How do I enter the Chicago Marathon 2027 drawing?

When does the Chicago Marathon 2027 application open?

Not announced. In the 2026 cycle the application opened on 21 October 2025 and closed at 14:00 US Central Time on Tuesday 18 November 2025, with drawing results emailed on Thursday 11 December 2025. If the 2027 cycle sits in the same place in the calendar, the window lands around late October 2026 and results around early to mid December 2026. Treat both as estimates until the organizer publishes them: our event page carries the estimated marker for exactly this reason, and it changes the day a real date is published.

The race itself is fixed: Sunday 10 October 2027, the 49th running, which is the second Sunday of October in the usual pattern.

What it costs

For the 2026 race the official entry fee was USD 250 for United States residents and USD 260 for everyone else. The 2027 fee has not been published. Nothing is charged at application time on the drawing route; the fee is taken only when an entry is awarded.

The routes that skip the drawing

The drawing is the route for people with no other claim. Chicago also runs a set of guaranteed entries, and every one of them is applied for inside the same application window, not separately:

• Time qualifier, if your recent marathon time meets the published standard for your age group on race day. The standards table lives on the official apply page.
• Legacy finisher, if you have finished the Chicago Marathon five or more times in the last 10 years.
• Bank of America Chicago Distance Series, if you completed all three events in the series in the qualifying year (the Shamrock Shuffle 8K, Chicago 13.1 and the marathon itself).
• A cancelled entry rolled forward under the event's standard cancellation policy, or under its pregnancy and postpartum policy.
• The High Performance Program, which is capped at 150 participants and charges a reduced fee.

One detail worth knowing before you pick a route: a guaranteed application that is reviewed and rejected does not simply fail. The event switches it to a non-guaranteed application and puts you in the drawing instead, so applying on a claim you are not sure about does not cost you the draw.

Charity and tour operator entries sit outside all of this. Charity places are guaranteed and first come, first served, with a fundraising minimum of no less than USD 2,200, and only charities inside the official programme hold guaranteed entries. Tour operator places work the same way through the official operator programme. Both stay available after the drawing has been run, which is what makes them the fallback for anyone who applies and misses.

Your real odds

Nobody outside the event can work them out. Chicago does not publish the number of drawing applications it receives, so there is no denominator to divide by, and any specific figure you see quoted is an estimate rather than an organizer number. What is public is the shape of the problem: the field is around 55,000 runners and a large part of it is taken by time qualifiers, legacy finishers, the distance series, charity teams and tour operators before the drawing selects anyone.

That is the useful way to read it. If you hold any guaranteed claim at all, use it, because the guaranteed routes are the ones with published rules and the drawing is the one with none.

What to do now

Join the official Mile by Mile e-newsletter at chicagomarathon.com so the window announcement reaches you, and put a reminder in late October 2026 to check the apply page. If you think you might qualify on time, check the standards for your age group on race day (10 October 2027) rather than your age today, because that is how the event calculates it.