The COVID-19 pandemic and its aftermath undermined public transit agencies’ ability to attract and retain workers, even though jobs in the transit industry have traditionally been relatively well-paid and secured by unions. Initially, the public health crisis resulted in transit operators suffering from direct exposure to the disease, with many dying. People working in direct contact with passengers, like bus drivers, faced continued risk from daily contact. This resulted in many older staff retiring, high levels of employee absenteeism, and too few workers to provide service (PDF).
In the years since, this transit workforce hasn’t expanded as quickly as the national workforce. Inadequate funding has made it difficult for transit agencies to afford rising labor costs.
As a result, many transit agencies have had little choice but to cut operations, depriving the nation’s 20 million daily riders of access to bus and train services essential to getting to work, school, and recreation. Agencies have also struggled to hire enough employees because of competition from other employers.
To assist transit agencies as they continue toward full recovery from the pandemic, we examined how transit jobs compare with similar jobs in the broader industry, like driving for commercial trucking companies. Our comparison clarifies that transit agencies generally, but not always, offer wages on par with those elsewhere in the transportation field. But agencies could make several key changes to improve their chance of recruiting and retaining job holders.
Transit agencies struggle to attract workers, which undermines their service
In recent years, the lack of adequate staffing has put transit agencies in a bind. In New York City, a shortage of drivers forced the Metropolitan Transportation Authority to cancel a number of express bus trips. And during some months in 2021 and 2022, inadequate crew availability caused tens of thousands of individual delays on that city’s subway system. Though the situation has since improved, an inadequate workforce remains a major cause of delays.
Source: Metropolitan Transportation Authority, last updated March 20, 2026.
Delays resulting from inadequate operator availability are hardly confined to New York City. On Chicago’s L lines, employee absence is a common cause of long delays. Though the number of rail operators in Chicago has increased since the pandemic, as of this February, there are fewer operators than before the pandemic.
Workforce retention and recruitment challenges can affect other aspects of transit service provision. An inadequately sized or trained maintenance staff, for example, could result in vehicles that aren’t ready for service because they haven’t been cleaned or repaired.
Transit agency jobs offer some advantages—but also are uncompetitive in certain ways
Our comparison of transit jobs with other, similar occupations shows that transit agencies offer average wages on par with those in other industries, though there is substantial variation between metropolitan areas. For example, transit workers make more on average than the general workforce in the New York City region, but substantially less than the overall workforce in the Philadelphia region. Transit workers also benefit from similar or better-than-average nonwage job benefits, except for schedule flexibility.
This ought to indicate that transit agencies would be competitive in job recruitment. But we find that agencies impose some requirements on jobseekers that may reduce transit jobs’ appeal. For example, transit agencies are less likely to allow employees to work from home; that’s impossible, of course, for bus operators or maintenance workers, who need to come to work physically to be able to do their jobs. Some current transit workers may choose, for instance, to switch to another job where they can work from home if that appeals to them.
Moreover, transit agencies often require more-stringent qualifications, such as drug testing, background checks, and minimum educational credentials, compared with other jobs in the transportation industry. This stringency may make attracting workers without these credentials difficult for transit agencies, which may ultimately undermine their ability to provide the services people rely on to get where they need to go.
How transit agencies can support a more robust workforce
To respond to these conditions, transit agencies should adopt new strategies to attract and retain workers across operational, maintenance, and administrative roles, including:
- Carefully monitoring their wages and those for similar job postings in the region to ensure they remain competitive across position types. In regions where transit agencies already pay less, they may need to increase wages to attract more employees, especially given the skills requirements transit positions often have.
- Prioritizing outreach for a diverse range of job candidates, including by reducing unnecessary credentials, such as college degrees, in circumstances where they are unneeded. Agencies can also cover the costs of new training, such as for commercial driver’s licenses, rather than requiring jobseekers to hold these upfront.
- Expanding benefits to meet employees’ needs. Agencies could consider, for example, providing child care assistance options for employees who work jobs outside the traditional 9-to-5 schedule.
- Providing some employees, such as those in administration, the ability to work from home at least several days of the week. This could increase agencies’ ability to recruit staff who enjoy the comfort of not going to the office.
These approaches can help transit agencies throughout the United States better provide their essential services by becoming more competitive in their regional job markets.
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