Qualifiers Needed to Run 5:17 Under Their Standard to Get Into the 2027 Boston Marathon

Runners hoping to race Boston next April needed a qualifying time at least 5:17 faster than the standard for their age group, the Boston Athletic Association said Tuesday as it started emailing decisions for the 131st Boston Marathon on April 19, 2027.

That margin got 24,630 qualifiers in on time. Another 1,000 are being drawn at random from applicants who beat their standard but missed the cutoff, through the Boston Qualifier Selection the B.A.A. added in July. Between them that makes 25,630 runners accepted or pending verification, which the B.A.A. says is a record for qualifiers. It received 33,649 applications during registration week, Sept. 14 to 18, and 8,019 will not get a place.

Last year’s cutoff was 4:34, and 8,887 of the 33,249 people who applied for the 2026 race were turned away. This year’s bar is 43 seconds higher, and on the clock alone 9,019 applicants would have fallen short, slightly more than a year ago, and it is the draw that brings the final count below last year’s. With 1,000 places shared among roughly 9,000 runners, anyone in it had about a one-in-nine chance, at the low end of the 11 to 14 percent MH estimated before registration.

Qualifiers will make up about 85 percent of the 30,000-runner field. The other 4,370 or so places are for charity runners, invited pros and Para athletes.

“To earn a spot into this race takes dedication and resiliency, and the number of marathoners world-wide only continues to grow,” Jack Fleming, the B.A.A.’s president and CEO, said in the announcement. “Although we are unable to accept all applicants, we want to recognize each and every athlete who trains and aspires to participate in the Boston Marathon.”

Who Got In

Among the 24,630 accepted on time are 13,898 men, 10,641 women and 91 non-binary athletes, from 120 countries and every U.S. state. About 10,745 of them, close to 44 percent, will be running Boston for the first time. The youngest is 18 and the oldest 84, and 1,498 live in Massachusetts. A further 215 met the Para Athletics Division standards, and 849 were accepted through the B.A.A. Running Club or for having run at least 10 Bostons in a row.

Boston was by some distance the most common place to qualify for Boston: 4,448 entrants are using a time from this year’s race, up from 2,981 who qualified at the 2025 edition for 2026. The 2025 Chicago Marathon (2,043), the 2025 New York City Marathon (826), the 2025 California International Marathon (812) and the 2026 London Marathon (610) make up the rest of the top five. Berlin, third on last year’s list with 1,127, dropped out of it.

Just 240 of the accepted times came from courses steep enough to trigger the B.A.A.’s new net-downhill adjustments, which apply to races that drop more than 1,500 feet and are in force for the first time this cycle.

Boston Marathon Cutoff Times by Year

At 5:17, this year’s cutoff is the fourth largest in the B.A.A.’s published history, behind 7:47 for the reduced 2021 field, 6:51 in 2025 and 5:29 in 2024. It also sits on top of qualifying standards that were already tightened by five minutes for runners under 60 ahead of the 2026 race.

Anyone still waiting on an answer should hear in the next few days, and entry fees come off a card only once a place is confirmed. There is no second registration window for qualifiers, so runners who missed out can still apply for a charity bib, with the official charity programs opening applications later this fall, or start working on 2028, whose qualifying window opened on Sept. 19 with the same standards as this year.