The Boston Marathon Cutoff Time Tracker tracks the net change in Boston qualifiers from year to year and that is the main variable used to determine the projected cutoff time. But not all BQ’s are necessarily equal. Only some of those runners will actually apply to run Boston – and that conversion rate of qualifier to applicant can vary along a number of different dimensions.
Last year, I did some in depth analysis of which types of runners were more or less likely to actually apply to Boston after notching a qualifying time. I’m not going to rehash that entire project, but I do want to take a second look at a specific part of it. Which of the Majors yield the most Boston applicants?
This question often comes up in regards to the Majors outside of the United States – especially Tokyo. In the past, I’ve found that London and Berlin have a lower conversion rate than the US Majors but a higher conversion rate than Tokyo. As a result, I include them in the tracker. But Tokyo is excluded. Sydney, which had an even lower conversion rate, was also excluded.
However, that data was based on the 2025 Boston Marathon. It’s possible that things have changed, especially now that Sydney is an official Major. So today, we’re going to dig back into this question using data from the 2026 Boston Marathon.
How Are BQ’s and Conversions Calculated?
First, let’s briefly discuss the methodology.
The key questions are: a) how many runners at each race qualified for the Boston Marathon and b) how many of those qualifiers actually ran the Boston Marathon?
I’m working with the dataset that I’ve uploaded to Kaggle, and I’ve narrowed it down to the results from eight races: Sydney, Berlin, Chicago, New York, CIM, Tokyo, Boston, and London. I included CIM because it’s typically one of the five largest qualifying races.
Next, I determined whether each runner met their qualifying time. Since I’m working with data for both the 2025 and 2026 Boston Marathon qualifying periods, I used the Boston qualifying times that would have been applied to those runners. Since we have no way of knowing whether someone applied but failed to make the cutoff, I also eliminated any qualifiers who did not make the cutoff for that year.
Note that I’m calculating this based on a runner’s age when they ran their race, so this doesn’t account for people who age up – and will be slightly underestimating the actual number of qualifiers.
Finally, I’m matching each of those qualifiers against the finishers from the Boston Marathon. For each runner, I narrowed the Boston finisher list down to potential matches (based on age and gender) and then I used fuzzy matching to see if a runner with the same (or similar) name finished the Boston Marathon. As long as their was a good match on name, gender, and age, that qualifier was considered to have completed the Boston Marathon.
This isn’t perfect. It could identify some false positives (due to people that coincidentally have similar names) and it could undercount some qualifiers who age up after their qualifying race. But the key question isn’t the exact conversion rate. It’s how the races compare to each other. So as long as the methodology is consistently applied across each group of runners, it’s ok to leave some room for error.
What Was the Conversion Rate to the 2025 Boston Marathon?
Let’s start with the baseline. How many people from each race qualified for the 2025 Boston Marathon – and how many of them ended up running it?
Based just on the total number of qualifiers who converted to Boston, Chicago and Boston are way out above the other races. Berlin, London, and New York all have a similar number of conversions. But note that New York has far fewer qualifiers overall, given the difficulty of the course.
Tokyo, which is in the middle of the group in terms of the total number of qualifiers, has the fewest number of conversions (outside of Sydney).
If you hover over any of the bars, you’ll see the conversion rate as a percent. For Chicago, Boston, New York, and CIM, it’s 30-40%.
London and Berlin come next with about 18%. So far lower, but not insignificant.
Tokyo comes next with 12.7%. And Sydney is even lower with 9.2%.
Note that this was the 2023 Sydney Marathon. So it was much smaller than the next two versions of the race, and this was before it became an official candidate race (2024) or an official Major (2025).
This is all very similar to the analysis that I’ve done previously. However I made sure to calculate everything again so that I could apply the same exact methodology to the new data.
What Was the Conversion Rate for the 2026 Boston Marathon?
There are three changes between the 2025 and 2026 Boston Marathon that could potentially impact this.
First, the qualifying times themselves changed. The times got knocked down five minutes for age groups under 60, which could shake up the distribution of who qualifies.
Next, the cutoff time changed. It was only 4:34 for 2026, compared to the 6:51 from 2025. Similar to the new qualifying times, this could shake up the distribution of who makes it in.
Finally, there were two editions of the Sydney Marathon in the qualifying period. The 2024 Sydney Marathon was an official candidate race and the 2025 Sydney Marathon was an official Major. Both editions were also much larger than the 2023 race. It’s possible this changed the kinds of people who ran Sydney – and how likely they were to run Boston.
The overall pattern here is similar. Boston had far more qualifiers this year, so it’s bar is much longer. But it and Chicago still stood out among the rest for the total number of conversions.
Berlin, London, and New York again had a similar number of conversions – with New York still having the fewest qualifiers.
Tokyo had a sizable number of qualifiers but a small number of conversions.
The biggest change here is Sydney. The green bar is no longer negligible. It does have the fewest conversions of all of the races, but it’s far more than it had last year.
In terms of conversion rates, the four American races again converted between 30-40% of their qualifiers. Berlin was 17.0% and London was slightly lower (15.6%). They still ranked above Tokyo, which fared slightly better (13.4%).
But again the biggest change was Sydney. Instead of a conversion rate below 10%, both editions of the Sydney Marathon had a conversion rate just over 20% – ranking it above all three of the other non-American Majors.
What Does This Mean for the 2027 Boston Marathon Cutoff?
One of the biggest questions all year has been – how much does the drop in BQ’s at the Berlin Marathon matter?
The weather at Berlin was warm, and the number of BQ’s dropped from ~9,000 in 2024 to ~5,000 in 2025. That’s a big decline. But as this data shows, Berlin has a relatively low conversion rate.
When you look just at the four American races, all four of them have a conversion rate above 30%. And all four of them saw an increase in BQ’s. Boston increased an insane amount (+3,000), and Chicago and New York each added 1,000+ BQ’s.
On the other side of the ledger, Berlin shed 4,000 BQ’s while London and Tokyo each added about 500. That’s a net drop of ~3,000 BQ’s from the lower converting international races. That big drop at Berlin likely prevented a worst case scenario, but it won’t offset the increases at the American races. The fact that such a large decrease in BQ’s is attributed to a lower converting race (Berlin) also suggests that the actual cutoff will be at least slightly higher than the final projection.
The one thing I didn’t expect from all this is that the conversion rate at Sydney is apparently much higher now that it is a Major. It’s still lower than the American races, and it’s a hilly course that doesn’t produce a lot of BQ’s. So it’s not a huge factor in the overall equation.
But the fact that there were two editions of Sydney in last year’s qualifying period and only one edition of Sydney in the 2027 qualifying period means that there will be fewer applicants coming from there. We’ll have to wait and see how the numbers from this year’s Sydney Marathon turn out, but this could be another x-factor that pulls things back down slightly.