The Boston Athletic Association's tax filing for the fiscal year ending June 2025 lists $12,200,585 in entry fees against $37,876,596 in total revenue. That works out to 32 percent. Sponsorship, ticket sales, royalties and investment income cover the other two-thirds of what it costs to stage the Boston Marathon and the association's other events. The filing is a Form 990, the annual return every U.S. nonprofit sends to the IRS, a legal document with penalties attached for filing it wrong.
New York Road Runners files a similar return for the TCS New York City Marathon and its other events: event entry revenue of $52,793,313 against $132,675,753 in total revenue, or 40 percent. At two mid-size races the pattern flips. The Houston Marathon Committee's race entry fees covered $4,501,803 of its $6,912,221 in revenue, 65 percent. Grandma's Marathon, in Duluth, Minnesota, covered $2,414,290 of $3,790,299 in revenue from marathon, half-marathon and 5K registrations combined, 64 percent. The bigger the race, the smaller the share of its own budget the entry fee pays for.
The price climbs with the field
42cal's own database of 478 marathons worldwide, built from races with a published general-entry price, shows the price side of that same relationship. Among the 181 races that price in U.S. dollars, the median top-tier general entry is $135, climbing from $120 for fields under 1,000 runners to $240 for fields over 30,000. The 119 races priced in euros follow the same shape: a median of EUR61 for fields between 1,000 and 5,000 runners, rising to EUR149 for fields over 30,000.
Boston's own entry fee sits above that median: $260 for 2026, open only to runners who clear the qualifying time for their age and gender, a standard 42cal's Boston qualifier calculator checks before anyone pays. New York and Chicago, both with fields above 30,000, charge $295 to $358 and $250. The full range across 42cal's database runs from $45 at Maraton El Salvador to as high as $606 at the San Francisco Marathon, which sells seven separate tiers between $118 and that ceiling. None of that spread says anything about what the money pays for once it is collected.
Where the fee lands
At Boston, the gap between entry fees and total revenue is filled mostly by sponsorship, which the association books as contributions: more than $23.7 million of it, 63 percent of total revenue, according to the same filing. Looking only at the Boston Marathon program itself, rather than the association as a whole, the BAA reports program revenue of $10,137,051 against program expenses of $25,808,581, covering 39 percent of what the race alone costs to run. At New York Road Runners, contributions and grants, including sponsorship and $4,542,289 in membership dues, cover $61,557,044, 46 percent of total revenue, close to what entry fees themselves bring in. At Houston and Grandma's, contributions cover a much smaller share, 28 percent and 10 percent, with Grandma's booking its sponsorship on a separate line worth another 14 percent.
Inside one organizer's budget
None of the four filings shows what the money is spent on in useful detail, except one. The Boston Athletic Association's Form 990 itemizes named race expenses rather than folding them into a single program line: prize money, runner amenities, equipment rental and contributed goods each get their own row. New York Road Runners, by contrast, reports $39,848,573 under a single line called "signature running event" and another $12,416,076 under "weekly programs and eve," neither of which tells a reader anything. London Marathon Events, which files UK company accounts rather than a 990, reports one line for its entire cost base: administrative expenses of £48,201,931.
Boston's total functional expenses for the year came to $36,359,970. Salaries, officer pay, pension and payroll taxes together account for $5,634,121, 15.5 percent of the total, the single largest category. Fees paid to outside services account for $5,368,625, 14.8 percent. Equipment rental runs $4,559,758, 12.5 percent, covering the barriers, tents, generators and grandstands that a road race needs. Contributed goods, the value of product sponsors supply instead of cash, come to $3,445,497, 9.5 percent, and the identical figure appears on the revenue side of the same return as a non-cash contribution. Grants to governments and organizations total $2,374,159, 6.5 percent. Prize money, at $1,418,724, is 3.9 percent.
The schedule behind that $5,368,625 services line breaks it into fourteen named payments, because the IRS requires an itemized list once a single category exceeds 10 percent of total expenses. Appearance fees paid to elite athletes come to $1,921,364, 5.3 percent of the BAA's total budget. Event consultants take $1,263,916. Public safety costs $812,390. Medical service costs $158,296. Drug testing costs $92,037.
Where the data disagrees. A common assumption is that a marathon entry fee mainly funds the police, medics and road closures that make a mass event on public streets possible. At the Boston Athletic Association, the appearance fees paid to a small number of elite runners, $1,921,364, come to more than double the entire public safety line, $812,390, and twelve times the medical service line, $158,296. Combined with prize money of $1,418,724, the professional field costs the BAA $3,340,088, 9.2 percent of total expenses.
Prize money is the smaller number
Prize money reads like a large figure until it sits next to the total budget. The BAA's $1,418,724 prize line held nearly steady the year before, at $1,274,728, 3.7 percent of that year's smaller total. The 2025 Boston Marathon's published purse breaks down further: $150,000 each to the open winners, a record first-place prize among the World Marathon Majors, $75,000 for second, $40,000 for third, a $50,000 bonus for a course record, and $97,000 spread across seven para divisions. Those divisions total $1,137,500, the purse for the Boston Marathon race itself, one edition; the $1,418,724 on the tax filing is prize money across every BAA event for the full fiscal year, which includes the first.
Appearance fees are what get elite athletes to the start line in the first place. Prize money is announced every year; the $1,921,364 the BAA paid in appearance fees surfaces only because federal tax law requires it. It runs 35 percent larger than the prize money line on the same return.
What the organizer pays the city
Organizers also pay for public safety directly to the cities they run through. New York Road Runners' 2024 tax filing names the payee outright: the NYC Department of Finance, paid $1,571,728 for street permits and NYPD traffic fees, one of the five highest-paid contractors on the entire return. The prior year's filing lists the same payee for $2,343,297. Boston pays differently, routing money straight to the eight cities and towns along its course and to the state, under a category the filing labels "support": $537,800 to the City of Boston, $437,200 to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, $158,600 each to the Town of Hopkinton, where the race starts, and the City of Newton, where the Newton hills sit, plus smaller amounts to five more towns and the Hopkinton public schools. That comes to $1,740,400, and adding the separately reported $812,390 public safety line brings the BAA's total government-facing spending to $2,552,790, 7 percent of its budget.
Not every city collects what it is owed. Chicago spent $22.6 million on police overtime for special events in 2024; about $7.2 million of that was tied to ticketed events including the Chicago Marathon, Lollapalooza and NASCAR combined, and reporting by Block Club Chicago does not break the marathon's individual share out from the other two. The city recovered just under $2 million of the total owed, and only from Lollapalooza and the Chase Corporate Challenge, an event separate from the three above. A city ordinance requires organizers to be billed for police services beyond twelve shifts.
When the fee does not carry over
Every major marathon checked here keeps the entry fee once it is paid, whether or not the runner ever starts. Boston's own athlete page states the policy in one clause: entries are non-refundable, non-transferable, and non-deferable, except through the association's pregnancy and postpartum policy. New York, Chicago, London and Berlin all publish similar terms in their own words. What looks like a deferral option at most of them is a second payment in practice. New York Road Runners requires a runner who canceled a guaranteed 2025 entry to register and pay the 2026 processing and entry fees again during a set claim window, rather than carrying the original payment forward. Chicago's policy states plainly that a canceled fee will not be applied to a future event. Pregnancy or postpartum status, and in most cases separately purchased cancellation insurance, are the exceptions that change any of that. Five of the largest marathons in the world sell that insurance as a product rather than offer a refund as a courtesy.
New York shows what the same policy looks like from the other side of the lottery. Entering the 2026 drawing costs a non-refundable $11 processing fee, on top of an entry fee of $255 for NYRR members, $315 for other U.S. residents and $358 for international entrants. NYRR received more than 240,000 applications from over 160 countries for that drawing, close to 20 percent more than the year before, and accepted about 1 percent of applicants who did not already hold a guaranteed spot, the lowest acceptance rate in the race's history. Multiplying the applicant count by the processing fee puts roughly $2.64 million in NYRR's hands. NYRR does not break out a separate drawing-fee line on its return. The most recent edition of the race, in 2025, produced 59,226 finishers, the largest marathon field ever recorded.
Where the charity money goes
A charity place works differently from a standard entry, and London documents the exchange more openly than any U.S. major. A UK charity buys places from London Marathon Events in blocks, Golden Bonds worth four entries a year over a four-year term, Silver Bonds worth two, with the current cycle running from 2026 to 2029 and every place already allocated. The price per charity entry rose to £400 plus VAT for 2026, up from £370, the first increase since 2021. London Marathon Events states on its own site that a charity entry belongs to the charity, not to the individual runner filling it.
That charity system moves more money than the organizer itself turns over. The 2025 TCS London Marathon raised a world-record £87.3 million for charities, £13.8 million more than the year before and a cumulative £1.4 billion since 1981, while London Marathon Events Limited's own turnover came to £59,794,235 in its most recent published accounts, for the year to December 2024. Boston runs its charity program differently, through 176 partner organizations that together raised a record $50.4 million in 2025 and more than $600 million since the program began in 1989, according to the BAA's own tax filing. Individual charities set their own minimum fundraising commitments, typically $5,000 to $15,000 per bib. Nothing in Boston's public filings or charity pages says what the BAA charges a charity for the same kind of invitational entry.
