Asian Games 2026 Schedule: Where to Find It and How to Plan

Last updated: August 20, 2026 | Written by Yuu, a Nagoya native of 35 years

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We checked every figure on this page against the organizing committee’s own pages and the official ticket information site, in Japanese and English, on August 19–20, 2026. That date matters more than usual here: the committee revised the competition programme, the daily schedule and the session schedule on August 19, and three new ways to buy tickets appeared in the four days before that. Anything you read about the Asian Games schedule that someone wrote before mid-August now describes an older document.

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Table of Contents

1. Where Is the Asian Games 2026 Schedule Actually Published?
2. What Exists in English?
3. How Final Is the Schedule After the August 19 Revision?
4. What Happens to Your Ticket If Your Session Was Cancelled?
5. When Did Competition Actually Start?
6. What Time Did the Opening and Closing Ceremonies Start?
7. What Are the Three New Ways to Buy Tickets?
8. How We Suggested Building a Day You Could Actually Watch
9. The Re-check Routine We Recommended Before the Games
10. Frequently Asked Questions
11. About the Author
12. Related Guides

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Where Is the Asian Games 2026 Schedule Actually Published?

This is the single most useful thing on this page, so it goes first. If you went looking for a schedule page on the official Asian Games website in August 2026, you would not have found one. As measured on August 20, 2026, https://www.aichi-nagoya2026.org/schedule/ returns 404 Not Found. The individual sport pages and venue pages do carry a heading for the competition schedule, along with headings for live results and the medal table — but as of August 20 they showed no dates or times under those headings [Source].

The committee had presumably built those frames for the Games themselves, and as of August 20 had not announced when they would go live.

The committee distributed the schedule as PDF attachments to a news post. It published the current set on August 19, 2026, and that set holds three documents [Source]:

• Attachment 1 — Competition Programme. Which sports run on which days.
• Attachment 2 — Daily Schedule. The day-by-day view.
• Attachment 3 — Session Schedule. The grid of individual sessions, which is the one that matters if you hold a ticket, because the organizers sell tickets by session.

The same post carries a fourth document, a reference sheet listing what changed.

One reason older links fail: the committee relaunched the official site on August 5, 2026. The previous site now sits at old.aichi-nagoya2026.org, and several older schedule URLs return 404 [Source]. If a blog or forum post sends you to a schedule link that dies, that is why.

The site structure worth knowing

Even without dates, the official pages are useful for confirming which sport is at which venue. Sport pages live at /ja/sport/<sport name>/ and venue pages at /ja/venue/<english-slug>/ — for example nagoya-city-mizuho-park-athletic-stadium — with index pages at /ja/sports/ and /ja/venues/ (English: /sports/ and /venues/) [Source]. Venue pages give the sports held there and an external access link to the Aichi Prefecture page; they do not carry schedules, seating maps or entry rules.

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What Exists in English?

The English-language route runs through the official ticket information site rather than the main Games site. As of August 20, 2026 it publishes these PDFs [Source]:

• Schedule & Venues — an English session list, three pages.
• Price & Sport Details — the English TICKETING GUIDE, which is where the ceremony times and the session codes come from.
• Supporter ID Registration Guide, Ticket Purchase Guide and Ticket Resale Guide.

A caveat I would rather state than gloss over: I have confirmed that the English “Schedule & Venues” PDF exists and is three pages long, but I am not going to tell you it contains every session with every date and venue, because I have not verified its contents line by line. Treat it as the English starting point and cross-check anything load-bearing against Attachment 3 from the August 19 news post.

There is also no comprehensive official spectator guide. What exists is ticketing-and-schedule material plus the prefecture’s access pages; no single document covers arrival, entry and venue rules [Source].

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How Final Is the Schedule After the August 19 Revision?

It is not final. On August 19, 2026 — one month before the opening ceremony — the organizing committee announced changes to the competition programme, the daily schedule and the session schedule [Source]. The confirmed changes are: an event name change in equestrian (show jumping); men’s water polo going from nine participating teams to eight, which moved the number of matches; date adjustments to athletics and handball; and newly fixed schedules for padel and teqball, both of which are held at Nagoya City Higashi Sports Center. On the session schedule side, the notice sets out the changes in two groups — one adjusted for shifts in athlete and team numbers, and another adjusted for federation scheduling.

This was not a one-off. The committee posted a similar revision notice on July 29, 2026, and between August 14 and August 20 alone the official ticket information site published six separate announcements [Source].

What that meant for planning before the Games, as we advised at the time:

• Write the as-of date next to every time you copy down. If your notes say “handball, 1:30 p.m.” with no date attached to when you looked it up, you cannot tell later whether it is stale.
• Do not build a day around two sessions with a tight gap between them. A start time that moves by an hour breaks a chain; a spare afternoon does not.
• Book the non-refundable things — flights, long-distance rail — around the whole trip, not around one session. Sessions can be cancelled outright, as the next section shows.
• Re-check within a week of travelling, and again the day before. The official wording states that the committee may change the schedule without notice as federations finalise their arrangements.

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What Happens to Your Ticket If Your Session Was Cancelled?

The August 19 revision did not only move times. Eight sessions were cancelled outright, and the tickets for them became eligible for refund [Source].

The organizers process refunds after the Games finish, not immediately, and they contact affected ticket holders at the email address registered to their account [Source]. So if one of these was your session, the refund is processed only after the Games, which closed on October 4.

There is a pattern here that is worth using. The organizers had already excluded handball, weightlifting and water polo from the official resale service, along with cricket, precisely because their schedules were still in flux [Source]. In other words, the sports the organizers refused to let you resell were the sports most likely to move — and then they moved. The full resale rules are in our Asian Games 2026 ticket guide.

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When Did Competition Actually Start?

This tripped up almost everyone. The Games officially ran from September 19 to October 4, 2026, but ticketed competition was scheduled to begin nine days earlier. The earliest ticketed session in the official ticketing guide is September 10 (Thu) at 10:00 a.m., men’s preliminary-phase basketball, session code BKB01 — and it survived the August 19 revision unchanged [Source].

The session schedule grid confirms the shape of the calendar: it runs from September 10 at one end to October 4 at the other, unchanged from the January version of the document [Source]. The opening ceremony sits nine days into that grid, not at the start of it.

One further trap that has nothing to do with dates: not every sport is in Nagoya, or even in Aichi. Swimming was scheduled in Tokyo, and other events were spread across Shizuoka, Gifu and Osaka. Within Nagoya city itself, the Asian Games use 18 sports across 18 venues, and the Asian Para Games 10 sports across 10 venues, according to the city’s own portal (updated August 25, 2026) [Source]. That is the number that matters if Nagoya is your base — it is a subset of the Games as a whole, not the total.

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What Time Did the Opening and Closing Ceremonies Start?

Both ceremonies were scheduled for 6:00 p.m., and both were at Nagoya City Mizuho Park Athletic Stadium, where seats were sold in four categories, A through D, plus a child price [Source]:

Two things about the ceremonies that are genuinely different from a normal session.

First, ceremony tickets required attendee details to be registered in advance, and staff checked those details against the ticket at entry [Source]. This did not apply to ordinary competition sessions.

Second, the entry rules specific to the ceremonies were published in September 2026, after our August reporting. The timetable came on September 7, 2026: identity checks from 1:00 p.m., gates open 1:30 p.m., WARM-UP STAGE 4:00 p.m., ceremony 6:00 p.m. The official English guidance puts the deadline plainly — Please enter the venue by 16:00 for the opening ceremony and by 16:30 for the closing one, with entry restricted, on the published schedule, from then until 5:20 p.m. and 5:40 p.m. respectively [Source]. The re-entry rule followed on September 12, 2026, and it names the ceremony venue: Re-entry is not permitted at Nagoya City Mizuho Park Athletic Stadium, alongside judo, shooting, sailing and cricket; at every other venue re-entry needs your ticket plus the wristband handed to you as you leave [Source]. Earlier, on September 3, 2026, came the Games-wide rules for every venue: bag and body checks at entry, and a published extract of the prohibited-items list — bottles and flasks limited to 750 ml and one per person, glass and metal containers, alcohol, monopods, tripods and chairs, and large bags, with only soft bags of 25 litres or less exempt — plus a list of prohibited behaviour inside venues. There is no cloakroom or coin locker at any venue, and that notice is published in Japanese only [Source].

What the prefecture’s page said is that the access route for the ceremonies differed from the route used on competition days; that there was no spectator parking or bicycle parking at the stadium; and that bus routes might be diverted by traffic restrictions [Source]. The stadium is served by three subway stations — Mizuho Undojo Higashi on the Meijo Line, Mizuho Undojo Nishi and Aratamabashi on the Sakura-dori Line — and we cover the walk from each in our venue access guide.

One additional fact about opening day, stated as a fact and nothing more: the organizing committee announced on August 19, 2026 that Their Majesties the Emperor and Empress would visit Aichi on September 19–20 to attend the Games [Source]. The announcement says nothing about spectator entry times, bag checks or road closures, so I am not going to infer any. The standing advice is the same as for any large event here: use public transport and arrive early.

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What Are the Three New Ways to Buy Tickets?

Between August 18 and August 20, 2026, three purchase routes appeared that most English coverage has not caught up with. They matter to schedule planning because each one changes how late you can decide.

For context, the regular route is unchanged: general sale runs until the day each session takes place, with “No restrictions (including international sales)”, first come first served and no lottery [Source]. What is no longer accurate is the old line that the official site is the only way in.

1. The Asian Q Ticket — no account registration

Sales of the Asian Q Ticket (and the Asian Para Q Ticket) began at 10:00 a.m. on August 19, 2026. The headline feature is that it can be bought without registering an ID, which removes the single biggest obstacle for visitors from abroad. The terms, as published [Source]:

• On sale until 90 minutes before each session’s scheduled finish time — so, in practice, deep into the session itself.
• First come, first served, unreserved seating only.
• Eligible ticket types: general, child and disability pricing. Wheelchair and Heartful tickets are outside the service.
• Payment by Apple Pay or Google Pay; delivery is an electronic ticket.
• An issuing fee and a system usage fee apply on top of the ticket price.

Which sports it covers is set out in the official ticketing guide rather than on the announcement page, so check there for your sport. One thing I cannot confirm and will not claim: the sales site is at quick.pia.jp/aichi-nagoya2026_en/ and is linked from the English ticket page, but I have not verified that its interface is actually in English. Note also that the Asian Q Ticket is not the same thing as what the organizers now call a “same-day ticket” — they introduced that term on September 2, 2026 for on-site sales at eight competition venues [Source].

2. The After 4 Ticket — evening entry, lower price

The After 4 Ticket went on sale at 5:00 p.m. on August 19, 2026. It is a timed-entry ticket allowing admission from 4:00 p.m., created to make use of seats freed up by invitational events that finish in the morning [Source]. Terms:

• 11 sports at the Asian Games (four at the Asian Para Games) are covered. The list of which sessions those are lives in the official attachment; I am not reproducing it here, because the Japanese and English versions of the sport-by-sport counts do not agree and I would rather send you to the source than print a number that is wrong.
• ¥1,500 to ¥6,500.
• On sale until 90 minutes before each session’s scheduled finish, first come first served.
• Ouen-ID (Supporter ID) registration is required — unlike the Asian Q Ticket.
• Payment by credit card, debit card or Google Pay — convenience-store payment on the official sales site ended at 5:00 p.m. on September 2, 2026; electronic ticket only.

For a traveller, this is the cheapest way to put an evening of sport into a day that is otherwise full of sightseeing.

3. The City Ticket Office — over a counter, in cash, on paper

The organizers announced the Aichi-Nagoya 2026 City Ticket Office on August 18 and opened it on August 20, 2026, inside the Oasis 21 i Center tourist information centre at B1F Oasis 21, 1-11-1 Higashisakura, Higashi-ku, Nagoya 461-0005 [Source]. It sold tickets for all sports at both Games while stock lasted, took cash and credit cards, and issued physical paper tickets on the spot. Resale was not handled there.

Also on August 19, 2026 at 5:00 p.m., additional tickets went on sale for the opening ceremony, closing ceremony, athletics, shooting, table tennis, badminton, volleyball and artistic swimming — explicitly including sessions that had been displaying as “currently unavailable,” following confirmation of final seat counts [Source].

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How We Suggested Building a Day You Could Actually Watch

With no official schedule page and a timetable that moves, here is the sequence we recommended before the Games.

1. Pick the sport first, then the session code. Tickets are sold by session, and the session code (BKB01, HBL09, OOC01) is the only unambiguous identifier. Write the code down, not just “handball on Friday.”
2. Confirm the venue on the official venue page. Sport pages and venue pages give you which sport is where, even though they carry no times.
3. Work out how you get there before you buy. Venues are spread across Aichi and beyond, and the official position is that spectators should use public transport as their primary means of travel to and from venues [Source]. Our venue access guide and transport guide cover the routes.
4. Allow for road closures on the outdoor events. The official transport page links to course and traffic restriction information for the marathon, race walk, cycling road race and triathlon. Officials also expect restrictions around the torch relay and the ceremonies [Source].
5. One venue per day if you can manage it. Given that start times moved a month before the Games, chaining two venues in a day is a plan with a single point of failure.
6. Book the room around the base, not the session. Sessions can move; a hotel next to a subway line stays useful either way. See where to stay for the Asian Games.

For route searching, my route runs a dedicated site for Asian Games venues that plans public-transport journeys to each one, and the official Games site links to it. Toyota Financial Services operates it, not the organizing committee — it is a route-search service the official site points to, not a Games app [Source]. As of August 20, 2026 I could find no announcement of an official Games app at all.

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The Re-check Routine We Recommended Before the Games

Because the schedule was a moving document, the practical skill was knowing the two places changes were announced. Between August 14 and August 20 alone, six notices went up on the ticket information site — that is roughly one every day [Source].

• The organizing committee’s news page at aichi-nagoya2026.org/ja/news/ — the committee posts schedule revisions and their PDF attachments here.
• The official ticket information site at lp-ag.tickets-aichi-nagoya2026.org (with an English version) — the ticketing operator posts cancellations, refunds, new ticket types and additional releases here, sometimes on the same day as the schedule change.
• Aichi Prefecture’s spectator access pages — the prefecture updated the general access page on September 3, 2026 — it now carries shuttle-bus, accessible-shuttle and park-and-ride detail — and last updated the ceremony page on August 3, 2026 [Source].

For the wider picture, see our full Asian Games 2026 visitor guide; the ticket guide covers buying from overseas, the resale service and what “currently unavailable” meant.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Where can I find the Asian Games 2026 competition schedule?

Not on a schedule page — there wasn’t one. As measured on August 20, 2026, aichi-nagoya2026.org/schedule/ returns a 404, and the sport and venue pages show a competition-schedule heading with no dates under it. The committee published the schedule as three PDF attachments to its news post of August 19, 2026: the competition programme, the daily schedule and the session schedule. In English, the official ticket information site publishes a Schedule & Venues PDF and the English ticketing guide. Open the news post rather than bookmarking the PDF, because the filenames are in Japanese and the links break easily.

Was the Asian Games 2026 schedule final?

No. The competition programme, daily schedule and session schedule were all revised on August 19, 2026, one month before the opening ceremony, and the committee announced a similar revision on July 29. The official documents stated that times might change without notice as federations finalised their arrangements, so we advised readers to re-check before every session. The Games closed on October 4, 2026.

When did Asian Games 2026 competition actually start?

Ticketed competition was scheduled to start on September 10, 2026 (Thu), nine days before the opening ceremony on September 19. The earliest ticketed session in the official ticketing guide is men’s preliminary-phase basketball at 10:00 a.m., session code BKB01, and the August 19 revision left it unchanged. The session schedule grid runs from September 10 to October 4.

What time did the opening and closing ceremonies start?

Both were scheduled to start at 6:00 p.m. The opening ceremony was on September 19, 2026 (Sat) and the closing ceremony on October 4, 2026 (Sun), both at Nagoya City Mizuho Park Athletic Stadium. Ceremony tickets also required attendee details to be registered in advance, and staff checked those details at entry. Under the published schedule, gates were to open at 1:30 p.m. with identity checks from 1:00 p.m., and spectators had to be inside by 4:00 p.m. for the opening ceremony and 4:30 p.m. for the closing ceremony, published September 7, 2026. Re-entry was not permitted at the ceremony venue, published September 12, 2026. Games-wide bag-check and prohibited-item rules were published on September 3, 2026 and applied at every venue.

My session was cancelled. What happens to my ticket?

Eight sessions were cancelled in the August 19, 2026 revision: one water polo session (WPO11), five handball sessions (HBL02, HBL04, HBL09, HBL11, HBL13) and two weightlifting sessions (WLF07, WLF09). Tickets for cancelled sessions are eligible for refund, the refund process runs after the Games finish rather than immediately, and the organizers contact affected ticket holders at the email address registered to their account.

Could you buy a ticket without registering an account?

Yes, during the Asian Games, through the Asian Q Ticket, which went on sale at 10:00 a.m. on August 19, 2026 and required no ID registration. It was first come, first served, unreserved seating only, on sale until 90 minutes before each session’s scheduled finish time, paid by Apple Pay or Google Pay and delivered as an electronic ticket, with an issuing fee and a system usage fee on top. General sale and the After 4 Ticket required Ouen-ID (Supporter ID) registration, so the requirement depended on which route you used.

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About the Author

Yuu was born in Nagoya and has lived here for 35 years. He started tracking the Asian Games schedule documents after realising that the question readers actually ask — “what is on, on the day I am there?” — has no single page answering it, in any language. The August 19 revision, and the eight sessions that quietly disappeared with it, are exactly the sort of thing that never reaches English coverage until someone reads the Japanese announcement.

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Related Guides

• Asian Games 2026 Visitor Guide — the overview: venues, hotels, transport and what to do between sessions
• Asian Games 2026 Tickets — buying from overseas, the official resale service, and what “currently unavailable” means
• Asian Games 2026 Venues and Access — how to reach every arena without a car
• Where to Stay for the Asian Games 2026 — choosing a base by the sessions you hold
• Asian Games 2026 Transport Guide — subways, passes and moving between venues on competition days