A day after France Galop announced record attendances for their racecourses, the Racecourse Association revealed on Thursday that attendances for British racing in 2025 topped five million for the first time in six years.
This marked a greater than 200,000-person increase in on-course attendances from 2024, which ultimately amounts to a 4.83% increase. Numbers of spectators at British race tracks had been dropping year-on-year prior to this rise, while there was also an overall increase in average attendance across all fixtures of 3.6% due to 17 more fixtures having been completed across the year.
There has also been a significantly greater representation from recorded under-18 racegoers in 2025. A 17% rise in younger viewers going racing from 2024 to 2025 was reported to be “on the conservative side” according to the Racecourse Association given the difficulty in gathering complete data on the topic.
2025 saw British racing undergo a significant TV marketing campaign with the slogan “The Going Is Good”, with the screening of an advert regularly appearing on terrestrial channels. Said advert first appeared in May, after the British Horseracing Authority announced a slight fall in attendances in Q1, suggesting an impact from that point onwards.
The exact figure of 5,031,640 is still substantially lower than a peak of beyond six million targeted between 2004-2016, but does represent a post-COVID peak, with early potential for that figure to climb again in 2026.