London Marathon Ballot: How the Random Draw Really Works
How the London Marathon ballot works for runners in the UK and overseas: a free random draw with no qualifying time, one entry each and lengthening odds.
By CricketTaken EditorialPublished London Marathon25 min read
- First race
- 29 March 1981
- Minimum age
- 18 on race day
- Applications for the 2027 edition
- 1,338,544
- UK entry fee for 2027
- £79.99
At 09:00 on Friday 24 April 2026, two days before that spring's race, London Marathon Events opened the ballot for the 2027 edition. It shut at 16:00 the following Friday. In those seven days 1,338,544 people asked for a place, and every one of them had the same chance whether the form went in during the first minute or the final hour.
That is the London Marathon ballot in outline: a random draw, free to enter, run by the organisers for general places in the following year's race from Greenwich to The Mall. There is no qualifying time. One entry per person, a minimum age of 18 on race day, and nothing to pay unless a place is offered or the entrant chooses to donate the fee in advance. Results arrive by email in early summer. Most of them say no.
A random draw with one entry each and no clock on it
The ballot belongs to London Marathon Events, the company that stages the race and passes its surplus to the London Marathon Foundation. It is the organisers' own draw, held under their own conditions of entry, and nobody else has a hand in it: UK Athletics licenses the race and its rules govern the competition on the road, but the federation plays no part in deciding which members of the public get a number.
What is being drawn for is the general place, the entry that carries no fundraising pledge and needs no time. Every other way into the field asks for something first. A charity place asks for a sum raised. Good For Age and championship entry ask for a marathon already run at a certain speed. A club place asks for membership and a committee's goodwill. The ballot asks for a name, a date of birth and an email address.
The timing has settled into a pattern. The window opens on the Friday of race weekend, when interest in the event is at its yearly peak and tens of thousands of spectators are about to watch a friend finish, and it stays open for about a week. For the 2027 race that meant 24 April to 1 May 2026. There is no sense in which the window "sells out". Entries are collected for the whole period and the draw is made afterwards, which is the entire reason an early entry is worth no more than a late one.
One entry per person is enforced by the conditions of entry, and bluntly. Multiple entries using the same registration details or the same email address lead to all of that person's entries being disqualified, not merely the duplicates. A household can put in as many entries as it has adults, each in their own name, and each is drawn independently. There is no couples' ticket, no group application and no way of linking two entries so that both succeed or both fail. Friends who plan to run together through the ballot are planning around an event that will almost certainly not happen.
The draw is also blind to form. It does not know who has run a marathon before and it does not reward the runner who has trained for years over the one who entered on a whim after watching the television coverage. Some club runners resent that. It is the design working as intended, because the general place exists precisely for the person who has no other claim on one.
Entering the London Marathon ballot step by step
Entry is online only, through the organisers' own website and the registration platform they use to hold accounts. Nothing is posted, nothing is sold in running shops, and no third party can submit an application on a runner's behalf.
- Ballot week opensThe form goes live on the Friday of race weekend and stays open for about seven days.
- One form eachPersonal details, a predicted finish time and the choice of whether to donate the entry fee.
- Confirmation emailSent on applying. Donors also receive a payment receipt.
- The drawA computerised random selection made after the window closes, with separate UK and international ballots.
- Results by early JulyAn email either offers a place or says the entry was not drawn.
- Confirm before the deadlineAn offered place must be confirmed, and paid for if not prepaid, by the stated date or it is lost.
The sequence as published for the 2027 edition. Dates move each year but the order has been stable since results switched from post to email.
What the form asks for
The form wants the details the organisers will later print on a number and check at registration: the name as it appears on photographic identification, a date of birth, a home address and a contact email. It asks which category the runner wishes to be entered and listed under. Since the ballot for the 2023 race that has included a non-binary option alongside male and female.
It then asks about the fee. A UK entrant chooses between paying only if drawn and donating the fee at the point of entry, a choice with consequences set out further down this page.
The age limit
The conditions of entry require a participant to be 18 years of age or over, and the test is applied to the day of the race. A runner who is 17 during ballot week is eligible so long as the birthday falls on or before race day the following April. There is no maximum. The organisers' own figures for 2026 listed three registered runners aged 18 and an oldest participant of 88.
What the predicted finish time is and is not used for
Every entrant is asked to estimate a finishing time. It has nothing to do with the draw. A predicted 2:59 is no more likely to be selected than a predicted 6:30, and the organisers could hardly run a fair random ballot otherwise.
The estimate matters months later, when successful runners are sorted into start areas and waves so that people of similar pace cross the line together and the road is not blocked by walkers in front of club athletes. Our page on the start zones, colours and wave timings explains that process. The practical consequence is that an honest figure serves the entrant better than a flattering one: a runner who claims 3:30 and is capable of 5:00 spends the opening miles being overtaken on both sides, and a runner who claims 5:00 and is capable of 3:30 spends them weaving.
The confirmation that proves an entry went in
An email arrives when the form is submitted. Entrants who donated the fee receive a payment receipt as well. Those two messages are the only evidence that an entry exists, and every year some people discover in July that the form they remember filling in was never completed. Keep the email. If it cannot be found, the status of the application is visible by logging in to the registration account.
Two draws, not one: the UK ballot and the international ballot
The headline figure of applications hides a division. Entrants living in the United Kingdom go into one ballot and entrants living anywhere else go into another, each with its own allocation of places and, as a result, its own odds.
Residence is the test, not passport. A British citizen who lives in Spain enters the international ballot; a French national with an address in Leeds enters the UK one. The form takes the country from the home address, and an entrant offered a place is expected to be able to stand behind the address they gave.
For the 2026 race the organisers published the split. Of 1,133,813 applications, 869,803 came from the UK and 264,011 from the rest of the world. Among the UK applicants, 433,775 were men, 430,983 were women and 5,044 entered as non-binary, a near-even division between the sexes that would have been unthinkable in the race's first decade.
Put as a share, a little under one application in four came from outside the UK. The field that actually assembled the following April was more British than that. The organisers' breakdown of the 66,393 registered participants in 2026 listed 46,048 as representing Great Britain and Northern Ireland, with the United States next on 4,861 and Ireland on 1,457. Those figures count nationality across every entry route and not residence in the ballot, so they cannot be laid directly over the application numbers, but they show plainly enough that the race remains a domestic event with a large foreign contingent and not the other way round.
- United Kingdom869803
- Rest of the world264011
Applications to the ballot for the 2026 edition as published by London Marathon Events. These are applicants, not places awarded.
Show the numbers
| Item | Value |
|---|---|
| United Kingdom | 869803 |
| Rest of the world | 264011 |
The fee is different too. For the 2027 edition a successful UK runner paid £79.99 and a successful international runner paid £275. The organisers describe the larger sum as including a carbon offset fee for international travel, so part of the gap is a levy attached to the flight and not a higher price for the same race number. Part of it is simply a higher price.
Nothing obliges the two ballots to have the same success rate, and the organisers do not publish either allocation. An overseas runner should not assume that the UK arithmetic applies to them, in either direction.
Paying only if you win, or pledging the fee up front
Entering is free. What a UK entrant decides on the form is when, and whether, money changes hands.
The scheme described here is the one published for the ballot drawn in 2026 for the 2027 edition. It has been reshaped several times and should be read as one year's terms.
| Entrant | Paid when applying | Paid if a place is offered | If no place is offered |
|---|---|---|---|
| UK entrant, standard option | Nothing | £79.99 | Nothing owed, nothing received |
| UK entrant who donated the fee | £49.99 to the London Marathon Foundation | Nothing more; the entry is prepaid | A second ballot, then a hydration vest if that also fails |
| International entrant | Nothing | £275, including a carbon offset fee | Nothing owed |
| Holder of a deferred ballot place | Nothing | The entry fee again for the new year | Not applicable |
| Affiliated club place (2026 criteria) | Nothing | £79.99, the standard UK price | Not applicable |
How the donation option works
The organisers market it as doubling your chances. A UK entrant who ticks the box pays £49.99 at once, and that payment is a donation to the London Marathon Foundation, the charity that distributes the event's surplus to sport and activity projects.
Three things follow. If the entrant is drawn in the main ballot, the place is already paid for at the lower figure, a saving of £30 on the standard fee. If the entrant is not drawn, the entry passes automatically into a second ballot confined to donors, which the organisers say gives at least double the chance of a place. If both draws fail, the donor keeps nothing of the £49.99 but is sent a hydration vest that the organisers value at more than £100.
For years this arrangement was known as bequeathing the fee, with a second draw and an item of winter training kit for those who lost twice. The kit has changed and the language has been modernised. The structure is the same.
A plain judgement is in order. The donation is a gift to a charity with a lottery ticket and a piece of kit attached, and it is best made by someone who would be content with the gift alone. Doubling a chance that sits in the low single figures per cent leaves it in the low single figures. Nobody should hand over £49.99 in the belief that a place has been bought.
How the draw is made, and the five-rejections guarantee that no longer exists
The organisers' description is short: a completely random draw, just like the National Lottery. Selection is computerised and made after the window has closed, from the full list of valid entries in each ballot.
What that excludes is worth spelling out, because folklore about the ballot is persistent.
There is no weighting for previous failures. An entrant who has applied every year since 2010 is drawn with exactly the same probability as one applying for the first time. The system holds no running tally that it consults, and a long record of rejection buys nothing.
There is no weighting by sex, age, home town or predicted time within a ballot, and no reserved share for first-time marathon runners. There is no advantage to a particular email provider, a particular browser or a particular day of the week.
There is no penalty for having run before, either. A runner who took part last spring through the ballot can be drawn again this year, and some are, to the irritation of friends on their eighth refusal. Random means that streaks happen in both directions.
The old rule, and when it went
The belief that five straight rejections earn a place on the sixth attempt is not an invention. It was once true. In the decades when entry was by paper form and results came through the letterbox, the organisers kept a record of consecutive refusals and guaranteed a start to anyone who had been turned down five years running.
The trouble was arithmetic. As applications rose and the number of places did not, the list of people owed a guaranteed start grew each year and ate further into the places available for everyone else. The organisers phased the guarantee out around the turn of the 2010s. We have not been able to pin the final qualifying year to a primary document, so no single date is given here, and anyone citing one with confidence should be asked for their source.
What can be said with certainty is that the current conditions of entry and the organisers' published questions and answers contain no such promise, and that a random draw, by the organisers' own definition, cannot contain one.
The arithmetic of your chances in the London Marathon ballot
The numerator is hard to find. London Marathon Events publishes how many people apply and does not publish how many ballot places it awards, so every success rate in circulation is an estimate built on somebody's guess at the second number.
The first number is solid, and it has moved fast.
Applications roughly doubled between the 2024 and 2026 editions. The million was passed in the ballot held in the spring of 2025.
Start with a ceiling, which needs no guesswork. The organisers recorded 66,393 registered participants for the 2026 race. If every one of those numbers had come from the ballot, which is very far from the case, the success rate against 1,133,813 applications would have been 5.9 per cent. The real figure has to be well below that, because the largest single block of the field runs for charity and further blocks go to qualifiers, clubs, sponsors and the elite.
Now the estimate. The figure most often quoted for general ballot places in recent single-day editions is about 17,000. Treat it as an outside estimate, not an official one. Set against the 578,304 applications for the 2024 race it gives a success rate a little under 3 per cent, roughly one in thirty-four. Set against the 1,133,813 for 2026 the same number of places gives about 1.5 per cent, roughly one in sixty-seven.
That is the whole explanation for the falling rate. The supply of places is tied to how many runners the roads from Blackheath to Westminster can carry, and it has crept upwards; the demand has roughly doubled in two years. The denominator ran away from the numerator.
Two consequences follow for anyone planning a spring around the result. An individual runner should expect to be refused in most years, and a run of ten refusals is statistically unremarkable at these rates. And a pair of friends who both want to run should not expect both to be drawn: at 1.5 per cent each, the chance of two independent entries both succeeding is about one in four and a half thousand.
Ballot results: the summer email, the deadline and the unclaimed places
Results are sent by email. For the 2027 edition they went out on Thursday 9 July 2026, a little over two months after the window closed, and the organisers' standing promise is that entrants will hear by early July.
| Stage for the 2027 edition | Date |
|---|---|
| Ballot opened | 09:00 on Friday 24 April 2026 |
| Ballot closed | 16:00 on Friday 1 May 2026 |
| Results emailed | Thursday 9 July 2026 |
| Deadline to confirm an offered place | 16:00 on Friday 31 July 2026 |
| Race days | Saturday 24 and Sunday 25 April 2027 |
Reading the email
The phrasing of the message changes from year to year, so it is safer to describe what each kind contains than to quote a subject line. An offer tells the runner that a place is available and gives a link to confirm personal details through the registration platform, with the fee to pay at that point unless it was donated at entry. A refusal says the entry was not drawn and points towards charity places and the organisers' other events. Donors who missed in the main draw are told the outcome of the second.
The message is easily caught by a spam filter. In 2026 the organisers asked entrants to allow time for it to arrive, since so many were being sent at once, and to check junk folders before concluding that nothing had come. Anyone still without an email could see the outcome by logging in to the registration account.
Older runners will remember a different ritual: a magazine dropping through the door in the autumn, its cover announcing the verdict before the envelope was fully open. Email is quicker and cheaper. It is also less of an occasion.
The deadline, and what happens after it
An offer is not an entry. For 2027 a drawn runner had until 16:00 on Friday 31 July to confirm, a little over three weeks. The organisers' guidance on a missed deadline was unambiguous: the place was gone, and the runner's remaining option was to apply for a charity place.
What becomes of the places nobody confirms is not set out in public. The organisers do not run a published reserve list for the general ballot, and an unsuccessful entrant is not told that they sit in a queue. The safest reading is that take-up rates are well understood from previous years and that offers are made with them in mind. A refusal in July should be treated as final.
What a ballot place allows and forbids
A ballot place is a personal licence to run one named edition. The conditions of entry say that participation is personal to the entrant, who is strictly prohibited from swapping, selling or transferring the place or offering to do so.
The sanction is specific. A runner whose number is used by someone else, or who is found selling it, has the result annulled and may be banned from the organisers' events for a period of up to five years. A second breach of any kind brings annulment and a ban of up to life.
The severity is easy to understand from the medical tent. The number on a runner's chest is linked to a name, an age, an emergency contact and whatever medical information was declared at registration. If the person on the stretcher is not the person in the database, the doctors are working from the wrong record and the wrong family gets the telephone call. There is a competitive reason too: a result recorded under a false name corrupts the age-group standings and can produce a qualifying time for somebody who never ran it.
Deferral, as published for the 2026 and 2027 editions
The legitimate alternative to passing a number on is to withdraw and carry the place forward.
| Entry type | Standard deferral | Pregnancy or postpartum |
|---|---|---|
| UK ballot place | Yes, to a later edition | Yes, to one of the following three years |
| International ballot place | Yes, to a later edition | Yes, to one of the following three years |
| Affiliated club place | Yes, to a later edition | Yes, to one of the following three years |
| Good For Age place | No | Yes, without qualifying again |
| Championship place | No | Yes, without qualifying again |
| Charity place | A matter for the charity | A matter for the charity |
Several conditions attach. The withdrawal has to be made before a deadline, which for the 2026 race was 23:59 on the Saturday night before the start. The entry fee already paid is not refunded, and the fee for the new year has to be paid again to secure the deferred place; an international runner pays the later fee less the carbon levy already charged. A place that has been deferred once cannot be deferred a second time unless the runner is pregnant or postpartum.
Injury and illness are the ordinary reasons for withdrawing. What the published terms police is the deadline and the type of entry.
The 2027 terms carry a wrinkle created by the two-day format. A runner deferring a Sunday place moves to the 2028 race. A runner deferring a Saturday place is promised a Sunday place in 2028, 2029 or 2030, with the year at the organisers' discretion.
The club ballot for affiliated running clubs
A second, far smaller draw runs alongside the public one, and many club runners rely on it more than on their own entry.
Running clubs affiliated to one of the four home-country federations, England Athletics, Scottish Athletics, Welsh Athletics or Athletics Northern Ireland, receive a small allocation of London Marathon places according to the number of first-claim members they have registered. Clubs do not apply. The organisers work from the federations' membership figures and write to each eligible club with its allocation. Our guide to England Athletics affiliation and athlete registration covers what first-claim status means and how a club's registered membership is counted.
The criteria published for the 2026 race were these.
| First-claim members registered | Places for the club |
|---|---|
| 0 to 9 | None |
| 10 to 39 | Entered in a draw for 228 places, one per successful club |
| 40 to 189 | One guaranteed place |
| 190 or more | Two guaranteed places |
The organisers said the draw among the smallest clubs meant that at least half of them would receive a place. Clubs were notified on 31 October 2025, had until 16:00 on 16 December 2025 to register their runners, and paid the standard UK entry price of £79.99 for each.
How clubs share them out
The organisers leave the choice of runner to the club, and most clubs have reached the same answer. The place goes into a draw among paid-up members who can show a rejection from that year's public ballot. Hence the autumn ritual of committee members asking for forwarded refusal emails, and hence the advice every club secretary gives in April: enter the public ballot even if you expect to lose, because the refusal is your ticket to the club draw.
Many clubs add conditions of their own. A minimum period of membership is common, so that nobody joins in September for the sake of a November draw. Some require volunteering at the club's own races. Some bar the previous year's winner.
The odds inside a club can be far better than the public ones. A club of 150 members with one place and twenty eligible applicants is offering a one-in-twenty chance, against something near one in sixty-seven in the open draw at 2026 levels. For anyone weighing up how to join an athletics club, that is a real if minor benefit of membership, though a club joined for this reason alone tends to notice.
The routes left when the ballot says no
A refusal closes one door among several.
Charity places. The largest share of the field runs for a charity that holds guaranteed entries and offers them in return for a fundraising pledge. The runner applies to the charity, not to the organisers, and the charity chooses whom to accept. The commitment is real and the minimum is set by each charity. How those entries are bought and allocated is explained in our guide to London Marathon charity places and the bond system.
Good For Age. UK residents who have run a marathon inside a standard set for their age band and sex can apply for one of a capped pool of places, which are awarded to the fastest relative to their standard. Meeting the time earns the right to apply and nothing more. The table and the cut-off are on our Good For Age page.
Championship entry. Faster still, and restricted to athletes registered with a UK athletics body, the championship puts club runners in a start of their own. From the 2027 edition it too is capped. The marks and the registration rule are set out in our guide to championship entry.
Overseas tour operators. Runners living outside the UK can buy a guaranteed entry as part of a travel package from one of the organisers' appointed operators in their own region. It is the dearest route and the most certain, and it is sold to runners abroad, not to UK residents.
Two further options sit outside the race itself. The organisers run a virtual event, TCS London Marathon MyWay, which is completed over 26.2 miles on a route of the runner's own choosing and earns a medal but not a place on The Mall. And England has other marathons. A runner whose real ambition is the distance, not the postcode, will find the Manchester Marathon and several others far easier to enter.
The calendar helps anyone weighing these up. A refusal lands in early July. For the 2027 edition the championship application deadline was 20 October 2026 and the Good For Age deadline 29 October, both for times run by the end of September, and clubs learned of their allocations for 2026 at the end of the preceding October. Charity applications run through the summer and autumn until each charity's places are gone. So a runner turned down by the draw has the best part of four months in which another door may open, and the charity route narrows first.
How the ballot has changed since 1981
The first London Marathon was run on 29 March 1981. More than 20,000 people applied, fewer than 8,000 were accepted, and 6,255 finished. Demand exceeded supply from the first morning and has done so every year since.
Entry in the early 1980s was a paper exercise. Forms were printed and returned by post, and accounts of those first races describe acceptance on a first-come basis, with applicants queuing to get an envelope into the mail at the earliest permitted moment. A system that rewarded whoever could stand outside a post office at midnight was never going to last, and as applications climbed towards and past the size of a large town the organisers moved to a draw.
For roughly a quarter of a century the ballot was a postal one. A form came with a magazine, the entry went back in an envelope, and the verdict arrived months later in another magazine. The guarantee for five-time losers belonged to this period, as did the option of bequeathing the fee.
Online entry changed the mechanics before it changed the principle. For the races of the early 2010s the organisers set a fixed cap: the ballot closed once 125,000 applications had been received. That figure was reached faster each year until the window was lasting less than a day, which reintroduced exactly the first-come unfairness the draw had been invented to remove. A shift worker or anybody without a screen in front of them on the right morning was shut out.
The cap had a second flaw. It disguised the scale of the demand, from the public and arguably from the organisers themselves. A ballot that always closes at 125,000 reports 125,000 applicants every year, however many more would have applied by teatime.
The cap was scrapped for the 2016 race. The ballot stayed open for five days regardless of numbers, and 247,069 people applied, close to double the old ceiling. The window has since lengthened to a week and moved to coincide with race weekend. Every record total in the chart above is a product of that decision: once the door stayed open, the true size of the demand became visible. The wider story of the event is told in our history of the London Marathon.
The 2027 Double and what two race days did to the draw
For 2027 the organisers announced a one-off: the race held on both days of the weekend, Saturday 24 and Sunday 25 April, over the same course.
- 100000Participants across both days
- 1338544Ballot applications
- 1008091Applications from the UK
- 330450Applications from outside the UK
Figures published by London Marathon Events for the 2027 edition only, which the organisers describe as a one-off format.
The organisers put the field at 100,000 across the two days. Of the 1,338,544 applications, 1,008,091 came from the UK and 330,450 from the rest of the world, so the overseas share was again a little under a quarter.
The effect on the ballot was mechanical. Every entrant was automatically put into the draw for both days, though nobody could run more than one, and the organisers said that entrants who had donated their fee had four chances where a standard entrant had two. Successful runners were allocated a day and could not choose or change it.
The competitive fields were divided by sex, with the elite men, the men's wheelchair race and the male championship and Good For Age runners on the Saturday and their female counterparts on the Sunday. The mass fields behind them were mixed on both days, so a ballot runner of either sex could be given either date. A household with two successful entries had no assurance of running on the same morning. Nor could a runner hedge by entering twice, once for each day: the single-entry rule applied to the weekend as a whole.
The days are not identical. The Saturday finish line was expected to close at 17:30, which the organisers put at a maximum of seven hours and forty-five minutes on the course, because the roads had to be reopened before the second race. Sunday's field was given until the end of the day.
More places against a larger pile of applications does not transform the odds. Even on the impossible assumption that all 100,000 places went to ballot entrants, the ceiling against 1,338,544 applications would be 7.5 per cent. The organisers have said the format applies to 2027 only, and a runner entering a later ballot should assume a single race day unless told otherwise. More on road running in this country sits on our athletics pages and across the England hub.