The Boston Athletic Association announced Tuesday that it had begun notifying qualified runners of their acceptance into the 2025 Boston Marathon, with 24,069 athletes making the cut.
The cutoff time for April’s race is stricter than ever, as athletes had to run 6 minutes 51 seconds faster than the qualifying standard for their age and gender group to gain acceptance. As an example, men aged 18-34, for whom the standard has been set at 3 hours for the last few years, needed to run faster than 2:53:09 to punch their ticket to Hopkinton.
The number of accepted runners is actually up significantly from 2024, when 22,019 qualifiers were accepted into the field. Still, 12,324 applicants weren’t accepted from a record pool of 36,393 time qualifiers.
“Boston Marathon qualifiers have trained thousands of miles with the hopes of lining up in Hopkinton on Patriots’ Day, ready to race towards the finish in Boston,” said Jack Fleming, president and CEO of the BAA, in a statement. “The sport of marathoning is reaching record levels from both a participation and speed standpoint. Unfortunately, we’re unable to accept all athletes into the field, though we do want to recognize, thank, and applaud all whose goal was to be part of the 2025 event.”
The accepted field for the 129th Boston Marathon includes residents of all 50 states plus Washington, D.C., and other US territories as well as citizens of 118 countries.
The five most popular qualifying races were the 2023 Chicago Marathon (2,584 entrants), the 2024 Boston Marathon (1,822 entrants), the 2024 London Marathon (1,101 entrants), the 2023 Berlin Marathon (809 entrants), and the 2023 California International Marathon (749 entrants).
The strict cutoff time, a jump from last year’s 5-minute-29-second cutoff, will likely stand as a record for some time, with the BAA set to lower its qualifying standards for the 2026 race by five minutes for each age and gender group.
Increased participation in the marathon post-COVID has seen more and more amateur runners reaching the qualifying standards, last adjusted in 2019. It meant another tightening of the standards was needed.
“We work with a statistical department at the University of North Carolina who helps us with some modeling, because we want our data to be the single best source for how we look at where we’re going,” Fleming told the Globe last week.
“We just wanted to go through this application period of time for 2025 to affirm that, all right, yes, for maybe, what, the 12th or 15th time since 1970, that an adjustment was warranted or needed.”
The field size for the 2025 Boston Marathon is again set for 30,000. The rest of the field will be filled by runners representing partner organizations of the race’s charity program. Applications for charity bibs will be accepted later this fall.
The 2025 Marathon is set for its latest possible date on the calendar, with Patriots’ Day falling on April 21.
Amin Touri can be reached at amin.touri@globe.com.