The Best Races in Georgia, Ranked — Peachtree, Then a 20-Point Gap

The live Georgia rankings are updated every day. This piece looks at the list as it stood on September 29, 2026.

Georgia has 323 races in our index, and 39 of them clear the bar for our state rankings. Only Florida, with 55, and New Jersey, with 41, have more.

Most of the 39 are small: 28 are 5Ks, and the median field is 255 runners. One is not small at all, and it shapes everything about how the list reads.

The Georgia twelve

The other 27 are on the full Georgia ranking, and the 12 inside the metro area have their own list: Best Races Near Atlanta.

Check the race page before you pick a goal. The high in Atlanta was 90°F or hotter on every Fourth of July from 2022 to 2026, as the Peachtree page shows year by year. The Augusta Half Marathon page will email you before the entry fee goes up.

Four things the list tells you

There is Peachtree, and then there is everyone else. Thirty-eight of the 39 have a known field size, and together they start 65,543 runners. Peachtree alone accounts for 50,000 of them, or 76%. The other 37 add up to 15,543. It is also the only Georgia race we have measured on all four of our scoring components, and it leads No. 2 by exactly 20 points. Last week’s New Jersey list had 3.1 points between first and second.

Georgia measures its courses more than any state we have written up. Thirty-one of the 39 are USATF certified, four in five. Nationally, 273 of the 549 races on any state list carry a certification, or half. For 20 Georgia races the certificate is what put them on the list: we know their field size and their certification and nothing else, and our formula needs two measured signals before it ranks a race. The certificate gets a race onto the list but does not raise its place on it. On its own it scores 40 of 100 on our credentials measure, below the neutral 50 we assume for a signal we haven’t measured. That is also why Peachtree’s credentials score is only 40: its course is certified, and it is not a Boston qualifier.

Age mostly arrives as an edition number. Nineteen of the 39 earn a longevity score. Only three have a founding year on record: Peachtree (1970), the Savannah Bridge Run (1992) and the Boo Run (2000). The other 16 carry their age in their name. The clearest case is No. 3: the Marigold 10K in Winterville is in its 52nd edition, which earns it a perfect longevity score on a field of 246 and puts it ahead of two half marathons that each start more than 1,300.

Georgia races in the cool months. Twenty of the 39 run between October and December, and 12 more in February or March. Only three fall between June and August: Peachtree on the Fourth of July, the Milledge Mile in Athens later that month, and the Bowdon Founders Day 5K in August. None is a Boston qualifier. The only marathon on the list is the Combos Marathon in Albany, at No. 17.

What is missing

Most of the 323. Eighty-two are past races, which sit out the rankings until their next edition is listed. Of the 202 upcoming races that miss the list, 103 have no measured signal at all and 99 have exactly one. For 79 of those, it is a field size with nothing to pair it with. Fourteen of the 99 carry an edition number and appear in the page’s founding-year section, but one signal is not enough to score. A race that has posted results for decades but never said when it started looks, to our formula, exactly like one that started last year.

Claiming a listing is free. It lets an organizer fill in a founding year or a certification number, and it cannot buy a better rank, only a more complete one.

Rich Shea runs BestRaces. Spot something wrong? Tell me and I'll fix it.