There are not many occasions when an email offering you the chance to spend €130 and give up your Sunday mornings counts as good news. The 2027 Dublin Marathon ballot is one of them.
The ballot for the 2027 Irish Life Dublin Marathon opens tomorrow, Thursday, November 12th, at 9am. For thousands of runners, that means putting their name forward and hoping the next important email contains congratulations rather than condolences.
But how realistic is that hope? Are you in with a decent chance, or is this another annual exercise in practising your gracious response to disappointment?
One In Three, Give Or Take A Few Nervous Runners
The most useful guide comes from the ballot for the 2026 race. Organisers reported just over 47,000 applications, with 17,200 runners securing places. That gives an overall success rate of approximately 36.6%, a little better than one in three.
Put another way, roughly 37 out of every 100 applicants were successful. The other 63 had to consider another route into the race, another marathon, or the brief and entirely unconvincing claim that they had not really wanted to run it anyway.
That figure needs a little care. It describes the overall outcome for the 2026 race, not your personal odds for 2027. The organisers aim to balance runners taking part in Dublin for the first time with previous participants, and we do not yet know how many people will apply this time.
There will again be 17,200 general ballot places. More applications would mean a lower overall success rate; fewer would mean a higher one.
For now, last year offers a useful benchmark. It does not offer a promise.
New York Makes Dublin Look Generous
Against some of the major international marathons, however, Dublin begins to look rather encouraging.
For the 2026 New York City Marathon drawing, organisers received more than 240,000 applications and said only about 1% would be accepted. That is roughly one in 100.
These are overall figures from different entry systems, so they cannot tell every individual runner the same story. Even with that qualification, the contrast is substantial. Dublin's recent ballot offered a much more realistic prospect of a place.
London operates on another scale again. Its 2027 ballot attracted 1,338,544 applications. We cannot turn that into a reliable ballot success rate simply by dividing the total race capacity by the number of applicants, because runners also enter through charity places and other routes.
Still, that is an extraordinary number of people volunteering for sore legs.
Better Than Rolling A Six
For a more familiar comparison, Dublin's 2026 success rate was below the 50% chance of calling a fair coin toss correctly, but comfortably above the one in six chance of rolling a particular number on a fair die.
You could also compare it with picking a heart from a shuffled deck of cards, which gives you a 25% chance. Last year's Dublin ballot was more favourable than that.
None of this will stop someone in your running group announcing that they never win anything, shortly before receiving their acceptance email.
Congratulations, There Go Your Sunday Mornings
And that is part of the peculiar appeal of a marathon ballot. Success brings the opportunity to pay for months of early alarms, wet socks and conversations about carbohydrate intake. Rejection allows you to keep your money and lie in on Sundays, yet somehow feels like the worse outcome.
The Small Matter Of Actually Entering
If you want to take your chance, the ballot closes at 11.59pm on Tuesday, November 17th, with results due on Wednesday, November 25th.
The entry fee is €130 plus platform and payment processing fees. Applying costs €4 plus a €1 platform and payment processing fee. The €4 will be refunded to unsuccessful applicants or deducted from the entry price for successful runners. The separate fees are not refundable or offset.
Successful applicants will have the remaining entry payment taken between December 1st and 3rd.
Enter here after 9am tomorrow.
