Brightline’s Florida Ridership Falls Short, Adding Stress to $2.2B Debt Stack
The private train service missed interest payments and accepted a higher interest rate
By Jeff Ostrowski February 20, 2026 1:40 pm
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Private train service Brightline has fallen far short of its projections in Florida to ferry 6.6 million passengers a year between Miami and Orlando, a level of ridership that would have generated $697 million in annual revenue.
Instead, in 2025, its second full year of service to Central Florida, Brightline carried just 3.1 million passengers and took in $214 million, according to a bond filing.
The financial fallout from the missed ridership goals is being felt by bondholders. According to a Feb. 17 filing, bondholders granted Brightline a two-month “grace period” on an interest payment due the same day. As a result, Brightline said it is incurring a 2 percentage point increase in its interest rate on a $985 million issue.
“The borrower did not make the interest payment due on Feb. 17, 2026, and, accordingly, such grace period has commenced,” the filing said.
In an earlier sign of strain, Brightline said last month that it had skipped its second interest payment on $1.2 billion of subordinate municipal bonds.
In all, Brightline has borrowed $2.2 billion from bondholders to finance its 235-mile service between Downtown Miami and Orlando International Airport.
The below-projection ridership numbers come even as Florida continues to experience a tourism boom. The state drew a record 142.9 million visitors in 2024 and was on pace to break that record in 2025, according to Visit Florida.
The rail service linking Miami and Orlando was more than a decade in the making. Over that time, Brightline faced a number of obstacles — including name changes, an abandoned initial public offering of stock, and lawsuits from counties in Florida’s Treasure Coast. Brightline closed service during the COVID-19 pandemic but continued construction of the Orlando extension, which opened only about a year behind schedule.
The mismatch between expenses and revenues largely explains why private passenger railroads had disappeared from the United States. Brightline is the brainchild of Wes Edens, the billionaire co-founder of Fortress Investment Group.
While no passenger rail service has operated profitably in the United States for decades, Edens saw “tremendous opportunity” for a train to capture some of the 50 million yearly trips between Miami and Orlando. If a one-way ticket costs $100, sales add up fast, Edens said during a 2014 call with Wall Street analysts.
“If we capture 4 percent of them, we make $200 million,” Edens said at the time. “We capture 6 percent of them, we actually make $300 million, $400 million. … We think that those numbers are very, very achievable.”
With stations in Aventura, Fort Lauderdale, Boca Raton and West Palm Beach, Brightline has become a high-profile player in South Florida’s downtowns. The rail service also plans to expand to Downtown Tampa.
Jeff Ostrowski can be reached at jostrowski@commercialobserver.com.
