NYC Congestion Pricing Enters Year Two: What NJ & Staten Island Travelers Should Know Before Their Next Manhattan Trip

New York City's congestion pricing program is now well into its second year, and this month brought two updates worth paying attention to if your business regularly sends people from Newark or Staten Island into Manhattan: a new city health report on what the toll has and hasn't changed, and continued confirmation that the program itself is here to stay. Neither update changes what the toll costs. Both are useful context for anyone still routing their own car into the zone instead of handing that problem to a driver.

What the toll actually charges, one year plus in

Congestion pricing took effect in January 2025 and charges most passenger vehicles a toll, generally $9 during peak hours, to drive on local streets in Manhattan south of 60th Street, according to Gothamist's reporting on the program. That zone covers most of the destinations NJ and Staten Island travelers are actually headed to for business: Midtown offices, Hudson Yards, the Flatiron District, and Lower Manhattan's financial district. The toll applies regardless of where a trip starts, so a car crossing in from the Holland Tunnel, Lincoln Tunnel, or over the George Washington Bridge owes it the same as one starting in Brooklyn, as long as it ends up south of 60th Street during tolled hours.

The legal fight is over, and traffic is measurably down

For much of 2025, congestion pricing's future was genuinely uncertain, with the Trump administration repeatedly moving to shut it down. That fight is now settled: a federal judge upheld the program in March 2026, rejecting the latest attempt to halt it, according to CBS News New York's coverage of the ruling. Marking the program's one-year anniversary in January, Gov. Kathy Hochul and Mayor Zohran Mamdani said traffic within the congestion zone was down roughly 11% since launch, per CBS News New York's report on the anniversary press conference. For anyone who has sat in Midtown gridlock on a Tuesday afternoon, an 11% reduction is noticeable without making the zone anything close to empty.

What a new city health report found this week

On August 16, 2026, the NYC Health Department released a first-of-its-kind study examining the program's air quality impact, and the findings are more nuanced than either side's talking points suggest. Citywide, air quality "was not any different because of congestion pricing," Health Commissioner Dr. Alister Martin said, per Gothamist's coverage of the report. Notably, the report found no increase in pollution along highway corridors outside the tolling zone, such as the Cross Bronx Expressway, where critics had predicted drivers would divert and dirty the air instead. That contrasts with an earlier Columbia University study that found air pollution had risen in the South Bronx, a discrepancy the city's report doesn't fully resolve. The MTA has committed $70 million toward pollution mitigation in the Bronx from congestion pricing revenue, including $20 million for cleaner refrigerated trailers at the Hunts Point Produce Market and $20 million for childhood asthma programs, per the same Gothamist reporting.

Where the toll revenue is actually going

Beyond the Bronx mitigation spending, congestion pricing revenue is funding transit upgrades across the region, including service boosts on the A and L subway lines and, closer to home for KulaRides clients, faster and more frequent bus service on Staten Island. We covered the Staten Island side of that story in more detail, including the borough's 130 new buses and a seven-minute-faster SIM8X express route to Midtown, in our recent look at Newark and Staten Island infrastructure investment. None of that changes the underlying math for a car trip into the zone, though: the toll is charged per vehicle, not per rider, and it applies whether you're driving yourself or being driven.

What this means if you're the one behind the wheel

For an NJ-based executive or a Staten Island resident driving their own car into Manhattan, congestion pricing means one more line item to track: an E-ZPass account in good standing, awareness of the $9 peak-hour window, and a higher toll if you're billed by plate rather than transponder. None of that is complicated, but it's one more thing to manage on top of parking, which in the tolling zone remains expensive and often scarce near Midtown or Lower Manhattan meetings. It's a small tax on driving yourself into the city that simply doesn't apply if someone else is doing the driving and absorbing the toll as part of a fixed fare.

How this maps to KulaRides

KulaRides is a New Jersey-based, owner-operated chauffeur service built around one flagship vehicle, the 2026 Chevrolet Suburban RST, and congestion pricing is exactly the kind of detail our clients don't have to think about. Tolls, including the Manhattan congestion charge, are built into our pricing rather than surprising you on an E-ZPass statement weeks later, and our driver already knows which streets and tunnel approaches make the most sense at a given hour. For a Manhattan meeting or a flight connection, our corporate travel service gives NJ and NYC companies one predictable point of contact instead of a different rideshare driver, and different toll surprises, every trip. If your trip starts or ends at the airport rather than in Manhattan itself, our airport transfer service covers that leg with the same fixed pricing. For more on how growing companies in the region are structuring their ground transportation this year, see our corporate travel guide.