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If you’re looking to buy cheap Broadway tickets, the first question you should be asking is: What’s the rush?
True Broadway devotees know the answer. Almost all Broadway shows, including most of the very best ones, offer same-day seats for considerably less than their average ticket prices. These are called rush tickets; generally priced at $30–$49, they’re available to anyone willing to wait in line for a box office to open. But other questions soon arise: Which productions offer rush seats, and how much do they cost? What are your chances of scoring rush seats for a given show, and how early should you plan to arrive if you want to be sure of doing so? How does the line look on any given morning?
That’s where BroadwayCheapSeats.com can help. This new, free and user-friendly website has an up-to-date list of rush, lottery and standing-room policies for every show on Broadway. More importantly, it uses data submitted directly by fans to tell you your rush-ticket odds at each show, as well as when to show up and what to expect. Since the site rolled out its beta version in July, it has attracted more than 11,000 visitors and culled more than 2,500 reports, based largely on word of mouth.
But now, Time Out can let the secret out: BroadwayCheapSeats is officially launching today, and it should be the first stop for anyone who wants to see Broadway on a budget.
The website is the brainchild and pet project of Katharine Quinn, the founder and CEO of And That's Media Group—which also includes the Broadway marketing company And That's Strategy and fan media website And That's Showbiz—and it is close to her heart. “My father was in the Navy, and I grew up going to New York with my mom,” she recalls. “This was the only way we could afford to see Broadway shows. Genuinely, the first hundred shows I saw on Broadway were only rush, lottery or standing room tickets.”
That’s the kind of attendance that can build a lifetime of theater fandom. But many younger people today may wrongly assume that Broadway is priced beyond their reach, Quinn notes, pointing to a 2025 study that found that Millennials and Gen Zers believed Broadway tickets to be nearly twice as expensive as the actual average price. “My interest is in removing as many barriers as humanly possible” she says. “Yes, of course, you can pay $1,500 to see George Clooney [in Good Night, and Good Luck]. But through lotteries, you can still see Hamilton for $10 or Maybe Happy Ending for $20.64. These programs do exist.”
Until now, however, there has been nowhere to go for detailed advice about how to maximize your rush opportunities. “Currently, there are rush reports that you can find some days—they might be on someone's TikTok, they might be on someone else's Instagram, they might be on Reddit,” Quinn says. “But there's not really a consolidated place for firsthand accounts. My aim is to make sure there's one location that has everything you could want from a discount-Broadway-ticket platform.”
The landing page for BroadwayCheapSeats features two elements. The main list is a complete roster of current Broadway productions, which you can sort by available programs, odds and recommended arrival times, as calculated through user reports and weighted toward the most recent 90 days. Above that list is a daily live board where you can see what other people are reporting from the ground in real time. (Information from the live board doesn’t enter the aggregated data until it has been reviewed to remove obvious outliers.) Lining up extremely early in the morning is still the best way to almost guarantee that you will get into a show but, Quinn says, “it's also not necessary.”
Each Broadway production also has its own page that will let you get a lot more granular about the data that BroadwayCheapSeats has collected about it. In addition to details about each show’s cheap-ticket offerings, these pages include plotted graphs of when users have arrived and gotten in, a breakdown of what sections their seats were in, and a look at all reports from the prior 90 days. Some pages also include information about new casting that can have an impact on how many rush seats are available, such as America’s Sweethearts star Reece Weaver’s current stunt in Chicago.
Because fan reports drive the data, BroadwayCheapSeats has more information about some shows than others—“Right now, The Lost Boys reign supreme; it drives more clicks than any other show,” says Quinn—but the site will grow broader and more accurate the more people use it and share their experiences. The submission process is easy: In the live board section, you answer a few short questions (name of show, arrival time, position in and estimated size of line) and then, when the box office opens, you reply to an email asking if you got in.
“The kind of humans who rush Broadway shows tend to be very generous theater fans,” Quinn says. “People do want to share that information, because why not? It only helps other people, and is gonna circle back and help you. If you're a regular Outsiders viewer, but you haven't yet rushed The Rocky Horror Show, you still may want that information. I don't think it's really in anyone's interest to hoard it.” (“If you want to be very generous, there are additional fields you can fill in where you can say, you know, “They told me they were selling 20 tickets today,” or, “My seats were in the mezzanine,” Quinn adds. “You can fill in all sorts of info.”)
So what are you waiting for? Give BroadwayCheapSeats a shot, and tell them what you find. Because snagging the best Broadway bargains in town will give you, well…a rush.
