At the start of October 2026 our UK and Ireland archive holds 197,526 races. They were run at 86 racecourses, they contain 1,864,626 runner records, and they cover 155,221 different horses, ridden by 6,591 jockeys and trained by 4,041 trainers. The first race in it is dated 2 January 2011.
Numbers on their own do not tell you much, so here they are in order. If you are weighing up UK horse racing data for a model, a dashboard or a product, think of this as the tour you would otherwise get by loading the files yourself.
What kinds of racing are in it
Four race types, which is how our data classifies them:
| Type | Races | Average field |
|---|---|---|
| Flat Turf | 80,074 | 9.6 runners |
| Flat All-Weather | 45,460 | 9.4 |
| Hurdle | 43,675 | 10.2 |
| Chase | 28,317 | 7.9 |
Jump racing is about 36% of the archive, and chases have noticeably smaller fields: 7.9 runners against between 9.4 and 10.2 everywhere else. Across everything, the average field is 9.5. In 44.7% of races ten or more horses go to post, and in 12.5% there are five or fewer. The biggest field on record is 40.
The courses split between Britain and Ireland: 61 in the UK with 158,412 races, and 25 in Ireland with 39,114. If you only want one of them, filter on the country attached to the course. Our racecourse ranking shows which ones carry the volume.
How busy is a racing year
Between 2023 and 2025 the UK and Ireland averaged 35.9 races a day across racing days, with a maximum of 77 on the busiest. Annual totals are very steady, from 12,185 races in 2011 to 13,051 in 2025, with a dip to 10,287 in 2020. May is the heaviest month on average, at about 1,354 races, and February the quietest at 767.
What is recorded for each race and runner
A race carries its date and time, course, distance, surface, class, age restriction, prize, number of runners and each-way terms. Distance is text such as 1m 2f or 2m 110y, not a number, which we come back to below.
A runner record has much more. It holds the finishing place or the code that replaced it, draw, age, weight, gear, a rating, the jockey and trainer, the favourite flag, the starting price and the margin behind the horse in front. Margins are explained in our guide, and the place codes in another.
Horse profiles are where the UK data does something the Hong Kong data does not. Each profile splits a horse’s career into four surfaces and disciplines: Flat all-weather, Flat turf, chase and hurdle, with runs, wins and places for each. Jockey and trainer profiles use the same split.
Timing, honestly
Finish times and sectional splits are the part of the UK data that needs the most explanation. They start in 2017, and they depend heavily on where the race was run. In Britain about 18% of runners have sectionals in 2017, 45% in 2023 and 91% from 2024 onwards. In Ireland there are none. Finish times mostly follow the same pattern, and before 2017 there is nothing at all.
Every runner with sectionals has up to 18 splits, each with a time and the stretch it covers, written like Start-13f. The sectional times coverage note goes through the pattern year by year and course by course. If you are building a model that needs timing, plan around that missingness rather than hoping it is random. It is not.
What is not in it
The archive covers racing in Britain and Ireland. A horse trained in the UK that runs in France or Hong Kong will have that run missing from the UK tables, because we do not carry courses outside the two countries. There is also no information on weather, track shape or going measurements beyond the going description attached to each race.
Updates and access
Racecards for the next day and results for the day just finished are updated every day after racing. You can take the history as a bulk download from the datasets and then pull each new day through the API, which has 26 UK endpoints covering races, records, racecards, horses, jockeys, trainers and courses. The UK Dataset API page lists the plans.
If your project needs something that is not on this list, ask us before you buy. A plain no early is better for everyone.
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