Thursday, October 8, 2026
Uber drivers’ wages have been cut by about 20 percent after congestion pricing, which charges motorists $9 to enter Manhattan at or below 60th Street during peak traffic times, went into effect on Jan. 5.
Governor Kathy Hochul claims the funds raised from the state-run program are for upgrades to the Metropolitan Transportation Authority.
However, Uber drivers are saying the company is citing congestion pricing as their reason for lowering base pay, which has been reduced from $5.39 per ride before the program went into effect to $4 per ride after.
Steve Azor, a driver for Uber since 2016, lives in Elmont, but has a Taxi and Limousine Commission plate that allows him to operate his for-hire-vehicle in New York City.
Azor said he blames congestion pricing for his recent reduction in wages.
Most Uber rides, Azor said, have pickup and drop off points about 10 to 15 street blocks away from each other, taking him about 10 minutes to complete.
With the new cut in base pay, Azor’s average of about $25 an hour, with the previous $5 rate, is now $20 an hour. For an 8-hour day, it lowers his pay from $200 to $160.
However, he said, the impact of the state-run program extends beyond Uber drivers.
The cost is also passed along to customers, who are paying an additional $1.50 congestion pricing fee for rides during peak hours. This new fee is on top of an existing $2.75 congestion fee for Uber trips below 96th Street in Manhattan, which was implemented by the company in 2019.
According to a 2023 article on Uber’s website, the company has been lobbying for congestion pricing since 2015.
“Uber supports congestion pricing,” the article states, “including on our own trips, to fund mass transit infrastructure. We do this because we are a for-profit company and good, robust, public transportation is good for business, reducing the need for car ownership and increasing use cases for Uber.”
The company wrote that it spent millions of dollars funding message testing, research, lobbyists and grassroots organizing to assist their fight for congestion pricing. In a statement to the New York Post in 2019, the company says it spent $2 million from 2015 to 2019 on lobbying efforts alone.
However, the company says it is slashing drivers’ wages as a result of the rising costs of operation, including the congestion pricing it lobbied for.
The Independent Drivers Guild, a Machinists Union affiliate of app-based drivers, shared a photo of an email blasted out to Uber drivers on their Facebook page. The company notified drivers that beginning Jan. 5, toll reimbursement would be slashed from $20 to $16.06 during peak hours and $14.06 during off-peak hours.
In that email, the company cited congestion pricing as the cause for the decrease in pay.
“It’s getting harder and they pay less,” said Antoine Mondesir, who has been an Uber driver in Brooklyn since 2017. “The company doesn’t care about anybody else. They don’t care about drivers.”
Mondesir used to work full time for the company, but once Uber started lowering its base pay, he could no longer afford to drive for the company full time and had to find work elsewhere.
“There’s no way you’re gonna do this full time to live,” Mondesir said. “You won’t be able to feed your family.”
He said he used to make around $300 for eight to nine hours of work in the first few years he worked for the company. However, last year, he said he was only earning around $200 for the same amount of work.
“These companies are looking for more profit,” he said. “When pay goes down, I don’t think they’re going to put it back up.”
While Uber has not released 2025 statistics, the company has been steadily increasing profits every year since it was founded in 2009. Profits have soared from $11.1 billion in 2020 to $43.9 billion in 2024.
However, the 2025 Gridwise Analytics’ Annual Gig Mobility report shows a decrease in wages for Uber drivers of 4 percent since 2023, despite rideshare prices increasing by 7.2 percent for customers in the same timeframe.
“They put an additional cost on customers, but we’re getting paid less,” Mondesir said.
State Senator Patricia Canzoneri-Fitzpatrick said she thinks it’s terrible Uber drivers are taking a pay cut simply because the company wants to squeeze as much profit from their own workers and customers.
Canzoneri-Fitzpatrick, who represents Franklin Square and Elmont, said she is staunchly against congestion pricing and claims it’s a “regressive tax” on commuters, many of which are workers.
The reduction in Uber drivers’ wages, she continued, demonstrates the trickle-down effect of how congestion pricing adds on costs that are going to “hurt everybody.”
“Those Uber drivers are working hard,” she said. “They deserve to make their fair wage. I don’t want to see them take a pay cut as a result of congestion pricing.”
Statistics listed on the MTA’s data transparency website show that TLC taxis and for-hire vehicles, which include vehicles used for Uber and Lyft, generated a total of $22.1 million in revenue in the program’s first two months of operation. That was 22 percent of the program’s overall revenue earnings, which were roughly $100.6 million.
“I think the whole thing is a scam,” Azor said of congestion pricing, adding that the MTA’s incompetence in collecting tolls from drivers is to blame for their loss in revenue each year. “If they were to get that money they lose each year, they wouldn’t need congestion pricing.”
According to a Jan. 29 press release by the MTA, the program has been successful in reducing traffic. The release states one million fewer vehicles entered the congestion zone in Manhattan in the first three weeks of the program, and that there were reductions in travel times of 10 to 30 percent as bus and subway ridership increased.
Regardless of traffic improvements, however, workers say they are the ones suffering the consequences of the program, along with their customers.
