The MTA Is Big Business in the Tri-State Region
MTA Paid $35 Billion to Area Companies Over Last Decade
February 2025 Update
Explore the Fact Sheets
New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) serves millions of transit riders every day, ensuring that they can get to work, school, and other hubs of activity, and enabling the NYC metropolitan region to be the economic engine of the entire tri-state area. Yet the MTA’s reach extends far beyond the metropolitan region; the MTA authority spent nearly $35 billion on payments to companies located throughout New York, New Jersey and Connecticut from 2014-2023.
MTA investments ripple across the state and region, reaching diverse industries and communities. The $15 billion raised by congestion pricing will support tens of thousands of jobs throughout New York State. Fully-funded MTA capital plans – including the proposed $68 billion MTA 2025-2029 capital plan – are not only crucial for ensuring the subways, buses and commuter railroads are reliable, but also for creating local jobs. The Partnership for New York City recently found that the new 2025-2029 plan will support $106 billion in economic activity in New York State, and directly create 72,000 good-paying jobs throughout the state.
This updated analysis lists top companies and total MTA spending by legislative district and incumbent in office as of January 2025. Previously, Reinvent Albany published details of the MTA spending on companies in the Tri-State Region (July 2024), in New York State (November 2023), New Jersey (June 2023), and across the United States (June 2020).
Key Findings
- The MTA spent nearly $35 billion on outside vendors in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut from 2014-2023.
- The MTA paid $30.3 billion to companies in New York State, $3.9 billion to companies in New Jersey, and $0.5 billion to companies in Connecticut from 2014-2023.
- Every congressional district in New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut has companies receiving MTA payments, in addition to every single NYS senate district. 149 of the 150 NYS assembly districts (99%) are recipients of MTA spending.
- MTA capital spending also supports in-house jobs held by MTA union employees. Reinvent Albany found that 21% of MTA capital spending has funded in-house labor costs since 2007; this share would amount to $14.8 billion of the total $68 billion 2025-2029 capital plan.
Visualizing MTA Spending Across New York Districts
The 2025-2029 Capital Plan
A $65 Billion Investment in the Subways, Buses, and Commuter Rails
Though very large, the MTA’s proposed $68 billion Capital Plan for 2025-2029 realistically reflects the huge backlog of projects needed to keep trains and buses rolling. The $68 billion price tag matches the mid-range cost estimate from the NYS Comptroller, yet still comes nowhere near the $106 billion in state of good repair needs identified by the Citizens Budget Commission. ($65 billion represents the NYCT, LIRR, MNR and MTA Buses component of the plan; an additional $3 billion is self-financed by Bridges & Tunnels.)
Key Areas of Investment in 2025-2029 Capital Plan
🚇🚌 Railcars and Buses: 1,500 new subway cars; 500 new railcars for Metro-North Railroad and Long Island Rail Road; and 2,000 new conventional buses and 500 new zero-emission buses will be purchased. New York State has a long history of railcar and bus manufacturing throughout the state, with both large manufacturers and small suppliers located in communities throughout the state.
🚦New Signals: The MTA will resignal portions of three subway lines: the Broadway N/Q/R/W Line, Liberty Av A Line, Rockaway A/S Lines, and the Nassau St J/Z Line. This important work will improve service reliability and continue the resignalling process of the subways, which still rely on 100-year old technology that is prone to failure, leading to service delays.
⚡ Power Systems: Twenty-one NYCT, six LIRR, and five Metro-North substations are slated for full renewal or new construction. Fifty-five other substations will have priority components replaced, including transformers, rectifiers, and switchgear. Unfortunately, a substation failure was recently seen on December 11, 2024 due to old equipment when a Brooklyn substation blew and service on the A, C, F, and G was halted for hours.
🌳🌀 Stormwater and Resiliency: The MTA proposes $800 million in improvements to protect the vulnerable Hudson Line on Metro-North, and $700 million for protections at subway stations to protect against stormwater flooding.
The plan also proposes a number of other improvements, including new elevators, escalators, or ramps at 60 more stations to meet the requirements of ADA settlement agreements, as well as $1.5 billion to install modern fare gates, among other items.
Methodology
Vendor data obtained from the Open NY Data Portal (see here and here) was cleansed and integrated by deduplicating names and addresses, using alphabetical and zip code sorting while rectifying spelling errors, business aliases, and changes due to mergers or acquisitions. Address information was confined to the years 2022 and 2023. Post-deduplication, these addresses were integrated into the 2014-2021 records based on matching vendor names and zip codes, under the premise that vendors operate a single location per zip code.
For vendors without direct matches in NY, particularly those with cumulative transactions exceeding $1 million, encompassing 300 vendors and 354 vendor-zip code combinations, a manual search was conducted. This process involved verifying addresses through Google and commercial datasets, such as Dun & Bradstreet and Yellow Pages, successfully pinpointing addresses for 329 pairs. For vendors without direct matches in NJ and CT, vendors with the largest number of transactions had addresses similarly manually searched and verified.
Subsequently, these identified addresses underwent precise geocoding via the ArcGIS Geocoding Service. Transactions without detailed addresses were geocoded at the zip code centroid.
District maps are based on those that will take effect after the 2024 elections; current incumbents in office as of January 2025 are listed.
See also our datasheet of the top 5 vendors by NYS, NJ, and CT congressional districts, and NYS Assembly and Senate districts for incumbents currently in office as of February 2025.