Operating Costs

Metro’s operating costs are the day-to-day costs of running our services.

Below, learn more about where the money goes to keep Metrorail, Metrobus, and MetroAccess service running, so that we’re ready to take you where you need to go.

Learn more about where the money comes from

Learn more about Metro’s annual operating budget

Breaking down our costs

In fiscal year 2024, Metro’s operating costs were $2.4 billion. That’s a big number — for comparison, that’s:

• More than the District of Columbia spends on schools
• Twice as much as Montgomery County, Prince George’s County, Fairfax County, Arlington County, and Alexandra all together spend on police
• Five times as much as it cost to build the Capital One Arena in Washington, D.C.

Here’s where that money goes.

About 70% of our money is spent to pay our employees. This includes everyone from front-line employees (like bus operators and station managers) to those behind the scenes (like planners, accountants, and administrators). Operating a bus for one hour doesn’t just takes one hour of the bus operator’s time; we need someone to maintain the bus when it gets back to the garage, someone to supervise the bus operator, someone to plan the bus service, someone to process paperwork to make sure the operator has health insurance, and more.

On Metrorail, there is a lot of maintenance and upkeep that we have to do no matter how many trains we run. Federal and local regulations require us to inspect and maintain tracks regularly, even if trains aren’t running as often. Aside from maintenance, employees like station agents, janitors, police officers, and other positions are needed to manage our stations and serve our customers regardless of how much service we run.

In addition to the money we spend on employees, running a transit system uses a lot of energy and materials. Buses need diesel and natural gas, trains and offices need electricity, MetroAccess vehicles need gasoline, and all of them need replacement parts for when things break. To better plan for the future, Metro makes deals to buy electricity and fuel at specific prices for 3- to 5-year terms. This means that if the price of fuel goes up, Metro doesn’t have to pay more, and if the price fluctuates up and down, we know in advance how much we’ll have to spend. But global events have reduced the supply of natural gas, leading to higher prices for Metro in the long run.

While Metro directly operates Metrobus and Metrorail, we pay vendors to run on-demand MetroAccess service. This means that instead of Personnel, those costs are in the Services category instead.

The impact of inflation

Just like you, Metro has seen our costs rise due to inflation. Many of our employees get cost-of-living adjustments each year — their salary goes up to account for inflation. Other things we buy have gotten more expensive, too. While the Consumer Price Index reported inflation as high as 9.1% in 2022, the price of many of the materials and services that Metro relies on actually rose even higher than that. For example, the price of gasoline rose by as much as 59.9 percent in 2022.

But no matter how much our costs go up, the jurisdictions that fund Metro (the District, Maryland, and Virginia) only have to increase their funding contributions by 3 percent. So we get a little more money from them, but not enough to cover the full increase.

The challenge of reducing costs

Since the majority of Metro’s costs are from operating and maintaining transit service, the only way to significantly cut costs is to make service cuts. However, these cuts are often a poor tradeoff for the dollars saved, because so many of our costs are structural (they don’t go down if we run less service) — and because reduced service is bad for riders like you.

As an example, in 2018 Metro reduced rail frequency by 33 percent during peak periods, and increased headways (the time between trains) from 6 to 8 minutes. This was a substantial service cut, which made Metrorail much less convenient for many of our riders. But it only saved Metro $10 million per year — less than 1 percent of our total operating costs.

The fiscal cliff

Because the costs of operating Metro go up faster than our revenue and funding, and because reducing costs is very difficult, we’re facing a “fiscal cliff.” That’s a point of crisis, where the money coming in won’t cover the money going out, with no obvious resolution other than to change the way Metro is funded by state and local governments and the federal government. 

Learn more about Metro’s sources of funds