MCTS Plans 2025 Fare Increase

MCTS bus. Photo by Jeramey Jannene.

Milwaukee County Transit System (MCTS) plans to raise fares in 2025.

The system launched a new fare collection system in 2023 and implemented fare capping, which puts a ceiling on how much riders have to spend for transit on a daily, weekly or monthly basis. Fare capping replaces transit passes, and allows riders to ride for free after hitting a cap without requiring the prepurchase of a special pass.

MCTS is planning increases to the daily, weekly and monthly caps in 2025. The daily cap will increase from $4 to $5 (25%), the weekly from $19.50 to $20 (2.5%) and the monthly from $72 to $75 (4.2%). The cost of a single fare will still cost $2, resulting in the need to take an additional, half-priced trip to reach the daily cap.

The transit system has a structural budget deficit that is largely being filled with federal pandemic stimulus funds, but those are projected to run out by 2028. Increases to the fare caps are “critically important” to maintaining revenue for the system, Tim Hosch, MCTS CFO, told the county board’s Committee on Finance earlier this month.

“But more importantly, fares have not been increased since 2019 so we are overdue for some type of small adjustment,” Hosch said. 

In 2019, the transit system narrowly avoided major cuts to service after savings in the county’s healthcare costs were used to backfill the system’s structural budget. A year later, COVID-19 had arrived in Milwaukee and the federal government was providing stimulus funding to local governments and transit systems across the country. MCTS received approximately $191 million in stimulus funding, which has plugged holes in the system’s annual budget since 2021.

The proposed MCTS budget calls for an additional $660,000 in farebox revenue in 2025; an amount that would cover 18% of MCTS’ $131 million fixed-route transit budget.

Transit officials recently made the controversial decision to stop developing a second bus rapid transit line to forestall a significant impending budget deficit. The new service was planned to run for 18 miles north and south across the county and would have cost an estimated $148 million to develop. But it was the estimated $6 million annual operating cost that caused concern, given the system will soon struggle to pay for the bus service it already offers.

Shelving the project allowed MCTS to move $15 million in federal funding from the BRT project into the general budget, keeping the system solvent until 2028. MCTS plans to use $10.5 million in federal funding in 2025 alone to keep the system from a budget deficit.

MCTS expects the new fare caps will help the system increase revenue even as it decreases its ridership expectations. The transit system lowered its ridership goals by approximately 1.8 million trips to 19.7 million, an amount that is still higher than 2023’s actual trip total of 17.1 million.

Ridership was declining even before the COVID-19 pandemic. But this trend was turbocharged once it hit, with approximately 28.9 million riders in 2019 dropping to 14.3 million in 2021. Ridership has slowly returned but remains well below what it was before the pandemic.

The proposal is subject to Milwaukee County Board of Supervisors approval.

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