Horse Racing Season UK: When the Flat and Jumps Run
The horse racing season in the UK explained: when the Flat turf and jumps seasons start and end in Britain, how they overlap, and what fills the gaps between.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished Racing Explained25 min read
- Flat turf season opens
- Doncaster, Lincoln meeting
- Jumps season ends
- Sandown Park, late April
- All-weather tracks
- 6
- First Good Friday racing
- 2014
On a Saturday in late April the champion jump jockey is handed a trophy in front of the stands at Sandown Park, in Surrey, and the jumps season is declared over. Within days there is a jump meeting somewhere else, the winners there count towards next year's title, and almost nobody notices. The British racing year has plenty of beginnings and endings, and most of them look like that one: a line drawn through a calendar that never actually stops.
The short answer first. There is racing in Britain on almost every day of the year. The Flat turf season runs from the Lincoln meeting at Doncaster, at the end of March or the start of April, to the November Handicap meeting on the same course in early November. The jumps season is at its height from October to April and formally closes at Sandown in late April. All-weather Flat racing carries on throughout, and a smaller programme of jumping fills the summer. The fixture list that holds it all together is published each year by the British Horseracing Authority.
The horse racing season in the UK at a glance
"The season" means four overlapping programmes, each with its own courses and its own rhythm.
| Programme | When it runs | Where it starts and finishes |
|---|---|---|
| Flat on turf | End of March or early April to early November | Opens and closes at Doncaster |
| Jumps, core season | October to April | Builds from the autumn meetings, ends at Sandown Park |
| Summer jumping | May to September | Smaller courses such as Market Rasen, Newton Abbot and Perth |
| All-weather Flat | Every month, with a winter championship | Six artificial tracks |
Two of those are the seasons most people mean. The Flat on turf is the programme that contains the Classics, Royal Ascot and Goodwood. The core jumps season is the one that leads to Cheltenham in March and Aintree in April. The other two grew up in the gaps, all-weather racing from 1989 and summer jumping from 1995, and between them they turned a sport with two off-seasons into one with none.
The mix on any one day follows the month. A Saturday in July might carry six or seven meetings, nearly all Flat, with one small jumps card somewhere in the West Country. A Saturday in January reverses the proportions: three or four jump meetings and all-weather Flat racing in the afternoon and again under floodlights in the evening. Midweek in the depths of winter the whole programme can come down to two or three cards, and those are the days a frost can wipe clean.
- 6All-weather tracks racing year-round
- 5Classics in the Flat turf season
- 4Championship races at the Cheltenham Festival
Fixed features of the British programme. The five Classics are all run between early May and mid-September, and the four championship races are those at the Cheltenham Festival.
A word on what this page is not. It gives the order and the month of each major meeting, which change very little from one decade to the next. It gives no dates, because the fixture list for any particular year is a live document and this is not the place to find it. For what separates the two codes in the first place, in horses, weights and obstacles, see our comparison of Flat racing and jump racing.
The Flat turf season in order, from the Lincoln to the November Handicap
The Flat season is built like a staircase. The spring finds out which three-year-olds are good, the summer tests them against their elders, and the autumn decides the championships and introduces the two-year-olds who will repeat the process next year.
It opens on Town Moor at Doncaster with the Lincoln Handicap, a cavalry charge over the straight mile that was run at Lincoln itself until that course closed in the 1960s. The meeting carried its name north and has opened the turf season ever since. The layout of the track is covered in our Doncaster course guide.
- March into AprilDoncaster's Lincoln meeting opens the turf season. Newmarket's Craven meeting and Newbury stage the first Classic trials.
- MayThe 2,000 Guineas and 1,000 Guineas at Newmarket, then Chester's May meeting and the Dante meeting at York.
- JuneThe Oaks and the Derby at Epsom at the start of the month, and five days of Royal Ascot in the middle of it.
- JulyThe Eclipse at Sandown Park, Newmarket's July meeting, the King George at Ascot, and the start of the Goodwood festival.
- AugustGoodwood concludes, and York stages the four-day Ebor meeting.
- SeptemberThe Sprint Cup at Haydock Park, the St Leger at Doncaster, and Newmarket's Cambridgeshire meeting.
- OctoberThe Cesarewitch and the Dewhurst at Newmarket, British Champions Day at Ascot, and the last Group 1 of the year at Doncaster.
- NovemberThe November Handicap at Doncaster brings the turf season to a close.
The order of the principal turf meetings in a normal year. Months are given without dates because the precise days move from one fixture list to the next.
Spring: trials and the first two Classics
April belongs to the trials. Newmarket's Craven meeting, Newbury's Greenham meeting and Sandown's Classic Trial give trainers a sight of their three-year-olds in public before the Guineas, which arrive startlingly early: the 2,000 Guineas and 1,000 Guineas are run over the Rowley Mile at Newmarket in the first days of May, when some of the runners have had one race in six months. Our page on the two Newmarket Guineas explains why the first Classics come so soon.
Chester follows within a week, on the tight circuit beside the Dee, and York's Dante meeting a week after that. Both stage trials for Epsom. The Oaks and the Derby are run there at the start of June, and by then four of the five British Classics have been decided before the summer has properly begun.
High summer: Royal Ascot to York
Royal Ascot occupies five days in the middle of June and is the densest concentration of top-class Flat racing in the British year. The meeting's structure is set out in our guide to the Royal Ascot programme. After it the season changes character. The Classic generation starts meeting older horses, first in the Eclipse at Sandown in early July and then in the King George at Ascot at the end of the month. Newmarket moves across the heath to its July Course for the summer. Goodwood's five-day festival on the Sussex Downs straddles the end of July and the start of August, and York's Ebor meeting in the third week of August gathers the best of the north's summer into four days.
Autumn: the Leger and the championship days
The St Leger at Doncaster in September is the last and oldest Classic, a mile and three-quarters and more, and the only one run in the north. Its history is told on our St Leger page. After it the programme turns towards the end-of-season championships. Newmarket's autumn meetings carry the big two-year-old races and two famous long handicaps, the Cambridgeshire and the Cesarewitch. British Champions Day at Ascot, created in 2011 by gathering several existing races into one afternoon, serves as the finale for the best older horses. Doncaster stages the final Group 1 of the British season for two-year-olds in late October, and two weeks or so later the November Handicap, another race inherited from a vanished course, in this case Manchester, closes the turf season in what is usually mud.
The jumps season in order, from the autumn return to Sandown
Jumping has no opening day in any sense a spectator would recognise. The season technically starts in spring, the day after the last one ends. What everyone calls the start of the jumps season is the moment in October when the ground eases, the big stables begin to run their better horses and the Saturday cards start to matter.
When that moment comes is a question of rainfall, not of the calendar. In a dry autumn the ground at the main tracks stays quick well into November, trainers of big chasers keep them at home, and the early graded races are run with three or four runners. In a wet one the season is in full cry by the middle of October. No other part of the racing year is so much at the mercy of the weather in the month before.
| Month | Principal meetings |
|---|---|
| October | Chepstow's two-day autumn meeting; Cheltenham's first fixture of the season |
| Late October and November | Wetherby's Charlie Hall Chase; Cheltenham's November meeting; Haydock's Grade 1 chase; Newcastle's Fighting Fifth Hurdle; Newbury's staying handicap chase |
| December | The Tingle Creek at Sandown; Cheltenham's December meeting; the Long Walk Hurdle at Ascot; the King George VI Chase at Kempton on Boxing Day; the Welsh Grand National at Chepstow |
| January | Cheltenham on New Year's Day; the Clarence House Chase at Ascot; Cheltenham's trials day |
| February | Final trials at Newbury, Ascot and Kempton |
| March | The Cheltenham Festival, four days |
| April | The Grand National meeting at Aintree, three days; the Scottish Grand National at Ayr; the finale at Sandown Park |
The autumn is a sequence of reappearances. Chepstow and Cheltenham in October are where good novices are first seen. Cheltenham's November meeting has as its centrepiece a handicap chase over about two and a half miles first run in 1960. Newbury's staying handicap chase at the turn of November and December, known for sixty years as the Hennessy, has been won by horses on their way to Gold Cups.
Christmas is the midpoint and the busiest week. The King George VI Chase, three miles around Kempton on Boxing Day, has been a fixture of that date since 1947 and is the most important staying chase outside the Festival. The Welsh Grand National follows at Chepstow the next day, weather permitting, which it frequently does not.
January and February are for trials. Almost every Saturday carries a race described as a stepping stone to Cheltenham, and the phrase is fair: by this stage of the winter the whole programme is pointing at four days in March. What happens there is the subject of our guide to the Cheltenham Festival and its four championship races.
Aintree comes three or four weeks later, three days ending with the Grand National on the Saturday. Ayr's Scottish Grand National follows, and then Sandown, where the last big staying handicap of the winter, first run in 1957 as the Whitbread Gold Cup, shares the afternoon with the presentation of the season's championships. The course is described in our Sandown Park guide.
Where one season ends and the next begins
The two codes turn over in different ways, and the difference says something about each.
The Flat turf season has a physical start and stop. No Flat racing takes place on grass between the November Handicap and the Lincoln, a gap of around twenty weeks, and the turf tracks are left to recover. A racegoer can stand at Doncaster in November and know that the next Flat horse to gallop on that grass will do so in spring.
The jumps season has only an accounting line. Sandown's finale is the last day on which winners count towards the outgoing championships. The following fixture, usually within days, is the first of the new season. The horses running at it are summer jumpers who have nothing to do with the championship just decided, and the stars who fought it out at Sandown will not be seen for five or six months.
The overlap months
April is the most crowded month in the calendar. The Grand National meeting, the Scottish National and the Sandown finale all fall in it, and so do the Craven meeting, the Greenham and the first Classic trials. The Lincoln has usually been run before Aintree. For about five weeks the national racing pages carry both codes at full strength.
The autumn overlap is longer and gentler. Jumping's better horses begin to appear in October, when the Flat still has Champions Day and its two-year-old championship races to run. For a fortnight or so Ascot's richest Flat afternoon and Cheltenham's first jumps fixture sit within days of each other.
Mixed cards
A few afternoons stage both codes on one card. For decades Sandown's finale was the best known: the Whitbread was run alongside Flat pattern races, so that the champion jump jockey and the leading Flat riders shared a weighing room for a day. The Flat races were later moved to a separate day at the same meeting. Haydock Park has kept the idea alive with a mixed card in May built around a valuable handicap hurdle. The practical requirement is a dual-purpose course with a Flat track and a jumps track that do not get in each other's way, which is why mixed cards have always been few.
Championships that keep their own calendar
Ask when the Flat season starts and the answer depends on whether the question is about the racing or the titles. They no longer match.
| Title | Counted from | Counted to | Decided by |
|---|---|---|---|
| Flat jockeys' championship | Guineas weekend, early May | British Champions Day, October | Number of winners |
| Flat trainers' championship | 1 January | 31 December | Prize money won |
| Jump jockeys' championship | First day of the jumps season, late April or early May | Sandown finale, late April | Number of winners |
| Jump trainers' championship | First day of the jumps season | Sandown finale | Prize money won |
| All-weather championships | Autumn | Finals day on Good Friday | Winners or points across the winter |
Until 2015 the Flat jockeys' title was decided across the whole turf season, from the Lincoln to the November Handicap. It was then shortened to run from the Guineas meeting to Champions Day, about twenty-four weeks. The argument for the change was that the title should be settled at the season's two great showpieces instead of dribbling away at minor meetings in November. The argument against, which has not gone away, is that a jockey can ride a hundred winners outside the window and have none of them count. Winners on the all-weather inside the window do count, so the champion is decided partly at evening meetings on artificial surfaces.
The trainers' titles work on a different principle altogether. Jockeys are ranked by winners; trainers by prize money. A stable that wins the Derby and the King George can take the Flat title with a fraction of the winners of a yard that runs hundreds of handicappers. Under the present arrangement the Flat trainers' table is counted over the calendar year, though the window has been redrawn before and may be again.
Jumping is simpler. Both titles run from the first day of the season to the last, and the jockeys' championship in particular is a year-long grind in which the summer meetings at Newton Abbot and Worcester count exactly as much as a winner at the Festival. Champions have often built a decisive lead before the big stables have run a horse.
The junior titles follow their seniors. The champion apprentice is decided over the same Guineas-to-Champions-Day window as the Flat jockeys' title, and the champion conditional over the full jumps season. Owners have a championship in each code as well, ranked by prize money in the manner of the trainers' tables. The presentations mark the two ends of the year: the champion Flat jockey and champion apprentice are honoured at Ascot on Champions Day in October and the jumps champions at Sandown six months later.
All-weather racing: six tracks and a winter season of its own
Lingfield Park staged Britain's first all-weather meeting in the autumn of 1989, and Southwell followed within days. The purpose was narrow. A series of hard winters in the 1980s had wiped out weeks of jumping, and the sport wanted a surface that would not freeze.
It got a good deal more than that. Wolverhampton was rebuilt with an all-weather track and floodlights in 1993 and introduced regular evening racing. Kempton Park replaced its turf Flat course with an artificial one in 2006. A new course opened at Great Leighs in Essex in 2008, closed within a year and reopened in 2015 as Chelmsford City. Newcastle dug up its turf Flat track in 2016 and laid a synthetic surface with a straight mile. That makes six.
| Track | Region | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Lingfield Park | Surrey | The first all-weather course, 1989; also races on turf |
| Southwell | Nottinghamshire | Opened days after Lingfield in 1989; also stages jumping |
| Wolverhampton | West Midlands | Floodlit from 1993 |
| Kempton Park | Surrey | All-weather since 2006; jumps on turf in winter |
| Chelmsford City | Essex | Opened in 2008 as Great Leighs, reopened 2015 |
| Newcastle | Tyne and Wear | All-weather since 2016; jumps on turf in winter |
The surfaces are blends of sand, synthetic fibres and wax or a binding agent, laid over a drainage base. They ride consistently in rain and remain usable in moderate frost, which is the entire point, though heavy snow or a deep freeze can still stop them.
Through the winter the all-weather programme does three jobs. It keeps moderate Flat horses in work when there is no turf for them, which matters to the owners paying the bills. It gives apprentices and journeyman jockeys a living from November to March. And since the winter of 2013-14 it has had a structure of its own, the All-Weather Championships, with qualifying races through the winter and a finals day on Good Friday.
The all-weather does not stop when the turf returns. The six tracks race through the summer as well, often in the evenings, and what began as a standby for bad weather now accounts for a substantial share of all Flat fixtures. Good horses appear there too. Trainers use the quieter months to give a backward youngster a first run, and Enable, who went on to win the Oaks and two Arcs, made her debut on the all-weather at Newcastle.
Summer jumping from May to September
Before 1995 the jumps season had a proper break. Racing over obstacles stopped around the start of June and resumed in late July or early August, traditionally at the Devon courses, and for those weeks jumping people went on holiday.
Summer jumping filled that gap. The programme is staged at smaller courses, mostly in the West Country, the Midlands and the north: Newton Abbot, Worcester, Stratford, Uttoxeter, Market Rasen, Bangor-on-Dee, Cartmel, Hexham, Perth. Two of them barely race at any other time. Cartmel, in the southern Lake District, holds its meetings around the late spring and summer bank holidays in front of huge holiday crowds. Perth, the most northerly course in Britain, races only between April and September.
The ground is the defining feature. Summer turf is faster than winter turf, and jumping on firm ground is hard on horses' legs, so courses water heavily to keep the surface safe. Even so, the going is rarely softer than good.
That suits a particular kind of horse: lighter-framed, often an ex-Flat performer, quick over its obstacles and uncomfortable in winter mud. Such horses can run up sequences between June and September against small fields, and a few graduate to better races in the autumn while the ground is still decent. The big, heavy staying chasers who win at Cheltenham are in a field with their shoes off. Market Rasen's Summer Plate in July and Uttoxeter's Summer Cup are the season's main prizes.
There is a standing argument about whether summer jumping is good for the sport. It provides income for small courses and opportunities for small stables. It also means the championship season never gets a clean start, and in a dry summer the fields can be thin. The fixture list has in recent years left a short run of days in late summer with no jump racing at all, so that riders and stable staff get a break. Its length has been adjusted more than once.
Why the seasons fall where they do
Three things fix the shape of the year, and none of them is tradition for its own sake.
The first is the ground. A horse landing over a fence puts enormous force through its forelegs, and soft turf absorbs what firm turf sends back up the limb. Jumping therefore wants the months when British racecourses are naturally wet, roughly October to April. Flat horses are lighter and racing for speed, and they want a sound surface with some give. The descriptions used, and the way the ground is measured, are set out in our piece on the going.
The second is the age of the horses. Every thoroughbred in the northern hemisphere officially turns a year older on 1 January, whatever its real foaling date. The Flat programme is built around two-year-olds and three-year-olds, who are still growing, and the calendar tracks their development: sprints for the youngest in spring, longer races as the year goes on, the Classics spaced from May to September over rising distances. Run the Derby in March and half the field would not be physically ready.
Jumpers are the opposite case. They are mature animals whose age matters little from one month to the next, so their programme can be arranged purely around the ground, and it is.
The third runs underneath the other two. The covering season, in which mares are sent to stallions, begins in the middle of February and runs into early summer. Foals arrive from January onwards after a gestation of about eleven months. A colt who retires to stud needs to be there for February, which is one reason a Flat career ends in the autumn. The yearling sales are held in late summer and autumn, when the Flat season's results are fresh, and the horses-in-training sales follow at the end of October, at which a good many Flat horses are bought to go hurdling. The jumpers' own sales of unbroken three-year-olds come in late spring and early summer. Each market sits where the racing has just produced its evidence.
Days without racing: Christmas, Good Friday, Sundays and the weather
The fixture list has very few blank days left, and it used to have many.
Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are the fixed ones. There is no racing in Britain on either. In some years the day before Christmas Eve is blank as well and in others a full Saturday programme is run on it; it depends on the day of the week. Boxing Day then stages more meetings than almost any other date in the year.
Good Friday was blank until 2014. For as long as the sport had been organised it was one of the days on which racing did not take place, and stable staff treated it as a rare guaranteed day off. That ended when Lingfield staged the first finals day of the All-Weather Championships on Good Friday 2014, with Musselburgh racing the same afternoon. The decision was argued over at the time and the fixture has stayed.
Sundays took longer. Britain's first Sunday meeting was held at Doncaster in July 1992, as an experiment, without the on-course betting that the law then prohibited on a Sunday. The law changed, and in May 1995 the 1,000 Guineas at Newmarket became the first Classic run on a Sunday. Sunday racing is now routine, though it has never grown into the main day of the week as it is in France and Ireland.
What the weather takes
The unplanned blank days come mostly between December and February. Frost is the main cause: turf that is frozen is unsafe to gallop or land on, and courses protect vulnerable ground with covers when a cold night is forecast. Waterlogging is the second, and snow the third. The clerk of the course holds an inspection, often at first light on the morning of racing, and the meeting is on or off by breakfast.
When a freeze sets in across the country, the all-weather tracks carry the sport, and extra fixtures are sometimes added there at short notice. That is now a matter of a few days. In the winter of 1962-63 racing in Britain was almost entirely wiped out from just before Christmas until early March, with a single meeting in Scotland in January the only break in more than ten weeks.
A few stoppages have had nothing to do with weather. Foot-and-mouth disease caused the abandonment of the 2001 Cheltenham Festival. An outbreak of equine influenza closed racing for six days in February 2019. In 2020 the pandemic stopped everything from the middle of March until 1 June; the Grand National was not run, the Guineas were moved to June and the Derby and Oaks were run on the same July afternoon.
Who builds the fixture list
The British Horseracing Authority publishes the fixture list each year, some months ahead of the January in which it takes effect. It contains close to fifteen hundred meetings across roughly sixty racecourses.
The BHA does not sit down with a blank calendar. Most fixtures belong, in effect, to the racecourses that stage them: a course holds its established days from year to year and can, within limits, move or trade them. A smaller pool is held centrally and allocated by the BHA according to what the programme needs, such as more opportunities for a particular class of horse or better coverage of a thin part of the week. Two large groups, Jockey Club Racecourses and Arena Racing Company, own about half the country's courses between them, so much of the negotiation is conducted with a handful of parties.
The constraints are tighter than they look. Meetings on the same day must be spread geographically so that jockeys, horses and stalls teams can get to them. Courses need time between fixtures for the turf to recover. The horse population has to be large enough to fill the races, and in recent years it has been stretched, which is why the number of fixtures and races is debated every summer.
The premier racedays trial
The fixture list for 2024 introduced a tier called premier racedays, launched as a two-year trial. A set of the strongest fixtures was given that label, with higher minimum prize money, and on most Saturdays a protected window in the afternoon was created in which only a limited number of meetings could race, so that the best racing was not competing with a clutter of minor cards. Lesser Saturday fixtures were pushed to the morning or the evening.
Reaction was mixed. Some smaller courses lost afternoon slots they had held for generations, and the early evidence on whether the changes improved attendance or engagement was contested. Parts of the scheme were revised after the first year. It is described here as an example, because the larger point will outlast the detail: the list is redrawn every year, and what looks like an ancient calendar is a document under constant negotiation.
A horse's year inside the racing year
Few horses race in every month, and those that do are not the ones in the headlines. Each kind of horse has its own season inside the larger one.
A two-year-old's year starts with the Brocklesby Stakes, a five-furlong race on Lincoln day at Doncaster that is by tradition the first juvenile race of the turf season. Only the most forward youngsters are ready for it. The rest appear through April, May and June, and the races lengthen as the horses grow: five furlongs at first, six as spring turns to summer, seven by midsummer and a mile by the autumn. Royal Ascot's two-year-old races are the first serious sorting, and the championship events come in September and October.
A three-year-old on the Classic trail has a compressed spring. One trial in April, the Guineas in early May or a Derby trial in the middle of the month, Epsom at the start of June. A colt who goes to all the major dates can have run in three Group 1 races by the end of June and might run in three more before retiring in October.
Older Flat horses pick their targets. A sprinter has a programme from May to October. A stayer waits for the long-distance races that begin in earnest at Chester and York. The weight-for-age scale, first worked out by Admiral Rous in the nineteenth century, adjusts the weights month by month so that a maturing three-year-old receives less and less from its elders as the year goes on.
The jumper's year is the mirror image. After Cheltenham and Aintree a good chaser is "roughed off", turned out in a field from May to July and left alone. It comes back into training in high summer, spends weeks walking and trotting on the roads to harden its legs, starts cantering in September and schooling over obstacles soon after. Its first run is in late October or November, ground permitting, and a horse that needs soft going may wait until December. A top staying chaser then runs perhaps four times before the spring. The whole of that eight-month campaign can amount to less than half an hour of racing.
The calendars around Britain's: Ireland, the Arc and the winter abroad
British racing is not scheduled in isolation. Ireland shares the same horses, trainers and jockeys to a remarkable degree, and its big meetings are slotted between Britain's so that the best can run at both.
| Meeting or race | Country | Time of year |
|---|---|---|
| Dublin Racing Festival, Leopardstown | Ireland | Around the start of February |
| Irish Grand National, Fairyhouse | Ireland | Easter Monday |
| Punchestown Festival | Ireland | Late April into May |
| Irish Derby, the Curragh | Ireland | Around the end of June |
| Galway Festival | Ireland | Late July into August |
| Irish Champions Festival | Ireland | September |
| Prix de l'Arc de Triomphe, Longchamp | France | First Sunday of October |
| Breeders' Cup | United States | Around the start of November |
| Melbourne Cup, Flemington | Australia | First Tuesday of November |
| Hong Kong International Races, Sha Tin | Hong Kong | December |
Over jumps the Irish dates bracket the British ones. Leopardstown's Christmas meeting runs alongside Kempton's. The Dublin Racing Festival, created in 2018, sits five or six weeks before Cheltenham and has become the main Irish trial for it. Punchestown comes after Aintree and after Sandown, so the Irish jumps season finishes about a week later than the British one and many Festival winners have one more run.
On the Flat, the Arc in Paris on the first Sunday of October is the race the European season bends towards. British-trained horses have won it many times, and its timing, a fortnight or so before Champions Day at Ascot, forces a choice on the connections of the best middle-distance horses that the creation of Champions Day did nothing to ease.
Then the season scatters. The Breeders' Cup in North America, the Melbourne Cup, the Japan Cup at the end of November and the Hong Kong meeting in December all draw British runners. In the new year the focus moves to the Gulf, with valuable meetings in Saudi Arabia in February and the Dubai World Cup around the end of March. A leading Flat jockey based in Newmarket can ride on four continents between the November Handicap and the Lincoln, which is one more reason the idea of a closed season has quietly disappeared.
So the honest description of the British racing year is a set of overlapping seasons with no gap between them, each with a peak. May to September for the Classics. March and April for the two great jump meetings. Good Friday for the all-weather. More racing guides are on our England hub, and wider sport coverage is on the blog.