Transit & Streets Data retrieved 2026-07-16
Subway ridership
Annual rides on the subway, from the MTA's own monthly count: the 2020 collapse and the climb back.
1.28 billion
subway rides in 2025
That is 75.5% of 2019, the last full year before the pandemic, when the system carried 1.70 billion rides.
The numbers behind this chart
| Year | Annual subway ridership |
|---|---|
| 2018 | 1,680,060,402 |
| 2019 | 1,697,787,002 |
| 2020 | 639,541,029 |
| 2021 | 759,976,721 |
| 2022 | 1,013,425,465 |
| 2023 | 1,151,998,158 |
| 2024 | 1,194,866,357 |
| 2025 | 1,281,883,362 |
The key years
What this counts
Paid rides on the New York City subway, summed from the ridership the MTA reports for each month on the state open-data portal. A ride is a swipe or a tap through a turnstile. The count covers the subway only: buses, the Staten Island Railway, and the commuter railroads are separate series in the same dataset.
What it does not say
- It counts rides, not riders. One commuter is roughly two rides a day, and a transfer through a turnstile can count again.
- Fare evasion is not in it. An entry that never registers a fare never registers here, so the true number of people moving through the system is higher.
- The MTA's monthly figures for this dataset begin in 2018, and the agency revises recent months after posting. Partial years are left off the chart.
The questions New Yorkers actually ask
How many people ride the NYC subway?
The subway carried 1.28 billion rides in 2025, per the MTA's monthly ridership data. That works out to 75.5% of the 1.70 billion rides of 2019.
How far has subway ridership recovered from the pandemic?
Ridership fell to 640 million rides in 2020. By 2025 it was back to 1.28 billion, which is 75.5% of the 2019 level.
The numbers move. We watch them.
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