MADISON SQUARE GARDEN CHARGES YOU $16 A BEER AND PAYS $0 IN PROPERTY TAX

A beer at a Rangers game at Madison Square Garden costs $16. That ties Las Vegas for the most expensive beer in the National Hockey League, according to a price survey Casino.org published Oct. 14. The building it's poured in sits on Seventh Avenue between 31st and 33rd Streets, on top of Penn Station, and it hasn't paid the city property tax since 1982. The city's Independent Budget Office counted the bill the Garden never got at more than $946.7 million, in 2023 dollars. Here's how both numbers work, and who covers the second one.

Casino.org, a gambling information site that also runs consumer price surveys, priced the same basic order at all 32 NHL arenas in October: one beer, one soft drink and two hot dogs, on the idea that a fan eats two over a game. It pulled prices from team and arena menus, mobile-order menus and other current-season reporting, and used each arena's signature dog where there is one. At the Garden the order came to $96: a $16 beer, an $8 soda and two TopDog Five Pounders at $36 each. The next most expensive arena, the Kings' in Los Angeles, came to $52. The cheapest, Montreal, came to $20.83. Time Out New York picked up the survey on Oct. 22 and put the Garden's total at roughly 361 percent above Montreal's.

That $96 needs one honest footnote. The Five Pounder is a giant loaded dog, piled with shaved beef, peppers, onions, sriracha cheddar and crispy onion strings, by Casino.org's description. When it sold for $35 in 2023, a Delish reviewer said it could be split among four people. Two of them make up $72 of the $96, so the total isn't a like-for-like order across the league.

The beer is. At $16, the Garden ties the Vegas Golden Knights for the top of the list. UBS Arena, where the Islanders play, charges $15. The Winnipeg Jets charge $5.28. The league average is $11.98, up about 69 percent from just over $7 a decade ago, by Casino.org's count. Two years ago it was a dollar cheaper here: in 2024 an Action Network study reported by PIX11 had two beers at the Garden at $30. MSG Eats runs more than 70 concession stands this season, amNY reported in its October preview, from Carnegie Deli pastrami to Tao sushi.

Two blocks away the price drops by half. Tara Mór, an Irish pub at 150 West 30th Street, lists every draft beer at $8 during happy hour, Monday to Friday from 4 to 6:30, Guinness included, on its own menu. The Celly, at Ninth Avenue and 29th Street, lists $5 drafts at happy hour every day from 8 AM to 7 PM. A bar and an arena aren't the same business, and the arena has a staff, a stand and a building's worth of overhead to cover. One line of that overhead is missing from the Garden's books, though, and it's the rest of this story.

The exemption sits in Section 429 of New York's Real Property Tax Law, passed in 1982. The IBO's March 2023 memo describes it plainly: a full exemption from city property tax, as long as major league hockey and basketball teams keep playing their home games in the building. It ends only if the state repeals it. Before 1982 the arena paid property tax, Gothamist reported. Its owners threatened to move the Knicks and Rangers to New Jersey, the IBO memo notes, citing energy costs and their property tax bill. Mayor Ed Koch pushed the deal through, six years after the Giants had left for New Jersey. Koch believed he was approving about a decade of breaks worth roughly $5 million a year, according to New York Times reporting cited by Bisnow.

The decade never ended. Gulf & Western, the Garden's owner in 1982, took the deal on the condition that it would end if the Knicks or Rangers stopped playing home games there within ten years, Gothamist reported, and both teams stayed. The Dolan family inherited the exemption when it bought the Garden in 1994, by Gothamist's account. When the IBO reviewed the break in July 2023, it found the exemption "lacks oversight requirements": no data reporting, no employment terms, no sunset date, no scheduled review and no say for the city.

Every February, the city's Department of Finance publishes a report on the property taxes it doesn't collect. In the February 2026 edition, the line for major league sports facilities, a single exemption, shows an exempt assessed value of $399.1 million and a cost of $43.3 million for fiscal 2026. Atlantic Yards Report, which tracks the city's arena breaks every year, matched that figure to the Garden, up from $42.9 million the year before. In 2023 the IBO put the yearly value at $42 million, worked from a Finance Department market value of $867 million, and called that a conservative estimate.

Added up, the IBO's July 2023 review counted more than $946.7 million in property tax the city didn't collect from the Garden from 1982 to 2023, in 2023 dollars. That's a city number, from the city's own budget office.

Put it in the terms of the stand. $43.3 million is about 2.7 million $16 beers, every year. The 41-year total is about 59 million of them. Put it in the terms of the city budget, and one year of the Garden's break is more than the $32.7 million the city put into its fiscal 2026 budget to keep libraries open seven days a week, and more than the $41 million it set aside for arts education in the schools, by 6sqft's tally of the deal.

Brad Hoylman-Sigal, then a state senator from Manhattan, led the push to end it. He asked the IBO to compare the city's arena deals, and the answer came back in March 2023: Yankee Stadium, Citi Field and Barclays Center together pay $167 million a year in payments in lieu of taxes, and the Garden pays none. "Every stadium in New York City pays the equivalent of property taxes, except MSG," Hoylman-Sigal said in a Senate release. That month the state Senate put a repeal in its budget proposal, the first time it had backed one, Gothamist reported. The Assembly left it out, and Gov. Kathy Hochul's office didn't take a position. It didn't pass. The Finance Department's 2026 report still carries the break.

The Garden's side: a spokesperson called the venue "a significant job creator" and told Gothamist its break is hundreds of millions of dollars less than what other New York teams and venues get. MSG Entertainment told Bisnow the IBO's own analysis showed its subsidy is among the smallest of the city's major venues.

The fight moved to the City Council that year over a different piece of paper. The Garden needs a special permit to run an arena over Penn Station. The first one ran 50 years, and in 2013 it was renewed for ten, Commercial Observer reported. In 2023 the Garden asked for ten more. Two Council committees approved five, and on Sept. 14, 2023 the full Council voted unanimously for five years, the shortest permit in the arena's history, ABC7 reported. In exchange, the Garden had to draw up a transit plan for the Penn Station overhaul. A Garden spokesperson called the five years a "grave disservice" to New Yorkers, Commercial Observer reported. The permit vote didn't touch the tax break. Only Albany can.

The repeal is still alive on paper. State Sen. Brian Kavanagh's bill, S957, with a matching bill, A1520, in the Assembly, would end the exemption and send the money to the MTA Finance Fund. The state Senate's bill page lists its last action as a referral to the Local Government Committee on Jan. 7, 2026. Repeal bills have been around since 2013 and have never cleared committee in either chamber, The New York Groove reported in May.

The answer to who pays it instead is nobody, in the direct sense. The city doesn't send the bill, and the Finance Department books the missing money as a tax expenditure, a cost it counts on paper every year next to everything it spends. The $43.3 million doesn't land on any one New Yorker's bill. It's money the city never collects, out of a budget it still has to balance with the taxes everyone else pays.

The other arenas make the comparison plain. Yankee Stadium, Citi Field and Barclays Center all get big breaks of their own, and each one pays something back in lieu of taxes. The Garden is the oldest venue getting a subsidy, by the IBO's account, and the only one whose break has nothing to do with what the building cost to build. It pays nothing back.

Hoylman-Sigal wanted the money sent to the MTA, Bisnow reported, and the Kavanagh bill writes that in. MTA trains pull in under the arena, and the fans getting off them pay $16 at the stand.

Every bar within a few blocks of Seventh Avenue sets its beer price against its own costs. The Garden sets its price at the top of the league, inside a building the state took off the tax rolls in 1982 to keep two teams that never left. The $16 is the Garden's call. The $43.3 million a year is Albany's, and Albany keeps making it.

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