Most Common Class C HPD Violations in NYC, Ranked

Self-closing doors are the single most common Class C violation HPD issued in New York City over the past year, ahead of pest infestations and ahead of heat or hot water complaints. That comes from bucketing 275,438 Class C violations HPD recorded with an inspection date between September 22, 2025 and September 22, 2026, grouped into the plain categories below.

Method and Data Window

HPD inspects buildings and logs each violation with a class and a free-text description called novdescription. We pulled every Class C, or immediately hazardous, violation in that field from the department's public wvxf-dwi5 dataset for the 12 months ending September 22, 2026. Class C violations made up 275,438 of the 936,537 violations of any class HPD issued in the same window, or 29.4%. A Class C citation is one line in the far larger record of violations and complaints that HPD keeps on every address in the city, and HPD sorts every one of them into Class A, B or C by severity.

The description field is not built for ranking. HPD writes a fresh line of text for nearly every violation, often naming the exact apartment, floor or hallway, so a single condition like a locked boiler room door shows up as dozens of near-identical entries. We grouped those entries by the words and code sections they share into ten categories a renter would recognize, then queried each category's total directly rather than trying to rank thousands of raw description strings. A final "other" category covers everything that did not fit cleanly into the ten, including plumbing fixture defects, fire-retardant ceiling material, general door locks and dozens of smaller conditions each too small to rank on its own.

NYC's Class C Violations Ranked by Category

The table below ranks each category by its share of the 275,438 Class C violations in the window, along with how long a landlord has to fix that category once HPD issues the notice.

Every residential building with three or more apartments must keep doors at entrances, vestibules and stairwell landings on a device that shuts and latches on its own, under the city's self-closing door rule, so a hallway fire cannot spread through a door someone left open. HPD issued 72,714 of these violations citywide in fiscal year 2025, the most recent full year on record, and says owners corrected about 60% themselves. The agency covered the rest with emergency repairs of its own, spending more than $6.7 million doing that work in FY25. A door counts as a violation whether the latch is missing, the hinge is broken or a resident props it open, and owners have 14 days to fix one before Housing Court penalties can apply.

That volume is part of a wider shift, not a one-year blip. Egress and self-closing-door violations more than tripled between 2019 and 2025 and became the single most common type of Class C violation citywide that year, according to a June 2026 NYS Focus investigation into HPD enforcement. Our own count over the past 12 months shows the same pattern: self-closing doors outnumber pest infestations by about 3,500 violations, reversing the order many older guides still assume.

Roach and mice infestations rank second, just behind self-closing doors. HPD logs an active infestation of roaches, mice or rats as a Class C violation, and the correction deadline is 21 days rather than the 24 hours that applies to most other Class C conditions, since clearing an infestation usually takes more than one visit. A single open pest violation does not mean an active infestation on the day you view an apartment. Check whether it is still open and how recently HPD issued it by looking up the building's violations before you sign.

Heat and hot water conditions rank third. New York's heat season runs from October 1 to May 31, and buildings must hold at least 68 degrees indoors between 6am and 10pm when it is below 55 degrees outside, and at least 62 degrees overnight regardless of the temperature outside. Hot water has to reach 120 degrees year round. Unlike every other Class C category, heat and hot water violations carry no grace period at all. The penalty clock can start the same day an inspector confirms the condition.

Lead paint accounts for most of the rest of the top five, though not the way many renters expect. Most of these violations are for an owner's failure to notify tenants about a lead hazard, investigate one that was reported, or keep the inspection and remediation records that Local Law 1 of 2004 requires, rather than for finding lead paint itself during an inspection. Owners have 21 days to correct a lead violation once HPD issues it.

Heating system access is the fifth-largest bucket, and it gets confused with a no-heat violation, but it is a different problem. These violations cover a boiler room door that is locked when an inspector or firefighter needs to get in, or a missing sign telling building staff who holds the key. They say nothing about whether the building actually had heat that day. A separate category, ranked third above, covers an apartment that lost heat or hot water. Because heating system access falls outside the categories with longer deadlines, owners get the standard 24 hours to fix it.

Window guards, gas leaks, electrical hazards, water leaks and mold each make up a smaller share, from about 2% down to 1%. One category renters often expect to see near the top barely registers: only 4 Class C violations in the entire window mention a smoke or carbon monoxide detector, because a missing or dead detector is almost always logged as a Class A or B violation rather than a Class C one.

The Citywide Rate in Context

Buildings with three or more apartments citywide average 30.1 HPD violations per 100 apartments, and 9.2 of those are Class C, as of September 2026. Put another way, just under one in ten violations logged against a typical building is immediately hazardous. Our own count over the trailing 12 months lines up with that: Class C violations made up 29.4% of the 936,537 violations HPD issued of any class in the same window, a similar share to the building-level rate. Nearly half of buildings, 45.3%, carry no open violation at all, so a clean record is common rather than rare.

Violation Mix by Borough

Volume follows population, so it is no surprise the Bronx and Brooklyn log the most Class C violations in raw numbers. Severity is a different question: what share of a borough's own violations are Class C, regardless of how many violations it has in total. By that measure the Bronx and Manhattan run closest together, at 32.6% and 32.4% of their own violations rated immediately hazardous, ahead of Brooklyn at 26.7%, Queens at 25.9% and Staten Island at 21.0%. Manhattan issues far fewer violations per apartment than the Bronx does, but when a Manhattan building does get cited, the citation is about as likely to be Class C as one in the Bronx.

The categories inside that Class C total shift by borough too.

The last three columns are each borough's own Class C total, not the citywide total, so they show mix rather than volume. Queens leans hardest on self-closing doors, at 29.5% of its Class C violations against 15.9% for pests, the widest gap of any borough. Manhattan and Staten Island report the highest heat and hot water share, at 17.2% and 17.4%, even though they sit at opposite ends of the citywide volume ranking.

Renting With an Open Class C Violation

An open Class C violation on a building you are considering is not automatically a reason to walk away. Age and pattern matter more than the raw count. A single self-closing door violation from last winter that HPD already marked corrected says little on its own. The same pest violation reissued for the same apartment two years running says the fix did not hold. Pull the building's current violations before you sign, not after, by checking the address on the free lookup, and ask the landlord in writing which open violations affect your unit or line.

New York's warranty of habitability, under Real Property Law 235-b, requires a landlord to keep the apartment fit to live in no matter what the lease says, and it applies whether or not a violation is on the books yet. If repairs stall once you already live there, a tenant can bring an HP action in Housing Court to force the issue, and a judge in that case can also order the landlord to pay penalties tied to the violations already on record.

Frequently Asked Questions

What Is the Most Common Class C Violation in NYC?

Self-closing doors. HPD issued 63,121 self-closing door violations in the 12 months to September 2026, about 23% of all Class C violations citywide, ahead of pest infestations at 22% and heat or hot water conditions at 14%. Owners must keep doors at building entrances, vestibules and stairwells shutting and latching on their own, and the correction deadline is 14 days.

How Many Class C Violations Does HPD Issue Each Year?

HPD recorded 275,438 Class C violations in the 12 months ending September 22, 2026, using the department's public violations dataset. That works out to about 9.2 Class C violations per 100 apartments citywide in buildings with three or more units, against 30.1 violations of any class per 100 apartments.

Do Roach or Mice Complaints Count as a Class C Violation?

Yes. HPD logs an active roach, mice or rat infestation as a Class C, immediately hazardous violation, and it was the second most common Class C category over the past year at 59,579 violations. The correction deadline is 21 days, longer than the 24 hours that applies to most other Class C conditions, since clearing an infestation usually takes more than one visit.

Is a Locked Boiler Room Door the Same as a No-Heat Violation?

No. A locked or inaccessible boiler room is its own Class C category, logged because an inspector or firefighter could not reach the heating system, not because the building had no heat that day. It ranked fifth over the past year at 17,147 violations. A separate violation covers an apartment that actually lost heat or hot water.

How Long Does a Landlord Have to Fix a Class C Violation?

It depends on the condition. Heat and hot water have no grace period at all. Lead paint, window guards, mold and pest infestations get 21 days. Self-closing doors get 14 days. Every other Class C condition, including a locked boiler room or an electrical hazard, gets 24 hours once HPD issues the notice.

Does an Open Class C Violation Mean I Should Not Rent There?

Not on its own. Look at the age of the violation and whether HPD marked it corrected. A single old violation says little; the same condition reissued for your apartment more than once says the landlord did not fix it properly the first time. Ask for the status of any open Class C violation in your unit before you sign.