The World Marathon Majors explained, and why it is eight

There are eight World Marathon Majors. Almost every page you will find explaining the World Marathon Majors says six, and that is not carelessness so much as inertia: the series ran for nineteen years with six races, everybody learned the number, and then it added two in under two years.

The current eight are Tokyo, Boston, London, Sydney, Berlin, Chicago, New York City and Cape Town. A ninth is in the queue.

That is the headline correction, and it matters more than it sounds, because the whole culture built around this series is a collection game. If the set has changed size, so has the game.

• 8Races in the series
• 5Continents represented
• 2006Year the series was founded
• 1Races currently in candidacy

Cape Town was confirmed as the eighth after its 2026 race and enters the series formally at its next edition. One further race is in the candidacy process.

The Majors are a competition, not a category

The most common misunderstanding is that "Major" describes a race's size or age. It does not. Some of the largest and oldest marathons in the world are not Majors and never will be. A race is a Major because a series says it is, and that series exists for reasons that have nothing to do with prestige.

It was founded in 2006 to solve a specific problem: distance running had no season.

Consider the position the sport was in. The best marathon runners in the world raced roughly twice a year. They raced in different cities, on courses of wildly different difficulty, against different fields, for prize money paid by whoever put the race on. There was no table. There was no way to say, at the end of a year, who had had the best one, because nobody was competing against anybody in any structured sense. Two athletes could both have an outstanding season and never meet.

The series fixed that by doing what every other professional sport had already done: it invented a championship. Points to the top finishers at each race, a scoring period, a table, a champion at the end of it, and a prize purse funded jointly rather than race by race.

Five races formed the original group, all of them in North America and Europe: Berlin, Boston, Chicago, London and New York. Tokyo joined in 2013 and made it six, and made it three continents.

Then nothing happened for over a decade, which is why the number six got so thoroughly embedded.

How a race becomes a Major, and why it takes years

Membership is not a vote and it is not bought. A race applies, becomes a candidate, and is then assessed at each successive edition until the series is satisfied or the race gives up.

The assessment is broader than most people assume. It is not primarily about the elite race. It covers the whole event: the expo, the course itself, every operational procedure, safety standards, and the calibre of elite athlete the organisers can actually recruit. A race that cannot get a strong elite field is not going to be a Major. A race that gets a superb elite field and runs a chaotic expo is not going to be one either.

Scale is part of it. Sydney's route in ran through its 2024 edition, which recorded 20,272 finishers, and that number was cited by the series as part of the reason it passed its second consecutive assessment. A Major has to be able to move tens of thousands of people through a city on a Sunday morning without anything going wrong, which is a logistics problem before it is a sporting one.

The process takes years by design. Sydney's candidacy ran for more than three. Cape Town passed its second and final stage of assessment after its 2026 race and joins formally at its next edition in 2027. Shanghai entered candidacy in 2024, passed its 2025 evaluation, and remains under assessment.

1. 1The race appliesOrganisers put themselves forward. Being large, old or famous is not sufficient, and several of the world's biggest marathons have never sought membership at all.
2. 2It is accepted as a candidate raceThe race enters a formal, multi-year evaluation programme. It is not a Major yet and its finishers are not collecting stars in the ordinary way.
3. 3It is assessed at each editionEvery part of the event is examined: the expo, the course, the operational and safety procedures, and the standard of elite athletes the race can attract and pay for.
4. 4It passes consecutive assessmentsPassing once is not enough. The series is testing whether the race can do it repeatedly, because a Major has to be reliable rather than occasionally excellent.
5. 5It is confirmed as a MajorThe announcement comes after the assessment year, and the race normally enters the series formally at its following edition rather than retrospectively.
6. 6Finishers get their starsRunners who completed the race during the final candidacy year have been issued provisional stars, so the year that qualified the race also counted for the people who ran it.

The assessments are annual and consecutive. A candidate that has a poor year does not fail permanently, but it does not join in the year it slips either.

Several of the world's best marathons are not Majors, and never will be

A point that gets lost in the branding: membership is a commercial arrangement between race organisers and a series, and both sides have to want it.

Valencia, Paris and Amsterdam are all enormous, well organised, extremely fast city marathons that are not in the series. Neither is Rotterdam, and neither is Osaka. Some of these races produce times and fields that stand comparison with anything the Majors put on. Their absence says nothing about their quality and everything about the fact that joining a series means accepting its assessment, its scheduling pressures, its commercial arrangements and its calendar, in exchange for a badge and a share of an audience.

For a race that already sells out, already attracts a world-class field and already has a broadcaster, the trade is not obviously worth making. For a race trying to grow into an international destination event, it plainly is. That asymmetry, rather than any judgement about who runs the best marathon, is what determines who applies.

There is a second category the series structurally cannot include: everything that is not a marathon. The oldest and largest ultra distance races in the world, the multi-stage desert races, the classic point-to-point road races over non-standard distances, all sit permanently outside a series defined by 42.195 kilometres. That is a definitional boundary rather than a snub, and it is worth remembering when somebody describes the Majors as the pinnacle of distance running. They are the pinnacle of one distance, at one kind of event, in one commercial arrangement.

The word "Major" is doing a lot of work it was never designed to do. In the series' own terms it means a member race. In common usage it has drifted into meaning the best marathons in the world, which is a claim the series has never actually made and which the presence of several non-member races of comparable stature quietly contradicts.

Why the expansion happened, and what it cost

Two arguments pushed the series to grow, and they pull in different directions.

The first is geographic. A series with five races on two continents, then six on three, was calling itself a world series while ignoring most of the world. Sydney gave it the Southern Hemisphere. Cape Town gave it Africa. Whatever else that is, it is a reasonable answer to an obvious criticism, and the current eight cities span five continents.

The second is a supply problem that had become genuinely acute. The Six Star chase turned into a mass phenomenon, and the six races could not physically hold the people who wanted to run them. Three of the original six are effectively ballot-only for most applicants. One requires a qualifying time that a large majority of marathon runners will never approach. The combined capacity has been far below the demand for years, and the waiting is measured in seasons rather than months. Adding races adds places.

The cost is dilution, and it is real. A collection of six had a shape people could hold in their heads. Whether a collection of eight, or nine, carries the same weight is a question the series is answering by experiment. Every addition makes the set easier to complete and slightly less remarkable to have completed, which is the arithmetic of scarcity and cannot be argued away.

The series began with five and reached six in 2013. Sydney became the seventh in 2025, and Cape Town, confirmed after its 2026 race, enters formally at its 2027 edition.

Show the numbers

Races in the series, at each expansion

Item	Races in the series
2006	5
2013	6
2025	7
2027	8

The star medals, and the number that keeps moving

Here is where readers most often go wrong, because the answer has changed twice recently and will probably change again.

The Six Star medal is awarded for completing the original six races, and the series has confirmed it continues to be awarded. Somebody who finished those six before Sydney joined has not had anything taken away.

Above it, the series has named a Nine Star medal as the next milestone, arriving once the series reaches nine races. Runners who completed Cape Town in 2026, during its final candidacy year and before it formally entered the series, were issued provisional stars counting towards it. The eight current races are also recognised as a set in their own right.

The practical advice is unglamorous: check the series' published programme rather than trusting any article, including this one, on the exact medal names and thresholds. The count has moved twice in two years and the naming has moved with it.

What has not changed is why anyone bothers. The star chase is close to unique in endurance sport. Almost everything else you can collect is either arbitrary or unlimited: run any hundred marathons, run one on every continent, run a race in every county. The Majors set is small, fixed, expensive, and genuinely difficult to complete because the entry systems are designed to say no. Scarcity is the product, and the series knows it.

Getting in is eight different problems

Every Major uses a different mixture of routes, and the mixture is the single most useful thing for anyone planning a chase.

Route	How it works
Ballot	A random draw among applicants. Used as the main public route by most of the Majors, with odds that get worse every year.
Qualifying time	An age and sex graded standard achieved at a certified race inside a set window. Boston is built on this; several others use it as one route among many.
Charity place	A guaranteed entry in exchange for a fundraising commitment, usually a substantial one. The most reliable route into the hardest races, and the most expensive.
Good for age or championship entry	A middle tier for runners who are quick without being elite, sitting between the ballot and the professional field.
Local qualification	Route reserved for members of the host city's running community, typically requiring a set number of qualifying races plus volunteering.
Tour operator	Guaranteed entries sold as part of a travel package by operators the race has authorised. Expensive, and for some races the only realistic option from abroad.

Boston is the outlier and deserves its own note. Its main route is a qualifying time, graded by age and sex, and achieving that time does not guarantee entry. When more qualifiers apply than there are places, the race admits the fastest applicants relative to their standard and turns the rest away. Running the qualifying time is the beginning of the process rather than the end of it.

The newer Majors are, for now, the easiest to enter. That is a temporary condition and a predictable one. Demand for a race rises sharply the moment it joins the series, and entry routes tighten in response. Anybody chasing stars should do the newest races first, which is the opposite of what most people's instincts suggest.

The eight races, and what actually separates them

The set is often described as though the races were interchangeable trophies. They are not remotely alike, and the differences are worth knowing before you commit a year of training to one.

Tokyo opens the year, the first Major on the calendar and the one that made the series something other than a North Atlantic arrangement. Its public entry is dominated by a lottery, and the ratio of applicants to places has been brutal for a long time.

Boston is the oldest annually contested marathon in the world, and it is structurally unlike everything else in the series. It runs point to point, from a town outside the city into it, which is what puts it outside the record rules. It is also the only Major built around a qualifying time as the principal route in, which means it is the one race in the set you cannot solve with money or luck.

London is a spring race in a city that closes for it, with a ballot that receives an extraordinary number of applications and the largest charity fundraising operation in the series attached to the entries that do not come from it. For a great many runners the charity route is not a fallback; it is the plan.

Cape Town is the newest and the first Major on the African continent, confirmed after its 2026 edition and joining formally in 2027. It also staged the series' Age Group World Championships in the year that confirmed it, which is a reasonable indication of what the series thinks the race is capable of.

Sydney is the first Major in the Southern Hemisphere, and its course crosses the Harbour Bridge, which tells you most of what you need to know about whether it is flat. It joined in 2025, so it is currently the easiest of the eight to get into, and that will not last.

Berlin is the autumn race with a reputation built almost entirely on its surface and its profile. It is the course that record attempts gravitate to, and the reason is geometry rather than mystique: a flat loop through a city with long straight sections is close to the ideal shape for running fast.

Chicago runs a loop through the city, starting and finishing in the same park, which keeps it comfortably inside the separation rule and makes it one of the fastest courses in the set.

New York closes the year and is the hardest of the flat-sounding Majors, because it is not flat. Five boroughs means five bridges, and a bridge is a hill with better views. The race also runs one of the more interesting entry systems in the series, including a local route that rewards runners who race and volunteer within the host city's running community through the year.

The label system underneath the Majors decides more than the Majors do

Sitting beneath the Marathon Majors is a separate structure that most readers have never heard of and that has more direct effect on elite athletes' careers.

World Athletics operates a labelling scheme for road races. Platinum Label is the top tier, with Gold below it and further tiers under that. Labels are awarded against criteria covering the depth of the elite field, the presence of anti-doping controls, course measurement, medical provision, timing and broadcast. All eight Majors hold the top label, which is one of the things candidacy is testing for.

The label matters because championship qualification hangs off it. In the marathon, athletes can qualify for a global championship by finishing position rather than by time: a high finish at a Platinum Label marathon, or a win at a Gold Label one, counts as having achieved the entry standard. That provision exists because a marathon time means so little in isolation. A time run on a hot day in a hilly race against nobody tells you less about an athlete than a top five finish at a Major does, and the qualification system says so explicitly.

This is why the label hierarchy, rather than the Majors branding, is the thing an elite marathon runner's calendar is actually built around. The Majors are where the money and the attention are. The labels are what turn a result into a place at a world championships, and the two systems overlap without being the same system.

The elite series is a points table hardly anyone watches

Underneath the mass event there is still the competition the series was founded to create.

Points are awarded to the leading finishers at each Major, on a scale where a win is worth 25 and the value falls away steeply through the top five. Only an athlete's best results inside the scoring period count, so a runner who races three Majors in a scoring window is not rewarded for volume. A champion is crowned at the end of the period in each of the men's, women's and wheelchair divisions, with prize money attached. The current points table and purse are published by the series.

The design has a specific purpose. Left alone, an elite marathon runner has every incentive to race twice a year on the fastest available course, with pacemakers, chasing a time. A points series gives them a reason to turn up somewhere hilly and beat people instead, because places score and times do not.

That tension between racing and time-trialling runs through the whole sport. A world record attempt wants a flat course, cool weather, a rotating group of pacemakers and no tactics at all. A championship marathon wants none of those things. The pacing decisions an athlete makes in the two situations are barely related, and the same is true for anyone running at the back: a race you are trying to win is a different event from a race you are trying to run fast.

Not every Major course can hold a world record

World Athletics attaches conditions to road records that have nothing to do with the runner, and two of the Majors sit awkwardly against them.

The course must be measured by an approved measurer holding an A or B grade certification from World Athletics or AIMS, using a documented method, with the measurement report available on request. Somebody must verify on the day that the course as laid out matches the course as measured, normally by riding in the lead vehicle. And the course has to be re-measured as late as possible before the race, on race day, or as soon as practical afterwards, by a different A grade measurer from any who did the original work.

Then come the two geometric conditions that decide whether a fast time can ever become a record.

The start and finish, measured along a straight line between them, may not be more than half the race distance apart. And the overall decrease in elevation between start and finish may not exceed one in a thousand, which is one metre per kilometre.

• 1Maximum net drop, in metres per kilometre
• 50Maximum start-to-finish gap, as a percentage of the distance
• 1Majors whose course fails both tests

Both are set by the World Athletics competition rules governing road running records. The elevation test is on the net drop from start to finish, not on how hilly the course is in between.

Both rules are about removing help the runner did not generate.

The elevation rule is about gravity. A course that descends steadily is doing part of the work, and a metre per kilometre is a slope so gentle that most runners would not notice it while allowing for the ordinary variation between a start and a finish in different parts of a city.

The separation rule is about wind, and it is the more elegant of the two. On a loop course, whatever the wind is doing, a runner faces it for part of the race and has it behind them for another part. On a course that runs consistently in one direction, a following wind can help for the entire distance, and there is no gauge and no limit on the roads. The sport cannot measure the wind over 42 kilometres of city streets, so instead of regulating the wind it regulates the geometry, and requires courses to double back enough that no single wind direction can assist throughout. That is a neat solution to a problem the track handles by pointing an anemometer at the athletes, which is an option nobody has on a road.

Boston fails both tests. The course runs point to point, so the start and finish are far more than half the race distance apart, and its net elevation change is a descent steeper than the limit allows. World Athletics has stated plainly that performances there are not eligible for world record consideration.

None of that makes a Boston time fake. It is a legitimate result, a legitimate personal best, and by common consent one of the hardest marathons in the world to race well, since the net descent is delivered through a profile that wrecks quadriceps early and then puts hills in the way at the point they hurt most. It simply cannot become a world record, and the rule that stops it is about the course rather than the runner.

The drop rule reaches further than records, too. Championship entry standards apply the same one-in-a-thousand test to road performances, and the world ranking system deducts points from results achieved on courses that exceed it, scaled to the size of the drop. A downhill course does not just fail to produce records. It produces a slower ranking score than the clock suggests, which is one of the ways the ranking system tries to make results from wildly different races comparable.

1. 1Original measurementThe course is measured by an approved A or B grade World Athletics or AIMS measurer, and the measurement report has to be available to World Athletics on request.
2. 2Geometric testsThe start and finish must be no further apart than half the race distance, and the net drop from start to finish must not exceed one metre per kilometre.
3. 3Pre-race verificationSomebody, normally the original measurer or a qualified official carrying the documentation, checks in advance that the course as laid out matches the course as measured.
4. 4Validation during the raceThat official rides in the lead vehicle, or otherwise confirms that the athletes ran the course that was measured rather than a variant of it.
5. 5Re-measurementThe course is measured again as late as possible before the race, on race day, or as soon as practical afterwards, by a different A grade measurer from any who did the original.
6. 6SubmissionOnly then does the performance go forward, and the process has to survive scrutiny of every stage. A course that fails one of the geometric tests never reaches this point at all.

Every step here is about the course rather than the athlete. A runner can do nothing to affect any of them, and a failure at any point makes the time a result rather than a record.

The age group side is the part nobody writes about

The series runs a second competition entirely, aimed at the people who make up almost all of its participants.

The Age Group World Rankings cover runners aged 40 and over, drawing results from a large network of qualifying races around the world rather than from the Majors alone. Runners are ranked within their age group, and the rankings feed an Age Group World Championships attached to one of the Majors each year. Cape Town hosted it in 2026, during the year that confirmed its own membership.

The logic is straightforward and slightly cynical in a way that does no harm. A series funded by mass participation needs mass participants to have something to compete for. Not everybody is chasing stars, and a runner who is never going to complete eight expensive marathons on five continents can still be the best 52 year old in their region, and can still have a reason to keep entering races. It is the same instinct that made age group categories standard at every level of the sport, extended to a global ranking.

What the series has actually changed about the marathon

Three things, and they are worth separating from the branding.

It gave the road a calendar. Before 2006 the marathon season was a set of unconnected events. The Majors imposed a rhythm on it: a spring block, an autumn block, and a table that connects them. Even people who never look at the elite standings navigate the year by that rhythm.

It standardised what a big city marathon is supposed to be. The candidacy assessment is, in effect, a specification. Races applying to join have to build themselves to it, and races with no intention of applying have copied it anyway, because it is a good specification. The expo, the wave starts, the pen allocation by predicted time, the results infrastructure: a great deal of that is now near universal and the series is part of the reason.

It turned marathon running into a collection. This is the biggest change and the least intentional. The Six Star medal was a loyalty scheme that became a life goal for a large number of people, and it reshaped the demand curve for six specific races so violently that their entry systems had to be rebuilt around rationing. That in turn is a substantial part of why the series expanded. The medal created the demand that created the need for more races to satisfy it.

The other force acting on the same sport in the same decade came from underfoot rather than from any organiser, and the arrival of carbon plated racing shoes reset what a given level of fitness produces on the clock. Between the two, marathon times and marathon participation both moved sharply, and disentangling one from the other is harder than most accounts admit.

How to plan a star chase without wasting years

Five things, in the order they matter.

Do the newest Majors first. Entry to a race is never easier than in its first years in the series. Demand climbs, ballots lengthen, and routes that exist now get closed.

Work out which race is your bottleneck, and start on it immediately. For most runners it is Boston, because it needs a qualifying time and the time needs training years rather than a lucky draw. For others it is whichever ballot they keep losing.

Understand that each race has several doors. Missing the ballot is not the end. Charity, good for age, championship entry and authorised tour operators all exist, and they have different costs and different lead times.

Register your finishes as you go. The series tracks completions through a runner account, and results from years ago are harder to reconcile than results from last month.

Check the current programme before you commit money. The number of races and the medal thresholds have both moved recently, and the version of this that was true two years ago is not the version that is true now. That is unusual for a set of rules and it is the single most important thing to know about the Majors, which is why almost every guide to distance running on this site that mentions them is going to need updating again.