State of US Marathons 2027: The Data Behind 114 Races

The typical US marathon is small — much smaller than you think

Media coverage is dominated by the giants, so most runners picture a marathon as 50,000 people crossing a bridge. The data says otherwise: across the 92 races in our database with verified field sizes, the median field is 1,646 runners. Six in ten US marathons (60.9%) field under 2,000 people. Only two races top 50,000 — New York (59,000) and Chicago (54,000) — and just 7 of 92 reach 20,000 or more.

Practical consequence: if you want a marathon where you park 200 meters from the start line and never weave through a crowd, you have 56 races to choose from — they just don't advertise on your feed.

What a US marathon actually costs in 2026-2027

Across 100 races with verified USD entry fees, the median is $149, with the middle half falling between $120 and $175. The tails are wide: San Francisco tops the set at $458.84 (all-in, processing fees included), while Pocatello costs $70 — a 6.5× spread for the same 26.2 miles. Fifteen percent of races now charge $200 or more; only 9% stay under $100.

For context, RunDida's global fee-inflation index — built from 31 races with multi-year official price points — puts marathon entry inflation at +4.9% per year (median +4.0%, as of August 2026), well above general consumer inflation. A US-only sub-index needs at least 8 races with three or more verified annual price points; we have 7, so we report the global figure rather than fake a national one.

The calendar: October owns the sport, August is empty

October hosts 23 of 114 races — one in five. Fall (September through November) carries 41.2% of the US calendar. But the spring block (March–May) is closer than the stereotype suggests at 35.1%, led by May (16) and April (15). The true dead zone is high summer: August has one race in the entire set, and June–July together have seven — almost all of them in Alaska, the Pacific Northwest, or at altitude, where summer heat doesn't kill a marathon.

The 2027 BQ downhill rule barely touches the mainstream calendar

From the 2027 qualifying cycle, the B.A.A. docks verified times from steep net-downhill courses: +5:00 for 1,500–2,999 ft of net drop, +10:00 for 3,000–5,999 ft, and no acceptance at 6,000 ft or more. The headlines made it sound like the end of fast marathons. The data disagrees: of 68 US courses with verified net-drop figures, exactly 3 take a penalty — St. George (2,559 ft, +5:00), Mt. Charleston (5,102 ft, +10:00) and REVEL Big Cottonwood (5,259 ft, +10:00). The next-closest course, Tucson, sits about 7 ft under the line after deliberately re-tuning its route. Zero mainstream US marathons are rejected outright.

The median US course gains just 178 m over 42.2 km, and 22% gain under 100 m — functionally flat. If you are hunting a clean BQ course, the constraint was never the rule; it's picking from the downhill races that stay under the penalty line or the dozens of genuinely flat ones in the full US ranking.

Race-day weather: most of the calendar sits in the PR window

We derived race-day climate for 56 US marathons from 20 years of NASA POWER daily data (2005–2024), using a ±7-day window (15 days) around each race's reference date. The median race-day mean is 12.4°C (54°F), and 62.5% of races land inside the 8–14°C band where most distance PRs happen. The five hottest race days in the set — Kauai (26.3°C), Kona (25.6°C), Maui (24.2°C), Honolulu (23.9°C) and Miami (21.6°C) — are all destination races where the heat is the deal you accept for the setting. The coldest — Madison (2.0°C), Seattle (4.6°C) and Philadelphia (5.4°C) — cluster in late November, when a PR-friendly start can turn into a cold finish for 5-hour runners; Equinox (5.0°C) is the outlier, a September race where interior Alaska's latitude does the work.

Methodology

Counts come from the RunDida marathon database: 114 US marathon series, using each race's latest confirmed edition as of August 2026. Field sizes n=92, entry fees n=100 (USD domestic; 89 verified against official race sources, 3 from news or archive records, 8 from listed prices pending verification; tiers vary by race and 15 of 100 include processing fees — spreads between individual races partly reflect those differences), net-drop figures n=68, elevation gain n=112, climate n=56. Race-day climate is computed from NASA POWER daily meteorology, 2005–2024, 7-day window per race. B.A.A. downhill adjustment thresholds are taken from the official 2027 qualifying announcement. Every statistic on this page is reproducible from the underlying per-race pages; sample sizes are stated per metric because coverage differs — where coverage sits below our own publication threshold (a US-only fee-inflation sub-index needs 8 qualifying races; we have 7) or where a field is held to a machine-only verification standard not yet cleared for publication (per-race finisher counts), we say so instead of estimating. Field sizes throughout this page are registration capacity, not finisher counts — the two are never interchanged.