Bus advertising: who sells it, what the units are, and what each authority allows

Bus advertising is bought from the transit authority's concessionaire, not from the authority, and the bus, the shelter it stops at and the bench beside it are often three vendors under three rule sets. The one national unit is the 30 by 144 inch King; Tail and Queen sizes, full wraps and window coverage are decided system by system.

Bus advertising is the largest transit format by display count and the least standardised. The Out of Home Advertising Association of America counted 600,000 bus displays and 88,000 bus shelters in the United States at the end of 2025, against 50,000 static rail and subway displays, and transit was the fastest-growing segment of a $9.46 billion category for the second year running. What makes the bus different from its rail sibling is not the numbers. It is that the vehicle, the shelter it stops at and the street furniture beside it can belong to three public owners, be sold by three companies, and answer to three sets of rules on the same block. This page maps those layers for the largest US systems, lists the dimensions that are actually published, and shows where the rules on wraps and windows diverge.

Who sells bus advertising in each city?

The concessionaire. A transit authority awards a licence, usually for a decade, with a minimum guarantee paid to the authority, and the licensee sells, prints and installs. The shelter is usually a separate business: in New York it belongs to the city rather than the MTA, and in Boston and San Francisco it is sold by a different company from the buses. Every row below was read on the authority's own page or a document it published.

Los Angeles is the clearest case. On one board file on January 25, 2018, Metro awarded the bus system to OUTFRONT Media for ten years with a $262,250,000 minimum guarantee, and the rail system to Intersection for ten years with a $42,902,200 guarantee. A brief that says "LA Metro" is two vendors. Boston splits by asset, San Francisco splits vehicle from shelter, and in New York the shelters are not an MTA asset at all: they belong to the city and are franchised by NYC DOT to JCDecaux, while the buses are sold by OUTFRONT Media under the MTA franchise.

Intersection's 2022 national kit lists bus media in eleven markets: Atlanta, Austin, Chicago, Dallas, Minneapolis, New Jersey, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Portland, San Francisco and Seattle. OUTFRONT Media holds the other large systems in the table. Between them the two companies sell most of the country's transit buses, which is why a national bus plan is usually two conversations rather than twenty.

What are the bus advertising formats and their published sizes?

One exterior unit is standard nationally, the King at 30 inches by 144 inches. Almost everything else is published as "varies by market", and the publishers who print a single Queen or Tail size disagree with each other. Build to the sheet the concessionaire sends for the fleet you bought.

Two things to take from the table. Trim and live area are not the same: on a Los Angeles King, 3 inches of the 30 and 3 of the 144 are outside the live area, and a Tail's live area is 65 by 15 inside a 72 by 21 panel because one template is trimmed to fit each bus type. And the Queen has no national size at all: Intersection's kit says "size vary by market", a small Virginia system publishes 30 by 108, a marketplace publishes 30 by 88 as typical. A creative built to a "standard Queen" will be wrong somewhere.

Shelters follow the same pattern one level down. Intersection's kit specifies a 68.5 by 47.5 inch panel. Los Angeles Metro's own production specs list two shelter vendors in the county with two sizes, 48 by 70 for OUTFRONT and 48 by 69 for Clear Channel. JCDecaux's New York page publishes counts, 2,800 or more locations, 525 digital screens and 5,160 or more backlit panels, and no dimensions.

Are full bus wraps allowed, and can they cover the windows?

Full wraps are sold on most large systems, and the window question is decided by the authority, not the vendor. The industry method is perforated film that reads as solid from outside and as a screen from inside; whether it may be applied, and to which windows, is written into each system's policy or wrap specification, and it changes. Denver rewrote its rule in October 2025. This is the format-by-regulator table for buses, the counterpart of the national one on transit advertising.

The Denver decision puts a number on what a window rule is worth. RTD reported that between April and September 2025, wraps with some window coverage produced about $786,000 in gross advertising revenue, 42% of the on-vehicle total for the period. The board removed that inventory from future agreements anyway. A plan that assumes a full wrap means the same physical coverage in every city is wrong in at least one of them.

The Boston example runs the other way and is the one to remember. Under the MBTA's guidelines an alcohol brand may buy the bus shelter and may not buy the bus that stops at it. Chicago allows alcohol on the bus but caps it at 75 wraps at any one time. The rule is not "transit"; it is the asset, on that system, this year.

Why is bus ridership not an impression count?

Because most of a bus exterior's audience never boards. Ridership counts journeys; an impression, in Geopath's definition, is a person passing a display who is likely to notice the ad, and circulation, the opportunity to see, "is no longer a credible measure of an Out of Home audience". The visibility adjustment that turns one into the other is the whole method, and it is explained on how out-of-home impressions are measured. An interior card's audience is the riders; a King's audience is the sidewalk and the traffic beside it, which ridership does not count at all.

Even the ridership figure needs a footnote. The MTA's 2025 ridership page says bus ridership rose 8.1% to 442 million rides, and its summary table for New York City Transit buses shows 352,146,093 rides and an average weekday of 1,107,691. Both are on the same page; the headline covers more of the MTA's bus operation than the table does. A proposal that quotes one without saying which is not wrong, but it is not checkable either.

The published per-bus audience figures are weaker still. Blue Line Media's bus page lists 9,000 to 100,000 daily impressions for a bus exterior and its transit page lists 9,000 to 17,000 for bus ads, on the same day. AdQuick states that a single bus in a top-25 market "generates 30,000 to 70,000 daily impressions". None of the three states a method. Ask a vendor whether the number in the proposal is Geopath-measured or its own, and which one the contract guarantees. For the category totals that are actually published with a source, see out-of-home advertising statistics.

What do third parties publish on bus advertising cost?

The ranges below are market-level figures compiled from publicly published vendor and industry sources. They are not quotes, and they are not the rates of any single network, including the operator whose campaigns the archive on this site documents, which prices per campaign and does not publish a rate card. Always get a written quote before budgeting.

No transit authority and no concessionaire in the table above publishes a bus rate. OUTFRONT Media, Intersection, JCDecaux and Clear Channel Outdoor all route to a sales contact. The two publishers who do print numbers are a reseller and a marketplace, and they do not agree.

Read the two against each other. Blue Line's floor for a traditional exterior unit is $500 per four weeks; AdQuick's floor for a King in a top-10 market is $1,500 per month, three times higher, and its full-wrap ceiling is above Blue Line's ceiling for any bus unit. Blue Line adds a $5,000 to $15,000 minimum per market that AdQuick does not, and lists no production cost where AdQuick adds $500 to $3,000 or more per bus. Neither says how the ranges were derived. Treat them as two published opinions, not a market price.

How do you reach the same corridor at street level?

A bus King rides the route the authority set, in the loop the concession sells, under a content policy the board wrote. The same corridor can be covered by inventory whose route is the campaign's to choose: Firefly sells digital and static tops on taxis and rideshare vehicles and 360, 270 and 180 wraps, with the tops in 15 named markets; Carvertise sells wraps on rideshare and delivery drivers' cars; Can't Miss US runs LED trucks in cities that permit them. None answers to the transit authority, which is the point and the risk: the content policy does not apply, and neither does the concession's audience figure. What replaces it is on how out-of-home impressions are measured.

How do you buy bus advertising?

1. Name the system, then the licensee. The authority's advertising page names the vendor. If the city splits bus from shelter, or bus from rail, that is two contacts.
2. Specify the unit by trim and live area, from the vendor's sheet for that fleet, not from a category name. Ask for the template per bus type for Tails and wraps.
3. Read the content standards before creative is signed off. Forum designation, prohibited categories, and the asset-by-asset list, since the same category can be allowed on the shelter and not the bus.
4. Get the window rule in writing. Which windows a wrap may cover, what film is required, and whether the rule changed for contracts after a given date.
5. Settle production and installation. Who prints, who installs, who pays for removal, and what a creative change costs mid-flight.
6. Ask which audience figure the contract guarantees. Geopath-measured, vendor-estimated, or ridership dressed as impressions.
7. Check the term. Four-week cycles are the norm; a wrap usually carries a longer minimum because of installation cost.

The category question, whether a bus earns the budget against a screen that follows the audience rather than a route, is the subject of the guide to out-of-home advertising, and the vendor map, which companies sell what across the whole category, is on outdoor advertising companies.