LONG ISLAND, NY — The Long Island Railroad’s weekend ridership topped pre-pandemic levels by more than 25 percent in 2025, a new study from the New York State Comptroller’s office shows.
In the new report, Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli’s office said that the LIRR’s weekend ridership had increased in 2025, amounting to 27 percent more riders than there were on weekends in 2019. Much of that increase, the comptroller’s office said, could be attributed to added service that brought Long Islanders to Grand Central instead of Penn Station.
With brief downswings in January and February over the past couple of years, the comptroller’s office said the Long Island Railroad has mostly exceeded pre-pandemic levels every month since 2023, when the Grand Central service was introduced.
“LIRR weekend ridership is the only transit mode analyzed where ridership has fully recovered and even improved compared to the pre-pandemic baseline. In 2025, average weekend ridership of about 267,000 was 27 percent higher than in 2019,” the comptroller’s report reads. “Summer months and the holiday season in November and December have seen particularly heavy usage with ridership in August 2025 reaching 1.5 million riders…Weekend ridership on the LIRR in 2025 was 17 percent of the total ridership for the year, a big jump from 2019 when weekend ridership was 12 percent of the total.”
By comparison, Metro North weekend ridership only reached about 92 percent of pre-pandemic levels in 2025, while weekend subway ridership only reached 89 percent of its pre-pandemic total and MTA bus riders stood at just two-thirds of their pre-pandemic numbers.
Returning to normal more slowly? Weekday ridership, upended by remote work and changing office schedules brought on by the pandemic.
“The gap between ridership recovery on major modes of transit on weekends and weekdays has actually expanded in recent years, suggesting weekend demand remains an important driver of overall ridership recovery as weekend ridership as a percentage of the total continues to increase since 2019,” The report reads. “Weekend ridership is a larger share of overall ridership for each transit mode than it was in 2019.”
As for what these trends could mean for riders in the future, the report recommended that the MTA focus on more frequent, reliable weekend service to meet demand shifts and study data to see which parts of the metro area might be lacking sufficient weekend service.
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