William Bayard Cutting (January 12, 1850 – March 1, 1912),[1] a member of New York's merchant aristocracy, was an attorney, financier, real estate developer, sugar beet refiner and philanthropist.

Cutting and his brother Fulton started the sugar beet industry in the United States in 1888.

He was a builder of railroads, operated the ferries of New York City, and developed part of the south Brooklyn waterfront, Red Hook.

Cutting ancestors included members from the Stuyvesant, Bayard, Schuyler and Van Cortlandt families of colonial New York.

They had four children: Cutting died on March 1, 1912, of acute indigestion while on a train coming back from El Paso, Texas.