A Record 215 Charities Will Carry Runners Into the 2027 Boston Marathon

The Boston Athletic Association named 215 nonprofit organizations to the Boston Marathon’s official charity program for 2027 on Tuesday, the most it has ever accepted, publishing the list in the middle of qualifier registration week, when the runners who need it are paying attention.

Applications from qualifiers for the April 19, 2027 race opened Monday and close at 5 p.m. ET on Friday, and hitting the standard has never been the same thing as getting in. Of the 33,249 runners who applied for the 2026 race, 24,362 were accepted, leaving 8,887 who had run the time their age group demanded and got nothing for it.

How a Boston Marathon Charity Entry Works

None of these entries go to runners directly: the B.A.A. allocates them to the organizations it has accepted, and each of those fills a team with people who sign up to a fundraising target in exchange for a bib. Applications therefore go to the charity rather than the race, on a timeline each team sets for itself, so there is no single Boston charity deadline to miss. The bigger teams do not hang about, though. Mass General Brigham is taking applications now and says it decides on most of them inside two weeks.

Getting onto the list was settled back in June, when charities filed letters of interest, and the criteria are narrower than its length suggests: a registered 501(c)(3), neither religious nor political, working on what the association calls building healthy communities, with priority going to those serving the eight cities and towns the course runs through. Twenty-two of the 215 cleared that bar for the first time, and the program has never carried more than 200 members.

The result runs from the city’s biggest teaching hospitals, Massachusetts General, Brigham and Women’s, Dana-Farber and Boston Children’s, through the charitable arms of the Red Sox, Celtics, Bruins and Patriots, down to neighborhood outfits like the South Boston Neighborhood House and the Boston Bulldogs Running Club.

What a Boston Marathon Charity Bib Costs

The B.A.A. sets no fundraising minimum for charity runners and leaves that to the charities, which is where the real price of a Boston bib sits. Boston Children’s Hospital asks its runners for $10,000, and Mass General Brigham the same of anyone needing a bib, while the American Heart Association sets its figure at $15,000. Tedy’s Team prices by route: $10,000 for one of its charity bibs, or only $6,000 from a runner who already holds a place and wants to raise money anyway.

That cheaper tier is the part almost nobody writes about. Runners who get in on their own qualifying time can still raise money for an official charity or for the B.A.A.’s own team, through a scheme the association calls Qualified Runner for a Cause, and the commitment is lower because the entry never came out of a charity’s allocation.

The Entry Pool Has Not Grown With the List

What Tuesday’s announcement never says is how many entries those 215 organizations are dividing up. The B.A.A. describes the program as just under a tenth of the total field, and with the 2026 field capped at 30,000 runners, that puts the pool a little under 3,000 places, or roughly 13 or 14 entries per organization in equal shares. In 2024, when the program had 160 members, the same sum comes out at about 18.

They are not split equally, of course, and the B.A.A. has never published the division, so the hospital teams run dozens of people while a small community organization gets a handful. The direction is clear enough all the same. The program has taken on a third more organizations in three years without taking a larger share of the field, while the qualifying route only gets harder: two rules are new for 2027, a time penalty for steep downhill courses and a random draw for about 1,000 qualifiers who miss the cut-off, which together have changed the odds for everyone applying this week.

The fundraising totals explain why the association keeps expanding it. Charity runners raised a record $57.3 million around the 2026 race, up 13.7 percent on the $50.4 million of the year before, and the program has now passed $675 million since it began in 1989. Divided among the 193 organizations that took part last April, that averages about $297,000 each, though the spread across the list is wide.

“We look forward to building upon the momentum of the Bank of America Boston Marathon Official Charity Program in 2027, and aim to surpass our record-setting fundraising mark of $57.3 million achieved in 2026,” B.A.A. president and CEO Jack Fleming said in Tuesday’s announcement.

The association’s own team, B.A.A. Gives Back, opened its applications on Monday and raised close to $450,000 last year, and the 215 charities will be recruiting through the fall and into the winter. Qualifier registration shuts at 5 p.m. ET on Friday, and nobody finds out whether they got in until early October, which leaves a runner a few weeks to learn they missed the cut-off and still find somewhere to go.