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. Ridership only surpassed 70 percent of pre-pandemic levels in September 2024. Since then, ridership has hovered around 73 percent of pre-pandemic levels in most months, rising to more than 75 percent in April and May of 2025.

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. Since September 2024, many stations in the Bronx, Upper Manhattan and outer Brooklyn have been lagging behind, while stations in the downtown areas of Manhattan and Brooklyn helped to fuel the recovery.

Most and Least Recovered Stations

Note: Least recovered stations exclude those closed for station and track work. As of February 2025, these included A line stops at Beach 25 Street, Beach 44 Street, Beach 90 Street, Beach 98 Street, Broad Channel and Rockaway Park-Beach 116 Street.

Sources: Metropolitan Transportation Authority; OSC analysis

The accompanying interactive map shows the recent history of ridership at 424 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 remained mostly flat throughout 2023 and early 2024, with some seasonal variation. Citywide, ridership strengthened to surpass 70 percent of pre-pandemic levels in September 2024 and has remained above this level since.

Station and Citywide Ridership Trends

Note: Some stations may show zero (or near-zero) ridership in months of when they were closed for refurbishment or track work

Sources: Metropolitan Transportation Authority; OSC analysis

Among the 20 largest station hubs in the City, 14 were above the citywide recovery rate of 72.2 percent in September 2024, and most of the 20 have exceeded the citywide rate in each month since. Large outer borough hubs have fared better, with Jackson Heights/ 74th Street and Flushing-Main Street in Queens ranking among the top three hubs citywide for most months since the start of 2024. Of the two main commuter hubs, Grand Central/42nd Street has had a relatively strong ridership recovery, staying above the citywide recovery level since June 2023, and reaching more than 80 percent in April and May of 2025, while 34th Street/Penn Station (1,2,3) was still below citywide levels. Four Manhattan hubs (Chambers Street/World Trade Center/Park Place, 34th Street/Herald Square, and the Lexington Avenue 53rd Street and 59th Street stations) remain significantly below citywide levels. However, by and large, many station hubs in midtown and lower Manhattan have seen recovery rates continue to rise in recent months.

Ridership at Largest Hub Stations

Sources: Metropolitan Transportation Authority; OSC analysis

Overall, subway ridership recovery citywide has remained fairly stable since May 2023, fluctuating between 64.8 percent and just under 70 percent of pre-pandemic ridership though August 2024, then between 71.6 percent and 75.8 percent since then to June 2025. The MTA anticipates that ridership will reach 77 percent of 2019 levels by 2028. Ridership levels are currently close to these projections, but returns will need to improve at both major midtown hubs and certain smaller outlying stations for the MTA to reach the farebox recovery rates included in the later years of its financial plan. One key may be improved OMNY adoption at outlying stations (which appear to lag behind OMNY usage at the central hubs) as the MTA implements its plan to phase out MetroCards by the end of 2025.

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

Data Sources: Metropolitan Transportation Authority; OSC Analysis