London will stage its marathon twice in 2027 after 1.34 million people asked to run it

The London Marathon will be run on two consecutive days in April 2027, with 100,000 people covering the same course from Greenwich to Westminster, after a world-record 1,338,544 people applied for a place in the public ballot.

The “Double” on Saturday 24 and Sunday 25 April 2027 is, in the organisers’ words, “a one-off unique event for 2027 only”. London Marathon Events says 45,000 people will run on the Saturday and 55,000 on the Sunday. Nobody can run on both days. The elite men, with the men’s Championship and Good for Age runners, will race on the Saturday and the elite women on the Sunday, an order announced on 30 September after a game of rock, paper, scissors between Sabastian Sawe and the wheelchair racer Catherine Debrunner. The weekend will also host the UK Athletics marathon championships.

The decision reflects a wider shift in mass-participation running: demand for the biggest city marathons is growing faster than their courses can carry.

The numbers behind the decision

London’s 2027 ballot total was 18% higher than the previous record of 1,133,813, set a year earlier, and more than double the 578,304 applications for the 2024 race. UK applications passed one million for the first time, at 1,008,091, which the organisers say is 1.8% of the UK population. A further 330,450 came from more than 200 other countries, including more than 92,000 from the United States.

The applicant pool is also young and evenly split. Women aged 20 to 29 were the largest group of UK applicants, at more than 179,000, and 18- to 29-year-olds made up 35% of UK applicants. Men accounted for 49.92% of all applications and women for 49.50%.

The race itself is already the biggest marathon there has been. Guinness World Records confirmed that 59,830 people finished the London Marathon on 26 April 2026, beating the 59,226 finishers at the New York City Marathon in November 2025.

Not just London

New York Road Runners received more than 240,000 applications from over 160 countries for its 2026 lottery, a record, and accepted about 1% of them, according to Canadian Running Magazine and PIX11. More than 40,000 other places go through routes such as charity entries and time qualification. Even the qualifying route tightened: only about the fastest 10% of time qualifiers were accepted, meaning runners had to beat their qualifying standard by at least 22 minutes 52 seconds. The 2026 race on 1 November marks 50 years of the five-borough course.

In Sydney, the newest of the World Marathon Majors, the ballot for 2026 drew more than 123,000 entries, a 56% increase, according to Destination NSW, which linked the rise to international demand after the race joined the series. Organisers raised capacity to target 40,000 finishers. The 2025 race had a record 32,963 finishers, and more than 36,000 finished in August 2026.

Who is driving it

The organisers’ figures point to young adults, and Strava’s data points the same way. In its Year in Sport report published in December 2025, based on activity data and a survey of more than 30,000 people, Strava said Generation Z athletes were 75% more likely than Generation X to name a race or event as their main motivation to exercise. New clubs on the platform nearly quadrupled in 2025 to one million in total, with running clubs growing 3.5-fold. These are self-reported and platform-specific figures, not a census of runners.

What it means for runners

More supply is coming, slowly. Cape Town becomes the eighth World Marathon Major on 23 May 2027, the first on the African continent, and Abbott says Shanghai could follow if it passes its 2026 evaluation.

But London’s double is a one-year exception, and the ballots remain lotteries. For most applicants to the biggest races, the realistic routes in are charity places, qualifying times or patience.