In the run-up to tomorrow’s Steelers game at Acrisure Stadium — nearly 25 years after the team’s first regular season game at what was then Heinz Field — tickets high up in the 500 sections were going for $161 on the team’s website.
On a ticket sold at that price, around $11 flows directly back to the City of Pittsburgh and the joint city-Allegheny County authority that owns the mostly taxpayer-funded stadium.
If last year is any guide, ticket sales for the 1 p.m. game against the Atlanta Falcons will approach $11 million — and the venue’s public owners, plus the city, will share around 7% of that.
The Steelers have hinted that they may need an upgrade to Acrisure, which cost at least $263 million to build. The 70-page lease that governs relations between the Steelers-affiliated PSSI Stadium Corp. and the stadium-owning Sports & Exhibition Authority of Pittsburgh and Allegheny County (SEA) describes the flow of funds from the football faithful, and from the concerts and other events at Acrisure, to the team’s public landlord. The lease runs out in 2031, meaning negotiations on an extension or an entirely new lease should get serious soon.
While the arguments for keeping the Steelers on the North Shore may not have changed much from those expressed for decades — economic stimulus, enhancing the city’s global profile, civic pride — the dollar figures could be very different, according to Geoffrey Propheter, an associate professor in public affairs at the University of Colorado Denver who focuses on sports finance. If the team seeks a new stadium, and the cost is “$2 billion, no one’s going to bat an eye,” he said in an interview with Pittsburgh’s Public Source.
Whether the team and the SEA discuss a new stadium, an extensive upgrade or just a new lease, the flow of ticket dollars could be on the table.
Public Source reviewed the lease documents, which, among other things, require that PSSI provide annual statements to the SEA documenting ticket sales for games and non-sporting events, mostly concerts. Public Source used the Right-to-Know Law to request those documents from 2023 through 2025.
Asked 16 questions about stadium revenue by Public Source on Sept. 2, the SEA declined an interview but provided a four-paragraph statement that partially addressed six of the questions. “The SEA is continuously engaged with the team on stadium capital needs to ensure that Acrisure Stadium continues to be an asset” to the city, county, state and residents, wrote SEA spokesperson Connor Reiche.
State Sen. Wayne Fontana, D-Brookline, who chairs the SEA board, declined to be interviewed.
The Steelers similarly responded to questions with a five-paragraph statement, saying in part that “the stadium has proven to be a smart investment — delivering on its promise as both an economic generator and a cultural and community asset for the region.”
The lease and the breakdowns provided by the SEA provide a partial window into the Acrisure cash flow.
An average game: Nearly $11M for the team, $800K for the public
Last year, the Steelers sold an average of 59,000 tickets per regular season home game, receiving around $11.6 million per contest. Of that, the city averaged $540,000 in amusement tax, and the SEA $236,000 in ticket surcharges.
While it’s hard to compare team leases, said Propheter, the 7% in effect at Acrisure “would probably be in the center” of a spectrum ranging from flat surcharges totalling around 3% of ticket prices to combinations of taxes and fees that approach 20%.
According to the 2000 lease, the surcharge on game tickets started at 5%, capped at an average of $3 per ticket. In 2014, when the SEA and the Steelers agreed to share the cost of a new scoreboard and control room, they added another $1-per-ticket surcharge.
While the surcharge flows through the public SEA, the Steelers consider that private money, because their total ticket prices are set by market realities. Because it flows through the public SEA, Public Source treated it as public money for this analysis.
As a result of the structure of the capped and flat surcharges, the nosebleed seats are effectively taxed and surcharged at a higher rate than the premium club seats and luxury boxes. Taxes and surcharges account for more than 10% of the price of Bud Light Deck or Student Rush tickets and about 8% of the cheapest regular seats. Buyers of plush club seats, meanwhile, pay between 5% and 6% of the ticket price to public entities.
“I see the regressivity in the math, but I’m not going to pretend that regressivity matters to anyone,” said Propheter. Regressive taxation means that people of lower incomes generally pay more. The stadium tax and surcharge “does hit people, low-income individuals harder,” but unlike necessities such as gasoline, people can opt out of buying tickets if taxes make them unaffordable.
Neither the SEA nor the Steelers addressed Public Source questions about whether the mix of taxes and surcharges should be reconsidered.
Surcharge money doesn’t just sit in the coffers of the authority, which also owns PNC Park, PPG Paints Arena and the David L. Lawrence Convention Center. It’s largely committed to paying for long-term improvements and upgrades to the stadium.
The SEA’s Reiche wrote that annually $1.4 million in surcharge money goes to repay debt from the stadium’s construction, with the rest banked for improvements to Acrisure. Recent improvements include the replacements of seats and escalators, he wrote.
The Steelers indicated that private money has funded the new 1933 Club Presented by Heinz, the Steelers Pro Shop and the Steelers Hall of Honor Museum, totaling more than $30 million, and not including surcharge funds.
Routine maintenance is the responsibility of the team.
The lease gives the team all revenue from concessions, in-stadium advertising and naming rights. Money collected from game day parking is subject to complex lease provisions and a separate agreement under which affiliates of the teams were empowered to develop much of the North Shore around the stadiums.
Concerts may have better ROI than games
The lease places a surcharge on non-NFL events just as it does Steelers games, and they too are subject to the city amusement tax. But another lease provision gives the SEA 15% of net revenues — basically sales minus expenses — for non-NFL events.
Public Source used the open records law to request a breakdown of the flow of those funds for recent years. According to the SEA’s response to the request, PSSI then “asserted that the records contain confidential proprietary information that could place PSSI at a competitive disadvantage,” but failed to provide any evidence to support that contention. So the SEA provided them.
The shows reported a wide range of profits for PSSI. The two Taylor Swift shows netted $1.25 million, according to the documents, but last year’s AC/DC concert profited to the tune of $226,000 while Monster Jam lost nearly $10,000. When events made more money than they cost, the SEA took 15%.
The Steelers said that over 25 years they’ve tallied “more than 300 charity, corporate, sporting and entertainment events annually that have generated more than $385 million in tax revenue to the city and state.”
The city’s and SEA’s overall share of the box office ranged from 7.1% for the Swift shows to nearly 12% on the 2025 Monster Jam truck show. The non-NFL events tended to send slightly larger shares of their ticket sales to the public sector than did the regular season Steelers games.
Like Steelers game surcharges, those baked into concert tickets flow to Acrisure improvements.
Taxpayers covered the bulk of stadium costs
The stadium was built as part of a controversial and complicated $1.1 billion package that also paid for PNC Park and the rebuilding of the convention center. The SEA records the Steelers’ contribution as nearly $70 million (just more than one-quarter of the stadium’s $263 million construction cost) and seat license fees on both sports venues raised a total of another $44 million. The Steelers characterize the team’s contribution as $100 million “from private resources,” including the seat licenses giving fans the right to purchase a given seat.
The rest of Acrisure’s cost was largely public funding, led by a state contribution that was technically a loan, but to be paid back via the standard taxes collected on economic activity.
A report commissioned for the Steelers and PSSI in 2024 put Acrisure Stadium’s total economic impact within Allegheny County, over four years, at $3.4 billion, counting total sales occurring as a result of events, taxes paid, indirect spending and worker earnings. The Steelers also hold that close to half of global mentions of Pittsburgh involve the team, and. that it would cost hundreds of millions of dollars to buy that kind of publicity.
Pop sales show how spending bubbles up
- A non-local attendee buys a $2 Coca-Cola at an event. That is called direct spending.
- The business that completed the transaction has to spend money on employing people for the event, which is considered indirect spending.
- The employee receives a higher salary due to the purchase, because it’s $2 that wouldn’t have been spent if not for the attendee traveling to the sports event and craving a Coke. With that higher salary, the employee might go out for dinner the next weekend instead of cooking at home. That’s induced spending.
- Another part of this chain reaction is leakage: The amount of direct spending not retained in the host region. For the Coca-Cola sale, a portion gets sent to the soda manufacturer.
Propheter said there’s a simple economic theory: “If you are going to the facility, you should be paying for the facility. … You want to build an edifice, the user should be the ones paying for it.”
The reality, he said, is that teams and their supporters argue effectively that a given location is the “spiritual home” for the team and “we have to do whatever we can to keep the team in its spiritual home,” even if that includes subsidies which he called “not a solution. They’re the problem. … Subsidies just drive up the price of things.”
These days, stadium renovations typically cost more than the original cost of Acrisure, while new NFL facilities carry price tags in the billions. A few, like California’s SoFi Stadium, are mostly privately funded, but others are largely paid for by the public. Then there are arrangements like the one that will result in the Washington Commanders’ new $3.7 billion home, including $1.1 billion in taxpayer-funded infrastructure work and a deal that gives the team’s owners control of lucrative riverfront acreage. “It is going to be a long time before anybody else throws more money at a team than DC has thrown at the Commanders,” said Propheter.
Rich Lord is the managing editor at Pittsburgh’s Public Source and can be reached at rich@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Octavia Liku.
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