In the closing weeks of 2025, 1,133,813 people entered the ballot for the 2026 TCS London Marathon, the random draw that decides who gets one of the race's public entry places, and fewer than 20,000 of them will get a bib. That is a ballot world record, broken for the second year running, and London is only one door into one of seven Abbott World Marathon Majors, the informal name for the biggest, most prestigious marathons on the calendar: London, Tokyo, Boston, Berlin, Chicago, New York and, since 2025, Sydney.
Every runner who has ever daydreamed about one of these races has heard some version of "just enter the ballot." What almost nobody says out loud is how much that advice varies depending on which Major you mean. The gap between the best odds and the worst is roughly twenty-fold. Knowing where a race sits on that spread changes whether a ballot entry is a reasonable long shot or closer to buying a single lottery ticket and hoping.
The odds are not remotely the same race to race
Five of the seven Majors run a public ballot: Tokyo, London, Berlin, Chicago and New York. Sydney, the newest, runs one too. Boston does not, and that distinction matters enough to get its own section below. Line up the five-plus-one that do, and the acceptance rates span from London's roughly 1.7 percent up to Chicago and Sydney's roughly one in three.
| Major | Recent ballot applicants | Ballot places (approx.) | Acceptance rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| London | 1,133,813 (2026) | ~18,000–20,000 | ~1.6–1.8% |
| New York | 200,000+ (2025) | ~6,000 | ~3% |
| Tokyo | 300,000+ (approx., media-reported) | portion of ~37,500 field | ~10% ("1 in 10") |
| Berlin | ~100,000–125,000 (media estimate) | ~30,000 | ~30% |
| Chicago | 160,000+ (2025) | ~50,000 | ~31–33% |
| Sydney | 123,000+ (2026) | ~40,000 target field | ~33% (upper bound) |
A few of those numbers carry a flag worth stating plainly rather than smoothing over. Tokyo's applicant figure is reported by running media as "over 300,000," but the Tokyo Marathon Foundation itself has not published an exact count, so treat it as an estimate, not an official statistic. Berlin's applicant pool is similarly soft, with sources putting recent years anywhere from 100,000 to 125,000. Chicago's own materials round its acceptance rate to 33 percent, though the math against the reported applicant total lands closer to 31. None of that changes the shape of the story. It just means the honest way to state Tokyo's odds is "about one in ten," not "exactly 12.5 percent," and the honest way to state Berlin's or Chicago's is "roughly a third," not a decimal point.
London and New York sit apart from the pack, and it is not by a little. Both have gone from difficult to genuinely improbable in the space of a couple of years.
Why London's odds keep getting worse
London did not start this hard. For the 2024 race, 578,304 people entered the ballot. For 2025 that jumped to 840,318, a new world record at the time. For 2026 it broke again, past the million mark for the first time, to 1,133,813 (869,803 from the UK, 264,011 from overseas). The number of ballot places has not moved anywhere close to proportionally across those same three years, so the acceptance rate has slid from roughly 2.9 percent to roughly 1.7 percent in two cycles.
That trend line is the real story behind London specifically, more than the headline percentage. Demand is not leveling off. It is compounding, and the ballot pool it is chasing is fixed. A runner who applied and lost in 2024 was already up against long odds; the identical decision to try again in 2026 is materially harder, even though nothing about their own qualifications changed.
The ballot is also not London's only door in. Good For Age, an entry route open to UK runners who hit an age-graded qualifying time set by the race, gets in without touching the ballot at all. So does the Championship entry for very fast runners, along with charity places and places sold through official tour operators. All of those routes pull bibs out of the total field before the ballot pool is even set, which is part of why the ballot itself is such a thin slice of who actually lines up on the day.
The drawing is smaller than the field, and that is the whole story
New York makes the same point even more starkly, and it is worth sitting with the arithmetic rather than skimming past it. The TCS New York City Marathon fields around 55,000 finishers a year. The non-guaranteed drawing, NYRR's term for its public ballot, accepted only about 6,000 of those bibs for 2025, out of a record 200,000-plus applications, for an acceptance rate of roughly 3 percent. That 6,000 is not 3 percent of the finish line. It is roughly 11 percent of it.
The other 89 percent of the field gets in through routes that never touch the drawing at all. There is 9+1, NYRR's own loyalty path, which guarantees a bib to any member who runs nine of the club's local qualifying races and volunteers at a tenth in the same calendar year. There is a time-qualifying standard for runners fast enough to skip the draw entirely. There is a Legacy guarantee for anyone who has finished New York fifteen or more times. And there is a large allotment sold through official charities and tour operators. Stack all of that up first, and what is left over for the general public to win by luck is a genuinely small remainder.
That is the mechanism low ballot odds actually run on, and it applies to every Major that has a ballot, New York included. A ballot is not "how the field gets filled." It is what is left after charity, qualifying times, tour packages and loyalty programs have already claimed their share, and the leftover is usually the smallest piece of the pie, not the biggest. Chicago runs the same layering, with a Legacy route for anyone who has finished five times since 2015 sitting alongside its drawing. London runs it through Good For Age and Championship entries. The ballot number that gets quoted in headlines is the odds of winning the smallest, most oversubscribed door, while several bigger, less random doors sit right next to it.
Boston is not a lottery, and treating it like one is the wrong plan
Boston belongs on this list of seven Majors, and it belongs nowhere on the ballot-odds table above, because it does not run a public lottery at all. Entry is earned: hit the qualifying time standard set for your age group and gender, known as a BQ, and you are eligible to apply. The complication is that eligibility is not the same as a guaranteed bib. When more qualified runners apply than there is room for, the Boston Athletic Association applies a rolling cutoff, an extra margin shaved below the official qualifying standard, and runners who cleared their BQ but not the cutoff get rejected anyway. For 2025, that cutoff landed at 6 minutes and 51 seconds under standard, and 12,324 runners who had legitimately qualified were turned away. Only 24,069 qualifiers were accepted into a field of roughly 30,000, the rest filled by charity, invitational and Para-athlete places.
For 2026, the BAA tightened its qualifying standards by five minutes for most age groups under 60 and added a small new lottery, about 1,000 places, reserved only for runners who qualified but missed the cutoff. That narrow draw is new and worth knowing about if you are right on the border. It is not a general entry lottery, and framing Boston as one misleads exactly the runners who need the real picture most: earn a fast time first, then hope the field is not so deep that year that your fast time still is not fast enough.
What the data actually says. The common assumption is that a Major's ballot is the main way people get in, so a rejected ballot entry means the race is essentially closed to you. The numbers say the opposite. At every balloted Major, the ballot is a minority entry point stacked next to charity places, time-qualifying standards, tour-operator allocations and loyalty or Legacy programs, and in New York's case the pure drawing is only about 11 percent of the field. Losing the ballot is not the same as losing your only shot. It usually means you have not yet looked at the other five or six doors into the same race.
What this means if you are actually deciding where to apply
None of this is an argument against entering a ballot. Somebody wins every one of them, and the entry fee to try is small relative to what is on the line. But the honest planning move is to stop treating "enter the London ballot" and "enter the Berlin lottery" as the same bet with the same odds, because they are not close. If a fast, certified marathon this year matters more to you than a specific finish line, Berlin and Chicago's roughly one-in-three odds are a fundamentally different proposition than London or New York's one-in-thirty-to-sixty. If a specific Major is genuinely the goal regardless of the odds, look past the ballot itself toward the qualifying-time and Legacy routes each race runs alongside it, since those are frequently the more realistic door for a well-prepared runner.
It also means the ballot is not a plan on its own, even for the race you actually want. A season built entirely around a single long-shot application is a season with no backup. Runners who keep a running list of certified, well-regarded marathons on 42cal's race directory can apply to a Major ballot and still lock in a real race for the year regardless of how the draw lands, rather than finding out in the spring that the only thing on the calendar was a bet that did not pay off.
