Boston 2027 Entry Fee: What You Pay and When

Published September 10, 2026 · Estimates, updated each registration cycle

Short answer: applying costs you nothing. During registration week for the 2027 Boston Marathon, September 14 through 5:00 p.m. ET on September 18, 2026, you submit an application and a qualifying time, and no entry fee is taken. The Boston Athletic Association processes the fee only for athletes it accepts, and acceptance letters go out by early October. For the 2026 race that fee was $260 for accepted qualifiers. The BAA has not published the 2027 figure yet, so plan for something at or a little above that number.

What your card does during registration week

You will be asked for card details when you apply, which surprises runners who expect to pay only later. What usually follows is a temporary preauthorization, a hold placed to check the card is valid. It can appear in your banking app as a pending line and then vanish a few days later. That hold is not a charge and it is not a signal about your application. Runners read it both ways every year, deciding they have been accepted because they saw a pending amount, or rejected because it disappeared. Neither reading is right. The only thing that tells you your status is the notification from the BAA in early October, which is laid out in the registration timeline.

The fee buys nothing until you are in

Paying early does not help, because there is nothing to pay early. Registration is not first come, first served, so an application filed at one minute past nine on Monday sits in exactly the same pile as one filed on Friday afternoon. What decides your fate is your buffer under the qualifying standard for your age and gender, ranked against everyone else who applied. Our central estimate for 2027 is that you need roughly 5:15 under your standard, with real uncertainty either side of that.

What you are really risking by applying

Because the fee lands only on acceptance, the money question is not whether to apply. It is how likely you are to be asked to pay at all. The table below runs a range of buffers through our 2027 forecast and turns each one into the chance your card is charged, using the $260 figure from the 2026 race as a placeholder.

The third column is an average across many runners with that buffer, not a bill anyone receives. Read it as a reminder that a thin buffer is a cheap lottery ticket rather than a financial commitment, which is the argument set out in full in applying with a small buffer.

Once it is charged, it stays charged

The entry fee is non-refundable, non-transferable and non-deferrable. Get injured in February, change jobs, have a baby, and the money is gone unless you bought the optional registration insurance offered at the point of entry. That insurance is a third party product with its own conditions, so read what counts as a covered reason before you rely on it. The BAA itself does not roll your place forward to another year, a point covered in whether you can defer Boston.

The costs after the entry fee

The entry fee is the smallest line in most Boston budgets. Flights and three or four nights in Boston in April, at Marathon Weekend prices, will usually run several times the fee. Add the expo, transport out to Hopkinton, and for many runners a qualifying race earlier in the window that had its own entry fee and travel attached. None of that is refundable either, which is an argument for booking flexible rates until your acceptance email lands in early October rather than the moment you hit submit.

Before you apply

Have the card ready, have your qualifying race and finish time to hand, and work through the registration week checklist so nothing is missing at 4:55 p.m. on the Friday. Then put your age, gender and finish time into the cutoff predictor. It gives you your buffer, your estimated odds against the 2027 forecast, and whether that buffer would have been accepted in each Boston field since 2014, which is a better guide to whether you will ever see that charge than any single prediction.