London Marathon Good For Age: Times, Rules and the Cut-Off

Sub 2:52. That is the figure printed against men aged 18 to 39 in the Good For Age table for the 2027 London Marathon, and a man of 35 who runs 2:51:30 at Manchester in April has beaten it. What he has earned is the right to fill in a form. Whether a place follows depends on how many other men in the United Kingdom ran further inside their own marks than he ran inside his.

Good For Age is the qualifying-time route into the London Marathon for people who live in the UK. London Marathon Events sets a standard for each age band and each sex, fixes a pool of places, 6,000 for the 2027 edition, split evenly between men and women, and awards them fastest first relative to the standard. Run inside the time and you may apply. Apply, and you join a ranking. The standard is a floor and the real line sits somewhere beneath it.

What London Marathon Good For Age is and who it is for

The London field is assembled from several sources that have little to do with one another. Charities hold the biggest block. The public ballot hands out general places by lot. Clubs get a handful. Good For Age, usually shortened to GFA by the people chasing it, is the part of the field reserved for ordinary runners who are quick for their years: not professionals, not necessarily club champions, but people who have trained seriously enough to run a marathon at a pace most entrants never approach.

Three conditions define the scheme as published for 2027. The applicant must be resident in the UK. The applicant must have run a full marathon inside the standard for their age and sex, on a certified course, between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026. And the applicant must be fast enough, relative to that standard, to rank inside the first 3,000 of their sex.

The first two are in the runner's hands. The third is not, and that is the feature most often misunderstood. A golfer who gets a handicap down to a certain figure can enter a certain competition. A marathon runner who gets under the Good For Age mark can apply to a competition for places, and the published mark says nothing about where the competition will be settled.

It is worth being clear about what the scheme is not. It is not the championship, which asks for much faster times and registration with an athletics federation. It is not open to the rest of the world. And it carries no fundraising condition: a Good For Age runner pays the entry fee, turns up, and owes nobody a sponsorship form.

Its weight in the race is modest. The 2025 London Marathon recorded 56,640 finishers, at the time the largest total for any marathon, and a pool of 6,000 is a little over a tenth of a field that size. Among club runners the scheme looms far larger than that share suggests, because it is the only entry route into the mass start that a runner can do something about. The ballot cannot be trained for.

The Good For Age times for 2027, band by band

The table below is the one published for the 2027 edition. The organisers have tightened it more than once, so a table seen on a forum or in an old magazine should be assumed to be out of date until checked against the year it belongs to.

Age band	Women	Men
18 to 39	Sub 3:38	Sub 2:52
40 to 44	Sub 3:43	Sub 2:57
45 to 49	Sub 3:46	Sub 3:02
50 to 54	Sub 3:53	Sub 3:07
55 to 59	Sub 3:58	Sub 3:12
60 to 64	Sub 4:23	Sub 3:34
65 to 69	Sub 4:53	Sub 3:52
70 to 74	Sub 5:53	Sub 4:52
75 to 79	Sub 6:13	Sub 5:07
80 to 84	Sub 6:38	Sub 5:27
85 to 89	Sub 7:10	Sub 6:10
90 and over	Sub 7:45	Sub 7:20

"Sub" is meant literally. A man of 30 needs 2:51:59 or quicker, and 2:52:00 is a miss.

In running terms the open-age men's mark works out at a shade under 6:34 a mile for 26.2 miles, and the women's at about 8:19 a mile. Neither is a jog.

How the standard eases with age

The first band is the widest by a distance: twenty-two years, from 18 to 39, on a single mark. After that the bands run in five-year steps to 89, with one final band for everyone of 90 and above.

• Women
• Men

The published marks for the 2027 edition converted to minutes. A runner must finish under the figure shown. Bands are labelled by their lower age.

Show the numbers

Good For Age standards for 2027, in minutes, by age band

Item	Women	Men
18	218	172
40	223	177
45	226	182
50	233	187
55	238	192
60	263	214
65	293	232
70	353	292
75	373	307
80	398	327
85	430	370
90	465	440

The slope is not even. Through the forties and fifties the men's mark gives back exactly five minutes a band, a gentle allowance of a minute a year. At 60 it gives back 22 minutes in one step, and at 70 a full hour, from sub 3:52 to sub 4:52. The women's table follows the same shape with smaller early steps of five, three, seven and five minutes, then 25 at 60, 30 at 65 and the same hour at 70.

Nobody should read physiology into those cliffs. Runners do not lose an hour between the ages of 69 and 70. The marks for the oldest bands are set generously because the supply of marathon runners in their seventies and eighties is small, and the organisers plainly want them in the field. Below 60 the standard is a filter. Above 70 it is closer to an invitation.

The gap between the men's and women's marks

At open age the women's mark is 46 minutes slower than the men's, a difference of about 27 per cent. Between the fastest men and the fastest women in the world the gap at the marathon is of the order of a tenth.

That mismatch is deliberate and follows from the equal split. Fewer women than men run marathons at the sharp end of the club scene in Britain, so filling 3,000 women's places requires a mark set further from the elite than the mark that fills 3,000 men's places. One can argue about whether that is fair to a man who misses out with 2:53. The organisers chose equal numbers over equal difficulty, and the table is what that choice looks like.

Why meeting the standard is not a guaranteed place

The organisers' wording for 2027 is that places are allocated on a fastest-first basis relative to age and qualifying time. Their published answers add that meeting the time does not guarantee a place if applications exceed capacity.

1. 1Run the timeA full marathon inside the standard for your band and sex, on a certified course, within the qualifying window.
2. 2Apply before the deadlineSubmit the form with a results link, proof of age and proof of UK residence.
3. 3VerificationThe organisers check each claimed performance and may ask for more information.
4. 4Two separate poolsMen are ranked against men for 3,000 places and women against women for 3,000.
5. 5Fastest firstApplicants are ordered by how far inside their own standard they ran.
6. 6The line fallsWhere the pool runs out, the cut-off is set. Everyone beyond it is refused, standard or no standard.

The process as described by London Marathon Events for the 2027 edition. The exact formula for ranking is not published beyond the phrase fastest first relative to age and qualifying time.

Note the fourth step. A man and a woman never compete for the same place, so the cut-off in the men's pool and the cut-off in the women's pool are two different numbers that have nothing to do with each other.

A worked example in the men's pool

Take four invented men, all inside their standards, applying for the same edition.

Runner	Age when the time was run	Marathon time	Standard	Margin inside
A	34	2:48:30	Sub 2:52	3 min 30 sec
B	57	3:05:10	Sub 3:12	6 min 50 sec
C	44	2:55:45	Sub 2:57	1 min 15 sec
D	66	3:43:00	Sub 3:52	9 min 0 sec

On the clock, A is the fastest of the four by more than seven minutes and D is the slowest by nearly forty. In the ranking the order is D, B, A, C. The 66-year-old who took three and three-quarter hours stands ahead of the 34-year-old who broke 2:50, because he was nine minutes inside his mark and the younger man was three and a half inside his.

Now suppose that, once every verified application is ranked, the 3,000th man is four minutes inside his standard. D and B are in. A is out by thirty seconds, despite a time that most club runners would frame. C was never close.

Two cautions belong here. The four-minute line is invented for the illustration, and no cut-off for any real year is quoted on this page because we could not confirm one from a primary source. And the example measures the margin in minutes, which is how runners talk about it; the application page does not say whether the organisers compare margins in minutes or as a proportion of the standard, and for a 66-year-old and a 34-year-old those are not the same sum.

Why the line moves from year to year

The cut-off is a product of who applies, and it is not known until they have. A mild spring that produces fast times at the big April marathons deepens the pool. A tightening of the standard thins the number of eligible applicants and should, other things equal, bring the line closer to the published mark. That is the logic of tightening at all: a standard that sits near the real cut-off is more honest than one that tempts thousands to apply for places they were never going to get.

The sensible reading for a runner is that a narrow pass is a weak application. Thirty seconds inside is eligible. It is not safe.

What counts as a qualifying run

The 2027 criteria say that qualifying times must have been run at an in-person event on a certified marathon course, and that the certificate must come from UK Athletics, the Association of International Marathons and Distance Races, known as AIMS, or a national governing body for distance running. They add one exception, covered below.

A full marathon only. Good For Age is a marathon standard and has no half-marathon equivalent. A storming 1:17 over 13.1 miles is evidence that a runner could probably break 2:52, and the organisers are not interested in probably. Nor is a fast 20-mile race, or the first 26.2 miles of an ultra, a marathon performance in this sense.

A certified course. Certification means a qualified measurer has ridden the route with a calibrated bicycle counter and confirmed that the shortest line a runner can take is at least the full distance. Our guide to how a marathon course is measured explains the method and why a GPS watch is no substitute. Many trail, coastal and multi-lap events in England sell themselves as marathons without holding a certificate. They are perfectly good days out. They do not count.

Inside the window. For 2027 that meant a time run from 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026. A personal best from three years earlier is of no use, however far inside the mark it was.

The MyWay exception

The surprise in the criteria is that a virtual run can count, provided it is the organisers' own. TCS London Marathon MyWay is the event in which entrants cover 26.2 miles outdoors on a route of their choosing on Marathon Day, tracked through the official app. The 2027 criteria accept a MyWay time, with a condition: an applicant whose only qualifying time comes from MyWay must also submit evidence of an in-person half marathon. That half has to beat a half marathon standard the organisers publish for the runner's age band and sex, and it has to have been run on a certified course inside the same window of 1 October 2025 to 30 September 2026.

That condition is the tell. A half marathon is not accepted as a qualifier, but it is accepted as corroboration, a check that the person claiming a fast self-timed marathon can demonstrably run. No other virtual event is mentioned, and a marathon logged on a third-party app or a treadmill has no route into the scheme.

What gets an application rejected

Four things will sink an application at the verification stage: a course with no certificate, a date outside the window, a time that cannot be found on an official results page, and a result that belongs to somebody else. The last is the reason the organisers treat number-swapping so harshly across all their events. A marathon run on another person's bib produces a result in the wrong name, and a qualifying claim built on it is a false one.

The application page says nothing on whether chip time or gun time is used. The safe assumption is that the time the official results display is the time that will be read.

Which age group applies: the day you ran, not the day you race

The organisers' published answer for 2027 is a single line. Asked whether times are based on the age the runner was when the time was run or the age they will be on Marathon Day, the answer given is the age you were when you ran your time.

This catches people out, because the Boston Marathon does the opposite and because many runners assume a race would care how old they are when they actually run it.

Work it through for a runner about to move up a band. A woman was born on 10 March 1986. She runs 3:41:20.

• If she ran it at an October 2025 marathon, she was 39. Her standard is sub 3:38 and she has missed it by three minutes and twenty seconds. She cannot apply.
• If she ran the identical time in April 2026, she was 40. Her standard is sub 3:43 and she is inside by a minute and forty seconds. She can.

Same athlete, same time, same edition of the London Marathon, at which she will be 41 either way. The only thing that changed was which side of her birthday the qualifying race fell.

The practical point writes itself. A runner within a few months of 40, 45, 50 or any other boundary gains a softer standard by running the qualifier after the birthday, and loses nothing by doing so apart from time in the window. At 60 and at 70, where the marks jump by 22 minutes and an hour for men, the timing of one race around one birthday can be the whole difference between applying and not.

It cuts the other way too. A time run at 39 is judged as a 39-year-old's time even if the runner has turned 40 by the date the form is submitted. There is no mechanism for re-basing an old result onto a newer, kinder band.

Because this rule sits in the organisers' annual criteria and not in any permanent rulebook, it should be re-read each year. The age bands used here are London's own and do not match the masters categories used in club competition, which are set out in our guide to UK Athletics age groups.

The residency rule and the proof it requires

Only UK residents are eligible. The criteria say so in five words and offer no exceptions.

The test is where the applicant lives. A New Zealander renting a flat in Bristol qualifies; a runner born in Bristol who has moved to Auckland does not. Applicants are asked for three documents.

Evidence	What is accepted, as published for 2027
Proof of performance	A link to the results webpage that clearly displays the name, date and qualifying time of the event
Proof of age	A copy of a passport or a driving licence
Proof of UK residence	An official document such as a utility bill from the last three months, or a copy of a driving licence
MyWay applicants only	Evidence of an in-person half marathon time in addition

The organisers have not published a long justification for the restriction, but the reasoning is not hard to reconstruct. The pool is small. Opened to the world it would be swamped by qualified runners from countries with far larger marathon populations than Britain's, and a scheme meant to give a home runner a realistic target would become another lottery. Overseas entrants already have routes of their own, priced accordingly.

What a fast overseas runner can do instead

Championship entry is the closest equivalent. For 2027 the organisers stated that a runner who does not live in the UK may apply for a championship place provided they are a member of UK Athletics through one of the home-country bodies, which in practice suits British athletes working abroad more than it suits visitors.

Beyond that the options are the international ballot, a guaranteed entry bought through one of the organisers' appointed tour operators, or a charity place. None of them rewards a fast time. That is a real gap, and anyone comparing the world's big-city marathons will notice that London is among the hardest of them for a quick foreign club runner to enter on merit.

Applying: the window, the evidence and the fee still to pay

For the 2027 edition the qualifying window shut on 30 September 2026 and applications had to be submitted by 16:00 on Thursday 29 October 2026, a month later. Earlier editions ran to a different calendar, with applications taken in the summer not long after the spring race, so the timetable is one more thing to check annually.

The form itself is brief. It asks for personal details, the performance being claimed and the three pieces of evidence in the table above.

Verification follows. The organisers say that applications undergo a verification process before eligibility is confirmed, and that an applicant will be contacted directly if more information is needed. A claimed time is checked against the official results of the race named. A screenshot is not a results page, and a link that leads to a results service where the name, the date and the time cannot all be seen together invites a query. UK runners can see how their own performances are recorded by looking themselves up on the national rankings database, which our guide to Power of 10 describes.

Once the deadline has passed, verified applicants are ranked and the pool is filled. The 2027 criteria did not give a date for decisions. Applicants who make the cut are invited to register, and at that point the entry fee falls due: qualifying buys the right to a place, not the place. The standard UK fee stood at £79.99 for the 2027 edition.

Two further terms matter. A Good For Age place cannot be deferred, because it rests on a time achieved in one particular window; the published exception is for runners who are pregnant or postpartum, who may carry the place into one of the following three years without qualifying again. And the place is personal, as every London Marathon entry is.

The organisers' own advice is to enter the public draw as well. It costs nothing, and a runner who assumes the time is enough and skips it has thrown away a second chance. How that draw works is covered on our London Marathon ballot page.

Good For Age against championship entry

A runner quick enough for both routes is choosing between two different experiences of the same race.

	Good For Age	Championship
Who may apply	UK residents	Registered members of a UK athletics body
Open-age men's marathon mark, 2027	Sub 2:52	Sub 2:38:00
Open-age women's marathon mark, 2027	Sub 3:38	Sub 3:10:00
Age-graded	Yes, twelve bands	No, one mark for each sex
Half marathon accepted	No	Yes, with restrictions
Places for 2027	6,000	1,200
Application deadline for 2027	29 October 2026	20 October 2026

The championship marks are 14 minutes harder for men and 28 minutes harder for women at open age, and they make no allowance for years. A woman of 58 who needs sub 3:58 for Good For Age needs sub 3:10 for the championship, the same as a woman of 28.

What the championship gives in return is position. Its runners start from an enclosure of their own at the very front of the field, directly behind the elite, and compete for national medals. Good For Age runners start in the fastest part of the mass field. The arrangements are set out in our guide to championship entry.

For years there was a second difference, and it was the decisive one: the championship accepted every eligible applicant and Good For Age did not. From 2027 both are capped and both are ranked. A runner comfortably inside the championship mark is, by definition, a long way inside the Good For Age mark, so the ranked pool holds no fear for them. The choice comes down to whether they hold a federation registration and want the front of the road.

The two routes are also joined at the bottom. The 2027 championship criteria say that an applicant who misses out there, lives in the UK and applied with a marathon time, not a half, may be offered a Good For Age place instead.

For most older runners the choice never arises, because the absence of age grading on the championship side puts it out of reach. Take a man of 62 who has run 3:20. He is fourteen minutes inside his Good For Age standard of sub 3:34 and would rank high in the men's pool. He is forty-two minutes outside the championship mark. The two routes overlap only for runners young enough, or exceptional enough, to be fast in absolute terms.

Choosing a qualifying race in England

This section is about eligibility and course character only. It carries no training advice.

Two documents make a marathon usable. One is the course measurement certificate, already described. The other is the race licence issued under UK Athletics rules, which covers insurance, medical cover and conduct, and which for a road race at a standard distance goes hand in hand with certified measurement. A race that advertises both, and whose results appear in the national database afterwards, can be relied on. A race that is vague about either should be asked before the entry fee is paid.

After eligibility comes speed, and speed in a marathon course means three things: few climbs, few sharp turns, and enough runners of a similar standard to share the work. On those tests the English calendar offers a short list that Good For Age chasers return to.

• Manchester. A spring race, large and predominantly flat, with thousands of runners in the three-hour region. Its layout is described in our Manchester Marathon route guide.
• Brighton. Also in the spring, on the south coast, and now part of the London Marathon Events stable. Exposed to the wind on the seafront.
• Chester. An autumn race that starts and finishes in the city and crosses briefly into Wales.
• York. The Yorkshire Marathon, an autumn race on quiet roads east of the city.
• Abingdon. A small autumn race in Oxfordshire with a field heavy with club vests, entered almost entirely by people after a time.
• Boston, Lincolnshire. Fenland roads, close to dead flat, and at the mercy of whatever wind is crossing them.
• London itself. A certified course inside the window for the following year, and the race at which a great many Good For Age runners requalify.

The window decides more than the course

The 2027 window ran from the start of October to the end of the following September. An October marathon therefore falls at the very beginning of a window. A time run at Chester, York or Abingdon in October 2025 counted for the London Marathon of April 2027, eighteen months later, and the same races in October 2026 fell just outside the 2027 window altogether.

So an autumn marathon is always a qualifier for the London after next. A spring marathon qualifies for the following year. Runners who plan a two-year campaign around a single target time need to know which they are doing before they enter anything.

London's system beside Boston's

The Boston Marathon is the only other major race that most British club runners think of as something to be qualified for, and the two schemes look alike from a distance. Each publishes standards by age and sex. Each warns that meeting the standard only permits an application. Each ends in a cut-off.

Set the two 2027 tables side by side and the resemblance thins.

Age	London men	Boston men	London women	Boston women
18 to 34	Sub 2:52	2:55:00	Sub 3:38	3:25:00
35 to 39	Sub 2:52	3:00:00	Sub 3:38	3:30:00
40 to 44	Sub 2:57	3:05:00	Sub 3:43	3:35:00
45 to 49	Sub 3:02	3:15:00	Sub 3:46	3:45:00
50 to 54	Sub 3:07	3:20:00	Sub 3:53	3:50:00
55 to 59	Sub 3:12	3:30:00	Sub 3:58	4:00:00
60 to 64	Sub 3:34	3:50:00	Sub 4:23	4:20:00
65 to 69	Sub 3:52	4:05:00	Sub 4:53	4:35:00
70 to 74	Sub 4:52	4:20:00	Sub 5:53	4:50:00

For men, London's published mark is harder than Boston's in every band up to 69, by three minutes for a 30-year-old and by eighteen for a man of 57. For women it is softer than Boston's in every band below 70 except the late fifties, by thirteen minutes at open age. And at 70 London becomes far more generous to both sexes. Boston holds a constant half-hour between its men's and women's standards. London does not pretend to.

The published marks are only half the comparison, since both races then apply a cut-off. Boston publishes its own: for the 2025 race, qualifiers had to be 6 minutes 51 seconds inside their standard to get in, and for 2026, after the standards were tightened, 4 minutes 34 seconds.

Four structural differences matter more than any single number.

Size of pool. Boston's field is 30,000 and most of it is filled by time qualifiers. London's Good For Age pool is 6,000 in a much bigger race. Qualifying is the heart of Boston and a side door at London.

Residency. Boston's standards are open to the world. London's are open to one country.

Age. Boston uses the runner's age on the day of the Boston Marathon. London, for 2027, used the age on the day of the qualifying run.

Course rules. From its 2027 race Boston adjusts times run on steeply downhill courses and refuses the most extreme. London's criteria ask for certification and say nothing about net drop.

A runner with one fast time may be eligible for both. The marks are different, the windows are different by a few weeks, and a qualifier timed for one can fall outside the other.

How the scheme has changed since every qualifier got in

Good For Age began as a promise. There was a table of times, and a UK runner who beat the time for their age was accepted. No pool, no ranking, no cut-off. Up to the 2018 race the open-age marks stood at sub 3:05 for men and sub 3:45 for women, with broader bands in middle age than today's five-year steps.

• Men
• Women

Before the cap185225

2019 edition180225

2027 edition172218

The mark for the youngest adult band, converted to minutes. The standard was tightened on other occasions too; these are the three stages confirmed for this page.

Show the numbers

Open-age Good For Age standards in minutes, three points in time

Item	Men	Women
Before the cap	185	225
2019 edition	180	225
2027 edition	172	218

The difficulty with a promise is that nobody controls how many people take it up. As marathon running grew, the number of qualifiers grew with it, and every extra Good For Age runner was a place taken from some other part of the field. There was a second problem. Because far more men than women were meeting their marks, an uncapped scheme was delivering a heavily male intake.

The 2019 edition changed the basis of the scheme. Places were capped at 6,000 and divided equally, 3,000 for each sex. The men's open-age mark came down to sub 3:00, the women's stayed where it was, and the bands were redrawn into the five-year steps still in use. From that point the standard stopped being the answer and became the entry requirement for a ranking.

• 6000Places in total
• 3000Places for men
• 3000Places for women
• 12Age bands

Figures from the organisers' published criteria for the 2027 edition.

Further tightening has followed. By 2027 the open-age marks had reached sub 2:52 and sub 3:38: thirteen minutes off the men's standard since the uncapped days and seven off the women's.

The effect on the time really needed is easy to state and hard to quantify without the cut-offs. Before 2019 a man who ran 3:04 was in. For 2027 a man who ran 2:51 could apply and might well be refused. Somewhere near a quarter of an hour has come off the performance required of a man under 40 in less than a decade, and the certainty has gone with it.

Men on Saturday, women on Sunday: Good For Age in the 2027 Double

The 2027 race is a one-off held across two days, and the qualifying fields have been separated by sex. The organisers confirmed that the men's competitions, including the male Good For Age race, take place on Saturday 24 April, and the women's, including the female Good For Age race, on Sunday 25 April. The mass fields behind them are mixed on both days.

For the scheme itself little changes. The pool is still 6,000. The standards, the window and the residency rule are as described above. A Good For Age runner cannot ask to be moved to the other day, because the organisers have said they cannot accommodate date changes for anyone.

The two days are not the same shape. The Saturday finish line on The Mall was due to close at 17:30, which the organisers put at a maximum of seven hours and forty-five minutes on the course, so that roads could be reopened before the second race. Sunday's runners had until the end of the day. A time limit of that kind is no concern to anyone running inside a Good For Age standard below the age of 80. It matters at the top of the table, where the men's marks for the oldest two bands stand at sub 6:10 and sub 7:20, and a qualifier in his late eighties or nineties would be wise to read the Saturday arrangements closely.

Deferral is not a way round the allocation either. A Good For Age place rests on a time from one window and cannot be carried forward except in pregnancy or the postpartum period.

One consequence is worth noticing. With the men's and women's qualifying fields on different days, the fastest women in the Good For Age pool start without the male qualifiers of the same pace who have surrounded them in every single-day edition, though the mass field behind them is still mixed. How the course itself runs from Blackheath to The Mall is covered in our mile-by-mile guide to the route, with the rest of our road running coverage on the athletics pages and the England hub.