 7-6 (2), 5-7, 6-2, which makes him the fourth man of the Open Era to win his first two majors in the same season, after Jimmy Connors, Guillermo Vilas and Sinner, and the first German man to win in New York since Boris Becker in 1989. On the women's side, Wikipedia's tournament table lists Elena Rybakina, Mirra Andreeva and Linda Nosková as the champions in Melbourne, Paris and London, and Rybakina added the US Open on 12 September with a 6-4, 5-7, 6-2 win over Aryna Sabalenka, her third major and, according to the WTA, the third time since 2000 that a woman has won the Australian Open and the US Open in the same year. She takes over the No. 1 ranking on 14 September, the first player from Kazakhstan to hold it.

The US Open also settled two long-running stories. Djokovic lost in the first round to Mariano Navone, a defeat that ends 24 years of a top 10 containing Federer, Nadal or Djokovic, as TNT Sports traced it. Alcaraz, the defending champion, returned from a wrist injury that had kept him out since April, reached the quarterfinals and lost to Shelton 6-7 (5), 6-1, 6-3, 1-6, 7-6 (10-7) in a match that ended at 3:33 a.m., the latest finish in the tournament's history. Shelton then beat Frances Tiafoe 4-6, 6-3, 6-3, 7-5 to reach his first major final, and Zverev beat Karen Khachanov 6-3, 7-6 (7), 7-6 (6); the wait for the first American men's champion since Andy Roddick in 2003 goes on. In the women's draw all four top seeds reached the semifinals, the first time that has happened at the US Open since 1975; Sabalenka beat Jessica Pegula 7-5, 6-2 and Rybakina beat Coco Gauff 3-6, 6-4, 6-4 before the final ended Sabalenka's bid for a third straight title.