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The BHA's 2027 fixture policy: fewer fixtures, similar races
Approximately 1,440 fixtures for 2027, 18 fewer than 2026, with programmed race volume expected to remain similar. Per the BHA, the calendar shrinks while the supply of races to price holds roughly level.
Britain’s 2027 racing calendar is expected to lose eighteen fixtures. The number of races programmed on it, per the BHA, stays similar. That gap is a supply story before it is a racing one.
Per the British Horseracing Authority’s Fixture List Policy 2027 blog of 27 August, written by its Director of Racing, Richard Wayman, the 2027 list is expected to include “approximately 1,440 fixtures, which is 18 fewer than in 2026” — while “the total number of programmed races will remain similar”. Both figures carry the BHA’s own hedge: final touches were still being applied, and the list was due in the days after. It is not out as of this writing — the Authority’s full-year fixture pages still stop at 2026.
The mechanism is redistribution, not reduction. Racecourses defer a fixture date and spread that meeting’s races across their remaining programme — for fewer six-race cards and, the BHA says, some efficiency savings for participants.
The reasoning for holding volume is money. Financial projections showed media rights and levy — named in the blog as the sport’s major revenue streams — “would be hit by several million pounds as a direct result of a significant reduction in fixtures or races”, at a time when both are already under pressure from falling betting turnover. The horse population has meanwhile been declining by one to two per cent a year since the pandemic. The Board chose prize money and the growth agenda over contraction. The cost sits a paragraph earlier in the blog, in the words of those making that argument: field sizes are likely to remain under pressure at times of the year.
For a desk that reads racing as a pricing problem, the unit is the race, not the fixture. Race count is the supply of markets to bet into; fixture count is the shape that supply arrives in. On the BHA’s own numbers, 2027 changes the shape and leaves the size roughly alone — slightly fuller cards, eighteen fewer meetings. Whether that shows up in published prices is a question for 2027’s odds, not a forecast worth making now.
This is not the levy item covered here on Tuesday. That was the Horserace Betting Levy Board consulting on audit thresholds for small operators; this is the racing those levies are generated by. The timelines do not line up. That consultation closes on 26 October; the package of incentives for breeding, owning, training and running horses that went to the Levy Board in July faces funding decisions, per the BHA, at its next meeting in September. Nothing is approved yet.
A calendar is not an instruction. The extra race on a card is there because a racecourse moved a date, not because anyone needs a view on it; a market you would have skipped at nine in the morning does not improve because the afternoon got longer.