Students, seniors and low-income New Yorkers will soon get a free or discounted OMNY card instead of a MetroCard, as the MTA seeks to speed up the long-delayed rollout of the tap-and-go payment system.

The MTA had hoped to phase out the MetroCard entirely by now. But the pandemic, and delays to the rollout of OMNY, have extended the use of MetroCards indefinitely. Less than half of New York transit riders currently use OMNY.

On Monday, top MTA officials shared their frustration with the slow shift to OMNY, blaming the company that designed the technology, the companies that handle pre-tax commuter benefits, and poor branding.

MTA Chair Janno Lieber said extending OMNY this year to New Yorkers who receive discounted fares – like seniors, paratransit riders and low-income residents enrolled in the Fair Fares program – was a big step toward making the payment system part of more commuters’ routines. More workers who use pre-tax commuter benefit cards will also be able to use OMNY this year, he said. Students will receive OMNY cards this fall, instead of a MetroCard.

“Kids who are going through the gate, they sometimes struggle to find their MetroCard, but they know where their phone is,” MTA Chair Janno Lieber said Monday. “We got to get that population, which is one of our key populations, we got to get them onto OMNY soon.”

Lieber said if kids successfully adopt OMNY, he’ll consider allowing all door boarding on local buses. While all buses have OMNY readers at the front and rear, they’re only activated at the front of local buses. MTA officials had previously said high rates of fare evasion on buses were the reason it hadn’t expanded OMNY on local bus routes. Nearly half of riders on local buses do not pay the fare.

“There's no solution to slow OMNY adoption better than giving OMNY users an extra door to board through,” Danny Pearlstein, the policy director of advocacy group Riders Alliance, wrote in an email. “Fare evasion is no excuse for not doing everything possible to speed things up on the slowest buses in the nation.”

The MTA also said it had a plan for students who lose their OMNY cards.

Jamie-Torres Springer, who is in charge of construction projects at the MTA, confirmed that students who lose their OMNY card will be able to easily request a new one, and the MTA will cancel the old one, like a credit card, Springer suggested.

“The old one will be deactivated when you replace it and you can be issued a new one in a fairly seamless way,” he told the MTA board at a meeting Monday.

In the 2025-2026 school year students will have the choice of loading their free OMNY trips onto their smartphones or using a physical OMNY card.

Springer blamed the reluctance to adopt OMNY on confusion about what exactly it is. Even the words behind the acronym, One Metro New York, don’t indicate what it does.

“It's not a card, and it's not an app. It's a system for paying fares,” Springer said.

Lieber said many companies that issue pre-tax commuter benefit cards to city employees have been slow to shift to OMNY.

Commuter benefit cards can be added to smartphones – iPhone users can do this using the Wallet app – allowing easy use of the pre-tax benefits.

“It's a ton of work with sometimes a recalcitrant set of partners, the companies who do these pre-tax benefits, but we're attacking that,” Lieber said.

The MTA board is also considering dropping Cubic Transportation Systems, which designed OMNY, as the agency extends the service to commuter railroads.

It will vote Wednesday on whether to shift the contract to Scheidt & Bachmann and Masabi, two companies that made the agency’s Train Time app. That would cost $36 million – though the MTA claimed the cost would be covered by Cubic.

Once OMNY is integrated with the Train Time app, users will be able to buy commuter railroad tickets and pay for subway and bus fares, with the future potential of added discounts for commuters that use both services.

Currently, the only fare discount available on OMNY is free rides for the rest of a week, once commuters hit 13 rides in one week. But advocates hope that will expand soon.

“We'll continue to advocate for combined discounts with transfers among modes for a seamless ride, and more affordable options that will now be available through the technology that's behind the fare system,” Lisa Daglian, executive director of the Permanent Citizens Advisory Committee, a commuter advocate at the MTA, wrote in an email.