The annual toll hike will be 4% this year.
The Pennsylvania Turnpike recently announced its annual toll hike at 4%. The increase is the turnpike’s 18th toll hike in a row.
The increase will begin on January 4th and continues the agency’s goal of cutting annual rate increases to just 3% by 2028.
The increases are part of a strategy to pay down the turnpike’s $16 billion in long-term debt as a result of borrowing to pay its annual fees to PennDOT.
The final 3% hike is expected to last until 2050.
In 2026, the 4% increase will raise fees for motorists who use the E-ZPass transponder from 7 cents a mile and $1.09 for every overhead gantry a driver passes through to 7.3 cents a mile and $1.13 per gantry.
For drivers who do not use an E-ZPass and receive a bill in the mail from a photo of their license plate taken at gantries, the fee will be 14.6 cents a mile and $2.26 per gantry to cover processing fees.
Toll By Plate fees are doubled compared to E-ZPass fees. Data shows that about 86% of turnpike users have E-ZPass.
When the 2026 toll hike was approved this past July, Chief Financial Officer Richard Dreher said the agency’s debt service was about $1 billion a year. The debt service will continue to grow until it peaks at $1.2 billion a year in 2038.
In 2038, the debt payments will begin to drop until the debt is finally paid off in 2050 with the help of the annual toll hikes.
The annual hikes come with a recent switch to eliminating toll booths and using all-electronic tolling. This reduced the turnpike’s workforce by 500 toll connection jobs and dozens of administrative positions.
Overall, traffic on the Pennsylvania Turnpike is within 5% of pre-pandemic levels. Commercial traffic is up 12.3%, and passenger traffic is down about 7.7%.
Turnpike data shows that traffic generated $1.8 billion in annual revenue for the year ended September 30th.
