From Monday 5 October 700 students of the City University of New York will be able to take metro and bus without paying the ticket. They will receive an OMNY card with unlimited racing, funded by the New York City Council as part of a new experimental program aimed at students for whom the cost of travel can make it more difficult to attend the university. The project, called CUNY OMNY Pilot Program, was presented on Monday, September 28 at the City College of New York. To finance it, the Council allocated $700,000 in the budget of the fiscal year 2027.
It is not a free transport program for all CUNY students. To be admitted, you must be eligible for Pell Grant, the main federal grant for university students with economic needs, attend full-time with at least 12 credits both in the autumn and spring semester and have at least two courses in attendance. Students who already receive transport support through other CUNY programs, such as ASAP, are excluded, which already includes an unlimited OMNY card.
The difference between the number of beneficiaries and the number of persons concerned is quite large. CUNY has identified about 54 thousand students who met the initial requirements and sent them a form: more than 28,500 compiled it, while only 700 entered the first group of the program. 300 more have been included in a waiting list and will be able to sub-enter if any of the beneficiaries will lose the requirements. According to the New York Times, among the eligible students the beneficiaries were chosen in lot.
Selected students have already been notified by email on September 22 and must withdraw the card on their campus. OMNY will be active from 5 October to 25 December 2026. Before the next semester CUNY will check again that each participant respects the requirements; those who remain eligible will receive an unlimited pass valid for 120 days from 28 January 2027. Physical cards will be distributed for now: CUNY says they can be added to a digital wallet when the MTA will make this feature available by the end of the year.
With the rates entered into force in January 2026, a single ride on the subway or local buses in New York costs $3. For a student who has to go to class five days a week means spending up to $30 only for a return trip every day, before any other trips. OMNY normally applies a weekly roof to shopping, but the cards distributed by CUNY will be configured directly to allow unlimited runs.
The program originates from a request made in recent years by the University Student Senate of CUNY. A proposal presented at the beginning of 2026 initially imagined a broader project, funded with $1.4 million divided between city and state and based on a pre-established number of student travel. The model actually funded by the city is different: the budget approved in June contains 700 thousand dollars for the project.
The appropriation is equivalent to approximately a thousand dollars for each of the 700 students of the first group, but it does not mean that each card has that value: the documents published so far do not share the 700 thousand dollars between the cost of the passes and other possible expenses of the program. The City Council speaker Julie Menin said that the goal is to expand the project, but at the moment it was not announced a funding that would allow it to be done.
The pilot is part of a wider series of interventions in the city budget on the cost of public transport. In the same budget agreement, the City Council funded the Fair Fares extension, which offers reduced rates to low-income New Yorkers, raising the access threshold from 150 to 200 percent of the federal poverty level. The free OMNY for CUNY students, however, have a much smaller scale: for this reason, at least in the first year, they will serve above all to understand how much demand exists for specific support for the transport of university students.
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