The Federal Transit Administration (FTA) has taken the unusual step of making partial-year apportionments of federal mass transit formula funding under the Transit Formula Grants budget account. Normally, FTA refrains from making partial apportionments while operating under a stopgap appropriations “continuing resolution” (CR), but five months into a fiscal year is apparently when FTA gives up and goes through the time-consuming process anyway.

(As it turns out, if they had waited one more week, they might have had a full-year appropriations bill enacted – we’ll see.)

The detailed apportionments are in 24 downloadable Excel spreadsheets, by individual program, here. There are also downloadable funding totals, by urbanized area and by state.

These 2024 apportionments differ from fiscal 2023 and prior-year apportionments in two very important ways:

1. The FY24 apportionments are the first to use the new urbanized area maps and population data from the 2020 Census, so some areas have jumped population tiers from last year to this year, and for urbanized areas crossing the 200,000 population threshold, this has implications for how they can use their federal capital funding for operating expenses.
2. COVID is over, and unlike fiscal 2022 and 2023 apportionments, which held transit providers harmless by crediting them with their pre-COVID 2019 ridership levels (if 2019 was higher than the most recent ridership level, which it usually was), the fiscal 2024 apportionments will be based on the actual 2022 ridership levels.

Urbanized areas that have moved from the 200,000 to under-1-million population tier to the 1-million-and-over population tier are:

• Nashville, TN
• Raleigh, NC
• Richmond, VA

Urbanized areas that have moved from the under-200,000 population tier to the 200,000 to under-1-million tier are:

• Amarillo, TX
• Bremerton, WA
• Clarksville, TN-KY
• College Station-Bryan, TX
• Deltona, FL
• Fargo, ND-MN
• Gainesville, FL
• Livermore-Pleasanton-Dublin, CA
• McKinney-Frisco, TX
• Navarre-Miramar Beach-Destin, FL
• Olympia-Lacey, WA
• Palmdale-Lancaster, CA
• Phoenix West-Goodyear-Avondale, AZ
• Rock Hill, SC
• Santa Barbara, CA
• Temecula-Murrieta-Menifee, CA
• The Woodlands-Conroe, TX