A 45-year-old man wants to qualify for Chicago. His bracket needs 3:10:00.
A 45-year-old man wants to qualify for NYC instead. His bracket needs 3:05:00. Five minutes faster, same age, same sex, same distance.
Run both qualifying times through the Alan Jones 2025 marathon tables and those five minutes are worth 1.8 points of age grade. Chicago's 3:10:00 grades to 67.7%. NYC's 3:05:00 grades to 69.5%. But that gap isn't the story. Neither major is even against its own age brackets, and they aren't uneven in the same way.
I did this for Boston in two earlier posts. Chicago and NYC run the same kind of system: one flat marathon time per five-year bracket, no adjustment inside it. So I ran their 2027 qualifying times through the same tables.
Do Chicago and NYC use the same flat-time system as Boston?
Yes. All three hand out one flat time to an entire five-year bracket. Two runners four years apart, filing the identical clock time, are treated as having run the identical performance. They haven't.
Age-graded percentage is the per-year alternative. It measures your time against the world best, adjusted for your exact age. For the marathon that starts from the Alan Jones 2025 open standards, 2:00:35 for men and 2:09:56 for women. An age factor then stretches that time a little more every year past your physical peak.
Boston's qualifying times already showed what a flat time costs. A 40-year-old's 3:05:00 BQ grades to 66.6%. A 44-year-old's identical 3:05:00 grades to 68.9%. That's 2.3 points inside a single bracket, before Chicago or NYC even enter the picture.
So this post asks a different question. Not how uneven one bracket is inside itself, but how uneven one major's whole table is against another's. And whether that unevenness lands the same way on men and women.
Every figure below uses the same convention as the Boston posts. The percentage is computed at the youngest age in the bracket, because that's the age each standard asks the most of.
How uneven are Chicago's qualifying times?
By 4.4 points among men, 6.1 among women. Bigger for women, and not in the same bracket. Chicago's 2027 time-qualifier table, in full (chicagomarathon.com, retrieved 2026-09-18):
| Bracket | Men | AG% | Women / non-binary | AG% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 16-34 | 2:50:00 | 76.3% | 3:20:00 | 73.3% |
| 35-39 | 2:55:00 | 68.9% | 3:25:00 | 64.2% |
| 40-44 | 3:00:00 | 68.5% | 3:30:00 | 63.9% |
| 45-49 | 3:10:00 | 67.7% | 3:40:00 | 62.9% |
| 50-54 | 3:15:00 | 69.0% | 3:50:00 | 62.8% |
| 55-59 | 3:25:00 | 68.8% | 3:55:00 | 64.9% |
| 60-64 | 3:40:00 | 67.3% | 4:15:00 | 64.0% |
| 65-69 | 3:55:00 | 66.4% | 4:30:00 | 64.9% |
| 70-74 | 4:15:00 | 64.6% | 4:45:00 | 66.5% |
| 75-79 | 4:30:00 | 65.1% | 5:00:00 | 68.9% |
| 80+ | 4:50:00 | 66.9% | 5:20:00 | 73.1% |
Set aside the open 16-34 floor and the open-ended 80+ ceiling. Neither has a matching edge to bound a spread, the same reason Boston's 18-34 and 80+ brackets don't. Across the nine closed brackets, 35-39 through 75-79, Chicago's men run from 64.6% (70-74, the easiest) to 69.0% (50-54, the hardest). That's a 4.4-point range. Chicago's women run from 62.8% (50-54, easiest) to 68.9% (75-79, hardest), 6.1 points.
Notice the two sexes don't even agree on which bracket is hardest. For men the hardest ask sits in the middle of the masters range, at 50-54. For women the middle is the easiest part, and the curve climbs from there to 75-79. Boston's women showed the same shape.
How uneven are NYC's qualifying times?
By 4.4 points among men, and by 10.0 among women, the widest spread in this whole comparison. NYC's 2027 time-qualifier table, direct from nyrr.org (retrieved 2026-09-18):
| Bracket | Men | AG% | Women / non-binary | AG% |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 18-34 | 2:53:00 | 72.0% | 3:13:00 | 73.0% |
| 35-39 | 2:55:00 | 68.9% | 3:15:00 | 67.4% |
| 40-44 | 2:58:00 | 69.2% | 3:26:00 | 65.2% |
| 45-49 | 3:05:00 | 69.5% | 3:38:00 | 63.5% |
| 50-54 | 3:14:00 | 69.3% | 3:51:00 | 62.5% |
| 55-59 | 3:23:00 | 69.5% | 4:10:00 | 61.0% |
| 60-64 | 3:34:00 | 69.2% | 4:27:00 | 61.1% |
| 65-69 | 3:45:00 | 69.3% | 4:50:00 | 60.4% |
| 70-74 | 4:10:00 | 65.9% | 5:30:00 | 57.4% |
| 75-79 | 4:30:00 | 65.1% | 6:00:00 | 57.4% |
| 80+ | 4:55:00 | 65.7% | 6:35:00 | 59.2% |
NYC's men's column is the steadiest number in this entire post. From 35-39 to 65-69, seven straight brackets sit inside a single point, 68.9-69.5%. It only breaks at 70-74, where it drops to 65.9%.
I raced in that 45-49 bracket. NYC, 2 November 2025, 2:56:19 at 48. That's 8:41 inside the 2027 standard of 3:05:00, and it grades 74.9% on the same tables. NYC's own results page scored it 76.4%, but that's a different story about table editions.
NYC's women's column does the opposite. It falls almost every bracket. 67.4% at 35-39, then 65.2%, 63.5%, 62.5%, 61.0%, 61.1% and 60.4%. It bottoms out at 57.4% for both 70-74 and 75-79, then ticks back up to 59.2% at 80+. That's a 10.0-point decline across the closed brackets. Not a dip and a recovery like Chicago's. A slide.
Read it the right way round. A lower percentage is a softer ask, so NYC's women's standard gets easier with almost every bracket you age into.
Men are consistent across majors. Women are not.
So line up all three majors' closed-bracket ranges and the pattern holds. Men: Boston 4.0 points, Chicago 4.4, NYC 4.4. Three independently run organizations, within half a point of each other. Women: Boston 6.2, Chicago 6.1, NYC 10.0.
Boston and Chicago show a women's spread roughly 1.4 to 1.6 times the men's, the same pattern the Boston post found. NYC's is 2.3 times. Not a new failure mode. The same one, worse.
But this isn't the marathon age-grading tables treating women more harshly in general. Chicago's and Boston's women's spreads land close to each other, at 6.1 and 6.2. It's a statement about how each organization drew its own bracket boundaries and flat times, not about the underlying physiology. The tables are the same in all three cases. Only the entry rules differ.
What does this mean for a 2027 Chicago or NYC entry?
Nothing, for getting in. A clock time clears your bracket's standard or it doesn't, and none of this arithmetic changes that. All three majors check a flat time against your bracket, not an age grade. What this describes is how much that flat time quietly asks of you compared with every other bracket in the same race. It isn't a rule you can appeal.
The number that moves with your exact age is age-graded percentage. It's the same calculation RaceRecords runs on every race in your history, not just qualifying attempts. A qualifying time and a strong age-graded race are related, but they aren't the same test. Every closed bracket in this post asks for less than 70%, the mark RaceRecords calls local class. NYC's oldest women's brackets drop into the 50s.
One more wrinkle if Boston is the target. A qualifying time run on a steep net-downhill course now carries its own time penalty before it ever reaches this arithmetic. That penalty can move the implied age grade further than a bracket boundary does.
Can the non-binary standard be age-graded?
No. All three majors publish a non-binary entry standard, and all three set it to the exact same clock time as the women's column, bracket for bracket. I checked NYC's full table against the women's table and every row matches to the second.
Chicago says so plainly. Its page states that "the standards introduced for non-binary applicants are inclusive of the qualifying times for the two previously existing divisions" (chicagomarathon.com, retrieved 2026-09-18). It adds that talks with non-binary athletes are ongoing toward something more specific. NYC's qualifier table carries no equivalent note. The non-binary column is simply there, identical, unexplained.
Neither organization had a table to derive anything else from. The WMA and Alan Jones tables behind every age grade RaceRecords computes carry male and female age factors only. There's no non-binary curve to run a non-binary standard through. I said the same about Boston's non-binary column. It's a limit of the tables, not a judgement about the category.
Sources and what they said
Everything below was checked on the date shown. Application windows and standards can change year to year, so treat all of it as current for the 2027 cycle only.
- Bank of America Chicago Marathon, "Apply" — the 2027 time-qualifier table by age group and sex, the non-binary standard and its accompanying note, the 16-and-over age minimum, and the qualifying window (1 January 2025 - 29 October 2026). Retrieved 2026-09-18. https://www.chicagomarathon.com/apply/
- New York Road Runners, "Marathon Time Qualifiers" — the 2027 men's, women's and non-binary time-qualifier tables by age group, confirmed identical for women and non-binary in every row, and the qualifying window (1 January - 31 December 2026). Retrieved 2026-09-18. https://www.nyrr.org/tcsnycmarathon/runners/marathon-time-qualifiers
- Boston Athletic Association, "Qualify for the Boston Marathon" — the 2027 qualifying standards table used for the Boston comparison figures throughout. Retrieved 2026-09-18. https://www.baa.org/races/boston-marathon/qualify/
- Alan Jones, Age-Grade Tables, 2025 road edition — maleRoad2025.xlsx and femaleRoad2025.xlsx, "Marathon" sheet, the open standards (2:00:35 men, 2:09:56 women) and every age factor used to compute the percentages in this post. Retrieved 2026-09-18. https://github.com/AlanLyttonJones/Age-Grade-Tables
No figure in this post came from a third-party calculator or a secondary summary of these tables. Every age factor was pulled from the published 2025 workbooks and run through the same arithmetic for all three majors.