As Temperatures Drop, NYC Promises to Check Every Complaint this year

By Chana Weinman

That crispness in the air means New York City’s “heat season” is starting.

Starting Oct. 1 each year, landlords are required to keep apartments at 68 degrees during the day when it drops below 55 degrees outside, and at 62 degrees at night no matter how warm it is outside. The rule runs every year until May 31.

Still, every year hundreds of thousands of tenants complain that their landlord never turned the heat on, or kept it too low. Many of those complaints come from city-owned buildings.

Last winter was the busiest heat season ever. From October 2025 through May 2026, the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) received 344,437 heat complaints, up 22 percent from the year before, The Real Deal reported. The city’s latest management report says HPD handled more than 188,000 heat and hot water problems. During a long cold spell in January, tenants made more “no heat” calls than in any month before. On Feb. 8 alone, the city received 6,144 heat complaints, the most ever in one day. Several people died in the cold.

But last year, some tenants who asked for help never got it. The city closed tens of thousands of complaints without sending an inspector. Officials would group many complaints from the same building together and close them all at once, without checking if each apartment actually had heat.

 one person and ask them how the heat was, and if that person had their stove going or their space heater, they might say, ‘Yeah, I think it’s fine.’ And everyone else was shivering, but they just closed down the complaint with no inspection,” said Ellen Davidson, an attorney with the Legal Aid Society’s Civil Law Reform Unit.

“So even though there might be 100 people in the building who were freezing, if they reached the one person who was fine, that was the end of the inquiry,” Davidson said.

Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s administration said in its housing plan that it will change that.

Starting this heat season, HPD will try to inspect every apartment that files a heat or hot water complaint, even when the whole building has no heat. Before, the agency only checked some of the apartments in a building with many complaints.

To do it, HPD has added staff. It now has 320 inspectors, about 11 percent more than five years ago, with more coming under the mayor’s Block-by-Block housing plan, HPD Commissioner Dina Levy said

Levy said the agency will look closely at buildings, help owners with repairs

The city is also pushing owners to use the J-51 tax break, which helps pay for heating and energy upgrades. The City Council renewed it for 10 years and raised it to cover up to 100 percent of reasonable costs, up from 70 percent.

“We have new tax abatement programs, we have new capital programs where we can actually make loans to help landlords address conditions,” Levy said. “Landlords who want to do right by their tenants and their buildings should consider HPD an ally and consider our doors open to assist them however they need”