Free SEPTA passes are now available for Philly city employees and some low-income residents

Philadelphia city employees and some residents living in poverty can get free SEPTA passes beginning Friday as part of a new program that city officials say could benefit 50,000 people.

The move represents a major expansion of SEPTA’s Key Advantage program, which allows employers to buy transit passes at wholesale price and offer them to employees. It comes as SEPTA is working to increase usage and as the city is looking for new ways to recruit and retain workers amid a staff shortage.

City officials and SEPTA authorities cheered the program during a news conference Monday, saying it will bolster SEPTA ridership, attract new employees to the city, drive economic activity, and cut down on pollution.

“An accessible, safe, and reliable transit system is essential to growth and equity in any major city,” Mayor Jim Kenney said. “The SEPTA Key program is a collective effort between SEPTA, corporations, and other major employers, and now the city, to build an even stronger, faster, and safer system for all and reduce emissions in our region.”

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Here’s what you need to know about the free passes — and how to get one.

1. Almost all city employees are eligible to get one through SEPTA Key Advantage. That includes firefighters, social workers, sanitation workers, accountants, IT professionals, librarians, and more. Full-time, part-time, and temporary employees who earn paid sick time are eligible. That amounts to about 22,000 employees, and about 10,000 of them have already registered for the benefit.

2. About 25,000 people living in poverty will be eligible for a separate zero-fare pilot program that is also rolling out this fall. The first cohort of program participants will be randomly selected based on income and age, and include residents living at 150% of the federal poverty line.

For city employees: All eligible city employees received an email to enroll, and the city also held in-person registration events through the summer. While enrollment opened in July, the benefit does not begin until Friday.

For low-income residents: Eligible residents will receive a postcard in the mail alerting them that they have been enrolled. Officials said those will be sent this week.

The passes are considered “all-access” and can be used on any SEPTA service. That includes buses, trolleys, the Market-Frankford and Broad Street subway lines, the Regional Rail lines, and the Norristown High Speed Line.

The SEPTA Key Advantage program that allows employers to buy passes started in May 2022, when some of the city’s largest employers — Penn Medicine, Drexel University, and Wawa — began handing out the all-access passes to employees.

After the initial rollout, SEPTA expanded the institutional pass program and in March it became available to all employers.

Around the same time, Kenney delivered his fiscal year 2024 budget proposal to City Council, which included funding for the city to enroll in Key Advantage and provide zero-fare passes to low-income residents. Council passed the budget in June, allocating $40 million this year to the programs — $31 million for those at or near the poverty level and $9 million for city employees.

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Kenney administration officials said the benefit for employees is intended to boost city hiring and retention efforts. About 1 in 5 city jobs are vacant amid a short-staffing crisis that has affected departments across the municipal government, and the city has committed to a handful of new perks as a way to attract applicants.

“We believe this program to be an investment in our workforce,” said Marsha Greene-Jones, the city’s deputy human resources director.

Though the transit authority is selling the passes at wholesale price, SEPTA sees it as an opportunity to expand ridership, which declined precipitously during the pandemic and has not rebounded to pre-2020 rates.

SEPTA has relied on federal relief funds to pay for its operations amid the revenue shortage. But officials have warned that those dollars will be exhausted next spring and the transit authority will need to dramatically cut service or increase fares if it doesn’t secure new funding.

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Leslie S. Richards, SEPTA general manager and CEO, said while the Key Advantage program is revenue-neutral for SEPTA — because the passes are sold at a drastically discounted price — she believes increasing ridership by thousands of people could have a ripple effect that brings more riders back.

“Everyone feels safer and more of a community when you see more people [riding],” she said.

Richards said that in addition to encouraging more employers to join the Key Advantage program, the transit authority is focused on partnering with colleges and universities to provide transit passes to students.

She said Swarthmore College is the first to sign on and students will be eligible to receive passes this fall. SEPTA expects other schools to follow suit.