If you're hunting MTA construction work, the number to watch isn't the operating budget we covered in the first installment of this series — it's the $68.4 billion 2025–2029 Capital Plan. Keep the one-liner on the wall: The operating budget runs the system; the capital plan rebuilds and expands it. This is the pot that rebuilds stations, replaces signals, repairs bridges, buys vehicles, and modernizes power, track, shops and yards.

The plan schedules about $9.45 billion in capital commitments for 2026 and $14.27 billion for 2027. Now, a commitment is not a check written that year. It generally means the MTA expects to authorize or obligate the money during that period — the shovels, and the payments, come later. Read those numbers as the pace of the pipeline, not cash on the street.

“A capital-plan allocation is a market signal, not a purchase order.”

Here's the five-year split: New York City Transit, Staten Island Railway and MTA Bus take $47.84 billion — 70 cents of every dollar. Long Island Rail Road gets $6.01 billion (9%), Metro-North $6.01 billion (9%), Major Projects and Expansion $5.25 billion (8%), Bridges and Tunnels $3.00 billion (4%), and interagency work $300 million, under 1%. This is a rail-heavy program, no way around it — stations, cars, signals, track, structures and power get far more money than bus facilities.

The largest categories within the New York City Transit portion rank like this: passenger stations and accessibility, $11.93 billion. Subway cars, $7.62 billion. Signals and communications, $6.91 billion. Line structures, $5.64 billion. Track, $3.72 billion. Buses, $3.29 billion. Traction power, $3.00 billion. Shops and yards, $1.65 billion. Bus depots, $370 million. One caution before you circle the vehicle lines: most of that car and bus money goes to manufacturers and their supply chains. If you build things in the field, your indicators are stations, signals, structures, track, power and facilities.

So which trades are best positioned? Straight up: the MTA doesn't publish a ranking of work by trade. What follows is our read of the plan's largest asset categories and named projects — not a list of guaranteed awards.

Stations first, because it's the deepest water. At nearly $11.93 billion, stations and accessibility are the largest city-transit construction category — work at more than 150 subway stations, full renewals at 10 locations, at least 60 new accessible stations, 45 elevator replacements, 43 escalator replacements, and modern fare gates at more than 150 stations. That's work for GCs, concrete and masonry, structural steel and misc metals, elevator and escalator outfits, electricians, plumbers, HVAC and fire protection, waterproofing, demo and abatement, plus the architects, engineers and CMs wrapped around all of it.

Signals are next. The $6.91 billion signals-and-communications program includes more than 75 miles of modern subway signals on the Broadway N/Q/R/W, the Liberty Avenue and Rockaway A/S, and the Nassau Street J/Z lines. That's a lane for signal-system integrators, low-voltage and electrical contractors, fiber and communications firms, software and controls specialists, testing companies and commissioning teams.

Then structures. The plan puts $5.64 billion into subway line structures and calls for painting and protecting 24 miles of elevated steel. The separate $3 billion Bridges and Tunnels program carries major structural work at the RFK, Throgs Neck and Bronx-Whitestone bridges, with $1.12 billion listed for bridge-and-tunnel structures — steel and concrete rehab, cable dehumidification, anchorage waterproofing, painting. If your shop does structural steel repair, concrete rehab, bridge painting, lead abatement, rigging, scaffold, access, waterproofing, inspection or specialty heavy-civil, this is your section of the plan.

Track comes with a trap. City Transit shows $3.72 billion in track work, and LIRR and Metro-North carry substantial track-and-structure programs of their own. But before you size the outside market off those lines, hear this: the MTA says more than $3.6 billion of track-and-switch work across its agencies is planned for in-house delivery — MTA forces, not your crews. A big category doesn't mean every dollar hits the street as a contract. On track, a lot of it never will.

Round it out with power and facilities: about $3 billion for traction power, plus shops, yards, bus depots and charging infrastructure, with dozens of substations to replace or repair and electrical capacity going up across facilities. That favors high-voltage electrical firms, switchgear and transformer suppliers, utility coordinators, cable installers, controls specialists, fire protection, HVAC, and anybody who's proven they can work an occupied industrial building without shutting it down.

Now the borough map — with a caveat. The MTA doesn't publish one clean dollar figure per borough; many programs are systemwide and several projects cross borough lines. The honest way to read it is by named corridors and facilities.

Manhattan: the largest named project is the $1.7 billion Grand Central Artery program — critical train-shed and terminal infrastructure serving Metro-North — plus station, accessibility, signal, power, tunnel and ventilation work flowing through the systemwide programs.

Brooklyn and Queens split the headliner: the $2.75 billion Interborough Express. The plan says that corridor needs major reconstruction — work on more than 85 bridges and rehabilitation of a 125-year-old tunnel in East New York. Brooklyn also gets the Livonia Shop modernization, station and accessibility work, elevated-structure repairs and signal work on the J/Z and A lines. Queens adds signal work on the N/Q/R/W and Rockaway corridors, LIRR station, track, bridge, power and capacity projects, and bridge-and-tunnel money at the Queens Midtown Tunnel and the Bronx-Whitestone, Throgs Neck, Cross Bay and Marine Parkway bridges.

The Bronx gets the 240th Street subway shop modernization, station and accessibility projects, and Metro-North work at Wakefield and along the Harlem Line — plus the structural, painting and waterproofing work tied to the RFK, Throgs Neck, Bronx-Whitestone and Henry Hudson crossings. Staten Island Railway carries its own $344 million program — stations, accessibility, track, switches, bridge repairs and painting, power switchgear, security and employee facilities — and Bridges and Tunnels assigns $223 million to the Verrazzano-Narrows, including design and state-of-good-repair work.

Now the sentence to tape above your desk: a capital-plan allocation is a market signal, not a purchase order. Some lines are reserves that get carved into projects later. Some work goes to MTA's own forces. Packages get combined, delayed, redesigned, or flipped to design-build, and funding and federal requirements can move the whole schedule. What turns a signal into a job is the paper: track the MTA's current-opportunities page, the My MTA vendor portal, Board procurement materials and the capital-program dashboard, and when a job surfaces, the documents that matter are the actual solicitation, drawings, technical specs, addenda, contract schedule and the project-specific insurance schedule. The broad shape is still clear — the deepest field market is stations and accessibility, then signals, structures, track, power and facilities — and the firms that win it will be the ones that can work safely around live service and manage outages, access, testing and paperwork without bleeding.