The Frankfurt Marathon Will Give 300 Runners Entry to the 2027 London Marathon

A fast enough run at the Frankfurt Marathon on Oct. 25 will now come with an entry to next year’s London Marathon, a race that drew a record 1,338,544 ballot applications for its 2027 edition. The two organizers announced the arrangement Wednesday: up to 300 places at the 2027 London Marathon, set aside each year for the German race and the city around it.

Two hundred of those are won on the road, divided evenly by gender, and go to whoever finishes highest in Frankfurt outside the elite fields. The remaining block of up to 100 is held for charity, club and community runners who live within 50 kilometers (about 31 miles) of Frankfurt, and they do not have to run the race at all. Applications for that block open after race day, decided with the Hessian Athletics Association, local clubs and sponsors.

Frankfurt’s version comes without any British paperwork. Good For Age entry is open only to U.K. residents, under the 2026 criteria, the most recent London has published. Championship entry, at sub-2:38:00 for men and sub-3:10:00 for women, does take applications from runners who live abroad, but only from those who hold membership of a U.K. athletics body. A German club runner with a 2:32 marathon has had to register with England, Scotland, Wales or Northern Ireland to use it, or else fall back on the ballot, a tour operator package, or a different race altogether.

Most of the other big-city marathons have been open on time for years. Chicago’s time qualifier carries no residency requirement, at 2:50:00 for men aged 16 to 34 and 3:20:00 for women and non-binary runners in the same bracket. New York does the same. London has run its fast lane through British athletics membership.

London Marathon Events bought Motion Events, the company that organizes Frankfurt, in April, the first time it had taken on an event outside the U.K. Hugh Brasher, the London Marathon Events chief executive, said Frankfurt is “the only marathon in the world where you can now use your sporting endeavour to qualify to run in London.” It is also the only marathon outside Britain his company owns, picked up five months ago along with the Gutenberg Half Marathon in Mainz.

Jo Schindler, who founded Motion Events and has directed the Frankfurt race since 2002, put it as a link between the two cities. “It is about celebrating performance at the Mainova Frankfurt Marathon, rewarding community impact and building a lasting connection between runners in Frankfurt and London,” he said. Frankfurt sold out last October for the first time in 41 editions, with nearly 17,000 entries in the marathon and close to 30,000 across the weekend.

Neither organizer has said yet what counts as non-elite, or how fast the 100th finisher will need to be. World Athletics’ published results for the 2025 race give a rough sense of the standard, though they take in the elite field too: 216 men down to 2:36:59, and 98 women down to 3:05:00. Frankfurt pulls that kind of depth because the course is flat and quick by European standards, and it finishes indoors, on a strip of red carpet inside the Festhalle.

Eligibility rules and the application process are due on the Frankfurt Marathon website. The race is on Oct. 25, and the runners who earn their way through it will line up in Greenwich on April 24 or 25, at an event putting 100,000 people on the road across two days.