New York Road Runners Opens Applications for the First 9+1 Drawing Thursday

New York Road Runners will open applications for the first 9+1 eligibility drawing on Thursday, Sept. 17, and the deadline that decides who is allowed to apply falls the night before.

NYRR announced in August that 9+1, the route that lets local runners earn a guaranteed place in the New York City Marathon by finishing nine qualifying races and volunteering at one, would be capped by a drawing. Marathon Handbook reported the change when it was made. The calendar was the missing piece, and the release NYRR sent to media on Tuesday supplies it. Entries open Thursday and close Tuesday, Sept. 29, on nyrr.org.

Membership has to be in place by Sept. 16 at 11:59 p.m. ET, and it has to stay active through drawing day on Oct. 1. Joining Thursday morning in order to enter will not work. An NYRR account also needs a working payment method on it at the point of applying, and applicants have to be 18 by the date of the 2028 marathon, Nov. 5, 2028.

Entering the drawing itself is free. NYRR will draw more than 15,000 members on Oct. 1, and everyone who comes out of it is charged $99 to become a 9+1 Passholder. The requirement after that is the familiar one, nine qualifying races and one volunteer shift across the 2027 calendar year, which earns a guaranteed place in the 2028 race. Passholders still pay the marathon entry fee.

Passholders also get help with the races themselves. Under a new Passholder Race Selection Process, NYRR says it will match Passholders to the nine races and the volunteer opportunity they need, rather than leaving them to compete for places when general registration opens. “The hardest thing about completing 9+1 should be running the races, not getting into them,” NYRR CEO Rob Simmelkjaer said when the changes were announced in August.

The reason NYRR gives for the cap is congestion at the other end of the program, in race and volunteer registration, though the release never says how much of it there is. Its own figures from earlier this year give the scale. The organization took more than 240,000 applications for the 2026 marathon drawing, from more than 160 countries, about 20 percent up on the previous year, and accepted roughly 1 percent of them. Time qualifiers from outside the membership had to run about 22:52 faster than the published standard to make the field. The race finished 59,226 runners in 2025, the largest marathon ever held.

NYRR says it has close to 100,000 members. Somewhere above 15,000 of them will be cleared to start 9+1 next year, and the organization has not said what share of applicants it expects that to be.

The race is also a more local one than its global reputation suggests. Marathon Handbook’s deep dive into the 2025 finisher data found that more than 57 percent of American finishers came from New York State, with another 10 percent from New Jersey, and that 69 percent of the whole field was domestic. “The 9+1 program has provided generations of New Yorkers with a uniquely local pathway to their hometown marathon, and we are preserving that opportunity for years to come,” Simmelkjaer said Tuesday.

Runners already working through 9+1 for the 2027 marathon are unaffected. The drawing governs the 2027 program year and entry to the 2028 race. The other ways into the marathon are unchanged, among them time qualification, 15 or more finishes, charity fundraising and the general drawing, and for runners who would rather skip the odds altogether there are still big races that take entries without a lottery.

The drawing runs Oct. 1. Registration for NYRR’s January to March 2027 races, the first block Passholders will need, opens Oct. 14.