By Erik Noonan | June 24th, 2026

The Minnesota e-bike rebate program is dead — at least for now. The two-year program, funded by the 2023 legislature, ran its course at the end of 2025. There’s no allocation for 2026. No replacement in the pipeline. Just a program that worked, a waiting list of tens of thousands of Minnesotans who couldn’t get in, and a state legislature that spent $254 million this session giving drivers a one-year discount on their car tab fees instead.

Let’s talk about that.

What the Rebate Was

The Minnesota Department of Revenue managed the e-bike rebate program for calendar years 2024 and 2025. The program offered up to $1,500 per purchase — applied at the point of sale, not as a reimbursement — with sliding-scale amounts tied to income. Lower-income applicants could receive up to 75 percent of eligible costs. The cap was $2 million per year. A shoestring budget by state transportation standards.

When the application portal opened on June 5, 2024, it crashed within minutes — overwhelmed before most people could finish an application. When it reopened on July 2, over 61,500 people entered the waiting room. The portal stayed open for 18 minutes before closing with 14,428 applications. Of those, 1,519 received a rebate. Just over 10 percent.

The demand wasn’t ambiguous. It was overwhelming. Over 1% of all Minnesotans tried to simultaneously log-in to the same glitchy government website on a weekday morning in the summer. 

What the Data Shows

A University of Minnesota Humphrey School research team analyzed the full application pool and surveyed participants. Here’s what they found:

Who applied: Applicants came from across the state, with concentrations in the Twin Cities metro and Rochester. The top zip codes for applications included South Minneapolis neighborhoods like Seward, Longfellow, and Hiawatha, and the Rochester area. On a per capita basis, rural zip codes showed some of the highest application rates in the state — communities in Waskish, Twin Lakes, and Tofte all ranked near the top.

Who got it: Of those who received a rebate and used it, users skewed slightly younger and, among filers not filing jointly, had a median adjusted gross income of about $40,000–$46,000. That’s well below Minnesota’s median household income of $85,000. The rebate reached people who needed it.

What they did with it: Most rebate users rode for exercise, errands, and time with friends and family. A smaller share commuted to work or school — but that’s where the infrastructure gaps show up, not the demand.

One survey respondent put it plainly: their family went from two cars to one after using the rebate on an e-bike.

According to AAA’s 2025 Your Driving Costs study, the average cost of owning and operating a new vehicle is $11,577 per year when you factor in depreciation, insurance, fuel, maintenance, and financing. A second car in a household isn’t a luxury for most families — it feels like a necessity, because our transportation system is built to require it. But it is also a financial anchor. Twelve thousand dollars a year is rent. It’s groceries. It’s a college fund contribution. It’s the kind of money that, freed up, changes what a family can do.

A $1,500 e-bike rebate that enables a household to shed a car payment, drop an insurance policy, and skip the gas station a few days a week isn’t a bike subsidy. It’s a financial resilience tool. The rebate costs the state $1,500 once. The household saves potentially thousands every year after that — and those savings stay in the local economy, not in an oil company’s quarterly earnings.

What didn’t happen: Most survey respondents who didn’t receive a rebate didn’t give up on the idea. Nearly 70 percent said they were still interested in buying an e-bike. More than 77 percent said they planned to apply again in 2025.

There’s no 2026 program to apply to.

The VMT Problem

Minnesota has a vehicle miles traveled (VMT) and a greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction goal. MnDOT’s 2040 target is 9,195 VMT per capita — a meaningful reduction from current levels. VMT directly ties to greenhouse gas emissions, air quality, and the accelerating cost of maintaining a highway system that’s already in trouble.

Minnesota’s state highway system carries a deferred maintenance liability in the billions. Roads and bridges built for traffic loads of the 1970s are being maintained — or not — by a transportation funding system that can barely keep pace. Every dollar spent on new capacity is a dollar not spent fixing what’s already broken. Every additional vehicle mile driven compounds that problem.

E-bikes address this in a specific, measurable way. Engineers and data scientists at SRF Consulting ran the numbers using Minnesota-specific travel behavior data. Their conclusion: a $100 million annual e-bike rebate program could reduce nearly 364 million VMT per year in Minnesota — roughly 9 percent of the state’s 2040 per capita VMT target, gone in one program.

For context: $100 million is approximately the cost of one freeway interchange. We build those to add VMT, often with flimsy statistical backing to justify the cost. We could instead run a VMT-reduction program at the same price.

Denver’s e-bike rebate program provides real-world evidence. After Denver launched a similar program in 2022, 71 percent of survey respondents said they used their gas vehicles less often after purchasing an e-bike. Twenty-nine percent were new to riding bikes entirely. 

Nationally, approximately 60 percent of all vehicle trips are six miles or less, here in Minnesota that number is even lower. That’s core e-bike territory.

What We Spent Instead

This session, the Minnesota legislature approved a one-year reduction in vehicle registration fees — rolling back the tab fee rate from 1.57 percent to 1.28 percent. The cost of that one-time subsidy: a $254 million backfill from the state’s general fund.

Two hundred fifty-four million dollars. One year. For a tax subsidy on car ownership. It’s a short term answer that adds to the long term problem.

The e-bike rebate program cost $2 million per year and turned away more than 13,000 qualified applicants in its first year alone. If the legislature had directed even a fraction of that $254 million into an enduring, income-scaled e-bike rebate, they could have funded the program for decades — and reached tens of thousands of Minnesotans who are still waiting.

The tab fee cut is one-year. The VMT problem isn’t. The GHG reduction mandate isn’t. The deferred maintenance liability isn’t.

Saint Paul Bicycle Coalition’s own Zack Mensinger laid out the math clearly in a MinnPost Community Voices piece a few years back: drivers don’t come close to paying for the cost of roads, and people who bike actually subsidize drivers by several hundred dollars. When we spend $254 million to make driving slightly cheaper for one year while letting a $2 million active transportation program expire, we’re not making a neutral choice. It is Minnesota’s leaders picking a direction and laying on the gas.

What a Better Program Could Look Like

The University of Minnesota researchers and the 2025 legislative process both generated ideas for improving the next rebate program:

• A lottery system instead of first-come, first-served. The application portal crash in 2024 disadvantaged rural applicants with slower internet, hourly workers who couldn’t monitor a computer at 11 a.m. on a Tuesday, and people without multiple devices. A lottery levels the field. BikeMN successfully pushed for this to be the format in 2025 and we will be firm on it remaining or being changed to rebate or discount that is always available. 
  
• Smaller rebate amounts to reach more people. BikeMN advocated successfully for dropping the maximum from $1,500 to $750 in the program’s second year — doubling the number of rebates available within the same budget. That model should be the baseline for any future program utilizing minimal resources.
  
• A hard income cap with explicit priority for lower-income applicants. The program already reserved 40 percent of certificates for lower-income filers, but that structure needs clarity and enforcement.
  
• Longer application windows with accessible timelines.
  
• Sustained, multi-year funding so retailers, applicants, and advocates can plan around the program. One-time pilots don’t build markets. Durable programs do.

The goal isn’t a rebate program for its own sake. It’s a transportation system that’s cheaper to operate, cleaner to run, and accessible to more Minnesotans — not just those who can afford a new car and a full tank of gas. And it is healthier too!

What You Can Do

The rebate is gone for 2026. Getting it back means legislative action. Here’s how to push for that:

Contact your legislators directly. Ask them to support a dedicated, multi-year funding package for an e-bike rebate program in the 2027 session. Be specific: tell them the program worked, it was popular, and $2 million per year was nowhere near enough to meet demand. You can find your legislators at mnleg.gov.

Tell BikeMN! We track legislative priorities and member interest. If you applied for the rebate and didn’t get it — or if you got one and it changed how you get around — share your story with us. Real stories move legislators.

Talk to your local elected officials. City councils and county boards can pass resolutions supporting a state e-bike rebate program and communicate that support to their legislative delegations. Many utilities also operate discount programs, as do some local municipalities. These should be made simple to bundle together. 

Show up. When the 2027 session begins and transportation committees start scheduling hearings, BikeMN will need people to testify. Sign up for our action alerts so you know when that moment comes.

Sixty-one thousand five hundred Minnesotans rolled up to that application portal in 2024. Most of them left empty-handed. They didn’t stop wanting to replace car trips with an e-bike. The legislature just stopped funding the program that would have helped them get one.

That’s fixable. But it requires legislators who hear from constituents that this matters — and it requires those of us who already know it to say so out loud.

Minnesota is a national leader in forward-thinking transportation policy — and that didn’t happen by chance. For over 17 years, BikeMN has been at the table, fight after fight, shaping a future where biking, walking, and rolling is safe, accessible, and valued. That work is funded by members like you. Join as a sustaining supporter today at bikemn.org/join — $5 or $10 a month helps ensure Minnesota stays ahead. We all move forward together.