The COVID-19 pandemic had a profound and disparate impact on subway ridership in New York City. Initially, the emergence of the virus in March and April 2020 corresponded with a steep and uniform drop in subway usage across all five boroughs. Citywide, April 2020 ridership was just 8.3 percent of what it was in April 2019, and through the summer of 2024 ridership has yet to regularly surpass 70 percent of pre-pandemic levels.

The early stages of the recovery were marked by great disparities between parts of the City where ridership returned more quickly and parts where it did not. As demonstrated by OSDC’s archived subway recovery tracker, ridership through early 2022 remained much higher (as a percentage of pre-COVID levels) in lower-income neighborhoods than it did in wealthier ones.

More recent recovery patterns are different and correlation with neighborhood income disparities has become markedly less pronounced. Currently, many stations in the Bronx and central Brooklyn are lagging behind, while much of Queens, lower Manhattan, and western Brooklyn are fueling the recovery.

Most and Least Recovered Stations

Sources: Metropolitan Transportation Authority; OSC analysis

However, ridership recovery systemwide has slowed through 2024, and is in danger of falling behind the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s (MTA) budgeted projections. The accompanying interactive map shows the recent history of ridership at 423 stations identified in the dataset. Select a station on the map to view its ridership recovery as a share of pre-pandemic levels and to compare it to the system’s recovery as a whole.

Station Ridership Citywide

Sources: Metropolitan Transportation Authority; OSC analysis

For the first two years following the pandemic, subway turnstile data published by the MTA showed a strong correlation between neighborhood median household income and subway ridership. Residents of higher-income neighborhoods were more likely to be employed in sectors that were more easily adaptable to remote work models, such as financial activities or business services. Ridership in these neighborhoods — and particularly at the major hubs in the City’s Central Business District — is also more dependent upon business, tourism, and commuters. In neighborhoods where residents were more likely to continue using the subway throughout the pandemic, common areas of employment are the health care and social assistance sector, as well as the leisure and hospitality sector.

As the recovery continued, this correlation became weaker, and by 2022 it was replaced by a more geographic relationship, as ridership recovery at major hubs in Manhattan neighborhoods failed to keep pace with recovery among outer borough stations. This trend continued until the spring of 2023, when significant improvement at a number of Manhattan hubs began to reach closer to citywide ridership recovery rates.

However, in mid-2023, the MTA altered the way it reports ridership at the individual station level. While the new system does include useful information on the share of rides paid for through the new OMNY system (whereby riders can simply tap a credit or debit card at the turnstile rather than purchase a pre-loaded MetroCard), the new data format is not comparable to the old data format and does not include any reporting from the first two years of the pandemic.

OMNY Share of Station Ridership

Sources: Metropolitan Transportation Authority; OSC analysis

This new data shows that ridership has remained mostly flat over the past year with some seasonal fluctuation. Citywide, ridership hit 68.5 percent of pre-pandemic levels in May 2023, a number that it matched again in November but did not surpass until it hit 69.5 percent in February 2024, and then again in May 2024 when it reached 69.8 percent of pre-pandemic levels.

Station and Citywide Ridership Trends

Sources: Metropolitan Transportation Authority; OSC analysis

Among the 18 largest station hubs in the City, 11 were above the citywide recovery rate of 65.9 percent in August 2024. Large outer borough hubs have fared better, with 74th Street/Jackson Heights and Flushing/Main Street in Queens ranking among the top three hubs citywide for most months through August 2024. Of the two main commuter hubs, Grand Central/42nd Street also recorded better ridership recovery (70.9 percent of pre-pandemic ridership) while 34th Street/Penn Station (65.1 percent) was more in line with citywide levels. Four Manhattan hubs (Chambers Street/World Trade Center/Park Place, 34th Street/Herald Square, and the 53rd Street and 59th Street stations along Lexington Avenue) remain significantly below citywide levels. However, by and large, many stations in midtown and lower Manhattan have seen recovery rates continue to rise. Much of Queens and western Brooklyn are also showing significant recovery while many Bronx and central Brooklyn stations lag behind citywide levels.

Ridership at Largest Hub Stations

Sources: Metropolitan Transportation Authority; OSC analysis

Certain lines appear to be recovering better than others as well. Most stations on the 7 line in Queens are regularly above citywide recovery levels, as are several on the L, 2, and 3 lines in Brooklyn. Meanwhile, many stations on the J, Z, and G trains frequently appear among those with the lowest rates of recovery (though various capital projects on those lines may be contributing to the lower ridership in recent months), as do some of the outermost L stations. Overall, subway ridership recovery has remained fairly stable since May 2023, fluctuating between a high of 69.8 percent of pre-pandemic ridership and a low of 64.6 percent during that period, without a clear trend of either improvement or decline.

In its July 2022 financial plan, the MTA revised its long-term ridership projections downward and does not now anticipate ridership returning to 80 percent of pre-pandemic levels until 2026. Officials have suggested that it may take closer to a decade to reach full pre-pandemic levels. Ridership levels have remained reasonably close to these revised projections but are slightly below the midpoint projection so far in 2024. Ridership returns will need to improve at both major midtown hubs and certain smaller outlying stations in order for the MTA to reach the farebox recovery rates included in the later years of its financial plan. One key may be to improve OMNY adoption at outlying stations, which seems to lag behind OMNY usage at the central hubs.

Data Note: Ridership is measured by numbers of station exits. Baseline ridership data is the average number of exits for the respective month for the period 2015 through 2019, adjusted to exclude for extended closures due to construction work where relevant.

Data Sources: Metropolitan Transportation Authority; OSC Analysis