Feature image from Governor Healy on Flickr.
This week, the Boston Athletic Association released the entry list for the 2026 Boston Marathon. Athletes can log into Athletes’ Village to see their corral assignment, but that isn’t publicly available. The only information in the searchable entry list is a runner’s name, age, city, state, country of residence, and country of citizenship.
That’s not enough to fully analyze the field for the 2026 Boston Marathon. But it is enough to answer a few key questions.
The first simple question: how many entrants are there in this year’s Boston Marathon?
The 2025 Boston Marathon saw more finishers than any year since 2014. Last year’s entry list also had more names – ~32,000 – than any recent year. This year’s searchable entries includes 32,073 athletes, which is more or less the same as last year (32,138). So the field size is pretty much the same.
Beyond that, there are three questions worth exploring:
- Has the age distribution changed as a result of the new qualifying times?
- Has the geographical distribution changed as a result of global politics?
- How many runners are repeating from the 2025 Boston Marathon?
Let’s get to it.
Has the Age Distribution of Runners Changed?
In general, the Boston Marathon trends older than the general distribution of runners. The qualifying times are (relatively) easier for old runners, and a larger share of older runners qualify. Older runners are also more likely to have the disposable income necessary to pay for a trip to the Boston Marathon – which isn’t cheap these days.
There’s one other key difference from 2025 to 2026, though. The qualifying times changed. And with that change, the qualifying times became tougher for runners under 60 – but they remained the same for runners 60+.
As a result, I expected to see the distribution of runners shift further towards older runners. Now, we have some data to see if that’s the case.
The visual below shows the number of runners in each age group in each year. The total number of runners is pretty similar from year to year, so there’s no need to norm this graph to show the data as a percent of the total number of entrants.
Among younger runners – from 20 to 34 – the number of entrants increased slightly. The next group of age groups – from 35 to 59 – all saw a net decrease in the number of entrants from 2025 to 2026.
And when you get to the 60-64 age group, there is a huge increase. The number of runners in the 60-64 age group increased by ~24%. Among runners 65-69, the increase was ~17%. The 70-74 and 75-79 age groups saw increases of almost 30%. All of the younger age groups shifted by much smaller amounts.
On the one hand, I think this is clear evidence that the new qualifying times advantage older runners 60+. On the other hand, this is also evidence that the current running boom is concentrated among younger runners. Despite the fact that younger runners have lower qualifying rates for Boston, their numbers are growing – because there are just that many more younger runners out there.
Has the Nationality of Runners Changed?
Another question worth pursuing is whether the distribution of runners’ nationality has changed.
Last year, there was a lot of speculation that interest in the Boston Marathon would dip among international runners, particularly Canadian runners. I was always of the opinion that this sentiment was particularly strong among a smaller group of vocal runners – and that global politics would not negatively impact registration for the Boston Marathon.
When registration time rolled around, there was no evidence that the number of international registrants was meaningfully depressed. And when I wrote this retrospective on the cutoff for the 2026 Boston Marathon, Jack Fleming confirmed that the share of international applicants was the same in each of the last two years.
Now we can look at where the actual entrants come from – and whether there are any differences among individual countries.
In each year, the majority – about two thirds – of runners are from the United States. This is unchanged.
The most vocal argument about a potential decline among international runners focused on Canadian runners. But this year there was 1,767 Canadian entrants in the Boston Marathon – compared to 1,800 last year. The difference (33) is a decline of less than 2%.
Among the top ten countries, this was the smallest change other than the United States (0.4%) and France (0.0%). Of 64 countries with greater than 10 finishers in 2025, 50 of the had a change (either an increase or decrease) of greater than 5%. Canada’s change (-1.8%) was the 6th smallest change.
In other words? There was no meaningful change in the number of Canadian runners at the Boston Marathon. The number of entrants in the 2026 Boston Marathon was not meaningfully different from the number of entrants at the 2025 Boston Marathon.
This graph is the same as the previous one, but it zooms in the y-axis to max out at 5,000 finishers. This emphasizes the fact that Canadian runners saw a very small change – and most other countries saw a greater change.
Another interesting takeaway – Australia had one of the largest changes. The number of Australian entrants increased 70%. The absolute number of entrants (523) is only #8 on the list of the most frequent countries. But the increase is probably a result of the huge increase in size of the Sydney Marathon.
How Many Runners Repeat the Boston Marathon?
One final question worth exploring – do runners return to Boston year over year?
In the past, I’ve seen some people argue that runners at the Boston Marathon are just there to check a box – and they are unlikely to repeat the race year after year. If this were the case, the number of qualifiers at the Boston Marathon would not be relevant for the cutoff in the next year.
But when I’ve looked at this in the past, I found that the conversion rate of qualifiers from Boston to applicants was close to 30% – similar to other American races. Many people run Boston year after year.
With this most recent data set, I thought it would be interesting to look at how many repeats there are – and whether there’s a pattern in who repeats.
When I matched the 2025 entrants to the 2026 entrants on a) name and b) country of citizenship, I found 7,961 repeat runners. That’s about 25% of entrants.
When you break those entrants out by country of citizenship, though, they are overwhelmingly American. Close to 80% of repeat runners are American, compared to only 67% of all entrants. Canadian runners are also slightly overrepresented (6.2% of repeats vs 5.5% of all entrants).
Among the other top countries, the share of repeat runners was similar or lower than the share of all runners.
This finding makes sense. It’s pretty logical that local runners are more likely to run Boston year over year than foreign runners. For American and Canadian runners, a trip to Boston is less of an undertaking. But European, Asian, and other international runners may find it to be more expensive, time consuming, and generally stressful. For them, Boston is probably more likely to be a bucket list item – and there may be another major (i.e. London, Berlin, Tokyo, Sydney) that’s worth repeating.
What’s the Bottom Line on the Entry List for the 2026 Boston Marathon?
With the release of the entry list for this year’s race, we have the first concrete data points that we can analyze. This data offers insights into the age distribution of runners, the nationality of runners, and who repeats the race year after year.
Although the Boston Marathon typically trends towards older runners, that trend has deepened this year. The new qualifying times almost certainly gave an advantage to runners in their 60’s and 70’s, and they represent a much larger share of the field.
There is no evidence that international political drama has influenced the distribution of international runners at the Boston Marathon. Among Canadian runners in particular, there’s been no change year over year.
Finally, a significant number of runners do repeat the Boston Marathon. But American and Canadian runners are more likely to repeat the race. Other international runners are less likely to repeat – and supporting the notion that it’s a bucket list race for them.