Will Boston Qualifying Times Change for 2028?

Published September 15, 2026 · Estimates, updated each registration cycle

Short answer: probably not. Nothing has been announced, and the pattern of past changes argues against another one this soon. The Boston Athletic Association tightened its qualifying standards for the 2026 race, kept them unchanged for 2027, and has historically left a tightening in place for at least five or six years before touching it again. Plan for 2028 on today's numbers, and treat any change as a bonus rather than a bet.

What the standards are right now

The open standards are 0:00:00 for men aged 18 to 34 and 0:00:00 for women in the same band, with the women's table also applying to non-binary athletes. Those are the figures in force for both the 2026 and the 2027 race. They came from the tightening the BAA announced in 2024, which cut five minutes from every band for athletes under 60 and left the 60-plus standards where they were. The full current table is in the 2027 qualifying times guide.

The pattern of past tightenings

There have been three modern tightenings, and they arrive slowly. Standards dropped five minutes for the 2013 race, five minutes again for 2020, and five minutes for the under-60 bands for 2026. That is roughly a seven year gap, then a six year gap. Each change was also announced a long way out, one to two years before the race it affected, never during a registration week. For a 2028 change to happen, the BAA would have had to signal it by now, and it has not.

There is a second reason to expect a pause. A tightening is a blunt instrument: it shrinks the qualified pool for one cycle, then the pool grows back. The 2026 race proved the point. Even with five minutes cut from the standards, the field was still oversubscribed and the cutoff landed at 4:34 under the new standard, down from 6:51 the year before but nowhere near zero. The BAA learned that a single tightening buys relief, not a solution. See the cutoff trend for the full picture.

The lever the BAA is pulling instead

For 2027 the BAA did not touch the standards at all. It changed how certain times are counted, adjusting qualifying times run on courses with a net elevation drop over 1,500 feet. That is a targeted fix aimed at the fast end of the applicant pool rather than a blanket five minutes for everyone. Whether it actually thins the field is untested, and the BAA will want a cycle of real data before deciding what to do next. That alone makes a 2028 standards change unlikely, because the results of the downhill adjustment will not be visible until after the 2027 race is run.

What this means for your planning

If you are picking a qualifying race for the 2028 Boston Marathon, use the current standards and aim for a buffer, not the standard itself. The qualifying window for 2028 is already open, so a fall marathon this season counts (see the 2028 window). Our central estimate for the 2027 cutoff is about 5:15 under the standard, and it is an estimate, not a BAA figure. A sensible 2028 target is at least that much again, because field size and the number of qualifiers keep pushing in the same direction regardless of what the standards say. You can test any goal time against thirteen years of real cutoffs with the cutoff predictor, which is the honest way to see how much buffer has actually been needed rather than how much you hope will be.

If the BAA does announce a change, it will come from the BAA directly and will be widely reported. Until then, the numbers above are the ones to train against.