Three days at Aintree, 8 to 10 April 2027: Opening Day on the Thursday, Ladies Day on the Friday and the Randox Grand National itself on the Saturday.
The Grand National was first run at Aintree on 26 February 1839 and is the most watched horse race in the world. It is a handicap steeplechase over four miles and 514 yards, two circuits of a course whose fences carry names that have entered the language, and the handicapper’s job is to make every horse in the field theoretically capable of winning. That is why it produces results no other race produces, and why people who follow nothing else in racing have an opinion about it.
The three days around it have grown into a meeting in their own right. Thursday and Friday carry championship jump races that would headline anywhere else, and Friday is Ladies Day, which draws a crowd from Liverpool and the north-west that treats the afternoon as a civic occasion rather than a sporting one.
The 2027 Festival runs from Thursday 8 to Saturday 10 April at Aintree Racecourse. The National itself is run on the Saturday, before an audience that includes most of the country. The prize fund reached one million pounds in 2022, half of it to the winner, which is more than any other jump race in the world carries. Horses must be seven or older and rated 125 or better to enter, and must already have been placed in a chase of at least two and a half miles.