The sunsetting of the MetroCard at the end of this year will most likely be followed by a fare increase for New York City’s subways and buses, with fares rising to $3.00 from $2.90. It would be the first such increase since August 2023.
The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, the state agency that operates the city’s transit system, announced the plan at a board meeting on Wednesday. The board will vote on the proposal after public hearings this fall and the changes would take effect in January.
The agency had originally planned to raise fares earlier this year, but transit officials decided to first transition to OMNY, a new tap-and-go payment system, and to retire the MetroCard, which will be phased out at the end of December after more than three decades. (Sales of the MetroCard will conclude at the end of the year, but the cards will still be accepted into 2026.)
Janno Lieber, the head of the transit authority, defended the new fares during the Wednesday meeting, arguing that an increase of less than 4 percent was reasonable compared with the fast-rising costs of other services in the city. He cited a state comptroller report showing that the price of housing in New York City has risen 68 percent since 2018, while transit costs rose 16 percent in the same period.
“Transit is one of the few things that makes New York affordable, and we’re keeping it that way,” Mr. Lieber said.
The proposed increase would also make it more expensive to reach the M.T.A.’s weekly fare cap, which makes rides free after the first 12 trips in a week. The cap would rise to $36 from $34.
The changes would also affect commuter rail fares and tolls. The cost of weekly and monthly tickets on the Long Island Rail Road and Metro-North would increase by up to 4.4 percent, with all other fares rising up to 8 percent. Tolls on several bridges and tunnels would increase by about 7.5 percent. A trip through the Queens-Midtown Tunnel, for example, would climb to $7.46 from $6.94.
In a cost-saving measure, the M.T.A. is also changing how Metro-North and L.I.R.R. riders use tickets. Starting in January, riders will no longer have to activate their digital tickets after boarding a train, an extra step that the M.T.A. said has led to some riders using the same ticket repeatedly and getting free rides. One-way tickets — both printed and digital — will now expire four hours after purchase; previously, tickets were valid for two months or more.
The fare increases are part of a broader effort to shore up the transit authority’s roughly $20 billion annual operating budget, which it relies on to fund its workers’ salaries and benefits, pay for utilities and cover borrowing costs.
“Fares raise billions of dollars each year to fund public transit services that millions of people ride every day,” Danny Pearlstein, a spokesman for Riders Alliance, a transit advocacy organization, said in a statement. “New York cannot function without that revenue.”
But the planned increases also come at a time when the cost of living in New York City has become a central theme of a hotly contested mayoral contest. Zohran Mamdani, the Democratic candidate for mayor who has focused his campaign on affordability, has promised to speed up M.T.A. buses, which tend to serve older and poorer residents and are among the slowest in the nation, and to make the buses free.
Removing bus fares would forfeit more than $800 million in annual revenue at a time when federal funding to the state, under the Trump administration, remains unclear.
Stefanos Chen is a Times reporter covering New York City’s transit system.
Urvashi Uberoy is an engineer contributing to The Times’s data-driven journalism.
The post N.Y.C. Subway and Bus Fares Are Likely to Increase to $3 in January 2026 appeared first on New York Times.
