The NYC budget deal includes a significant expansion of the Fair Fares program, offering half-priced subway, bus and paratransit trips to an additional 340,000 New Yorkers who will now be eligible to participate, according to City Council Speaker Julie Menin’s office.
The speaker shook hands with Mayor Zohran Mamdani on the spending plan on Tuesday morning, and it is set to be passed by the council later today, June 30, the deadline date for the city budget.
The budget will make Fair Fares accessible to New Yorkers living at or below 200% of the federal poverty level (FPL) — up 50 percentage points from its current threshold of 150% of the FPL. That means individuals making up to $31,920-a-year and families of four making up to $66,000 annually will now qualify for the benefit, according to the speaker’s office.
The expanded eligibility makes roughly 1.3 million New Yorkers able to access the half-priced fares, according to the speaker’s office. The expansion is made possible by an additional $54 million for the coming fiscal year, on top of the $120.6 million in already locked-in funding for the program.
Menin, who made expanding the program one of her key demands this city budget cycle, said the $3 fare is just too high for many New Yorkers.
“The Council secured the largest expansion of Fair Fares in the program’s history, making hundreds of thousands more New Yorkers eligible for half-price transit fares,” Menin said in a statement. “This investment will help more people get to work, school, medical appointments, and other essential destinations, while putting money back in the pockets of working families.”
The deal shows that Mamdani agreed to fund the expansion of Fair Fares, even though he has mostly spoken about his own campaign pledge to make city buses free instead.
The agreed-upon expansion appears to be an amalgamation of various proposals for growing Fair Fares this budget cycle. Those pitches came from the council itself, a coalition of transit and anti-poverty advocates, and the fiscally conservative Citizens Budget Commission.
It slightly differs from what the council proposed in its April response to Mamdani’s January preliminary budget plan. That proposal called for making Fair Fares free to those making up to 150% of the FPL, which would have covered everyone who was currently eligible at the time.
Jack Lobel, Menin’s spokesperson, said the council ultimately chose this path because it reaches more people who are riding transit more often.
Advocates were pushing for an even larger increase — calling for both the council’s original proposal and for half-fare trips to be available to those earning between 150% and 300% of the federal poverty level.
But Brian Fritsch — associate director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee to the MTA, one of the groups pushing for the expansion — said that although the deal was not everything advocates wanted, it is still a “really good step in the right direction.”
“It’s something we’ve been calling for years,” Fritsch told amNewYork. “It’s not everything, [but\ I think we want to deliver affordability to the people who need it. It won’t include those that are working minimum wage full time, at very least at that level. But it’ll still bring new benefits to a large number of New Yorkers who don’t currently receive it, which is great.”