A small number of addresses produces most of New York City's heat complaints, and the same addresses come back winter after winter. Of the 38,253 buildings that drew a heat or hot water complaint in the 2025-26 heat season, the heaviest 7.2% accounted for 55.8% of them. Across the three seasons ending May 2026, 13,589 buildings complained in all three, 22.0% of every building in the file, and those buildings hold 77.6% of the complaints.
Persistence is the part a renter can act on. Buildings that reached ten complaints in each of the last three seasons carried a heat or hot water violation 91.5% of the time. Buildings that appeared in one season out of three carried one 15.0% of the time, and 83.9% of that group drew no heat violation, no housing court case and no distressed-building designation at all.
How We Count a Building
Every complaint figure here comes from the city's 311 Service Requests file, identifier erm2-nwe9, filtered to agency HPD and complaint type HEAT/HOT WATER on the created date, and pulled on October 2, 2026. We group by the BBL field, the borough, block and lot number that identifies a tax lot, and treat one BBL as one building. Citywide grouped queries time out on this file, so every figure is the sum of borough chunks, and the per-day work below sums twenty borough and two-month chunks.
The 2025-26 season holds 341,824 complaints. Of those, 340,627 carry a usable BBL across 38,253 buildings and 1,197 carry none, so 0.35% of the season sits outside every building figure below. Seasons run October 1 to May 31, the window section 27-2029 of the Housing Maintenance Code sets, and we measure five of them back to 2021-22. HPD and 311 keep adding records for weeks, so a count for a fixed past window rises every time anyone runs it. We re-ran all of ours on one day.
The complaint type's primary descriptor records scope rather than service, with entire building and apartment only as its two values. A second descriptor field does separate the duties, and it is filled in for every season we checked. In 2025-26 it reads 211,741 no heat, 91,693 no heat and no hot water, and 38,390 no hot water. The tables below keep both duties together under the one label the city files them under.
Concentration in a Single Season
Sorting the 38,253 buildings by how many complaints each drew gives a steep curve. 2,063 of them, 5.4%, produced half the season's complaints, and the heaviest single building produced 2,401 on its own.
| Complaints in the 2025-26 season | Buildings | Share of buildings | Share of complaints |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 14,307 | 37.4% | 4.2% |
| 2 to 4 | 11,185 | 29.2% | 8.8% |
| 5 to 9 | 5,472 | 14.3% | 10.6% |
| 10 to 19 | 3,546 | 9.3% | 14.1% |
| 20 or more | 3,743 | 9.8% | 62.3% |
Set that against our pest measurement, where the 7.2% of complained-about buildings at ten or more complaints held 37.2% of the city's pest complaints. Heat runs tighter. The heaviest 7.2% of heat buildings hold 55.8%, and the 19.1% at ten or more hold 76.4%.
Several tenants reporting one dead boiler on one day inflates that. Counting separate days instead of calls removes the effect. The season's complaints fall on 221,284 distinct building-days, 1.54 calls per building-day, and on that measure the heaviest 7.2% of buildings still hold 44.3%. 2,424 buildings, 6.3% of the file, logged a heat complaint on 20 or more separate days of a 243-day season, and 452 did so on 50 or more days.
The base is narrower than the complaint file suggests. 172,485 tax lots hold three or more apartments, and 142,316 of them, 82.5%, drew no heat complaint at all last season.
Same Addresses, Different Winters
61,791 buildings complained in at least one of the three seasons ending May 2026. Most of them appear once and never return.
| Seasons with a heat complaint | Buildings | Share of buildings | Share of complaints |
|---|---|---|---|
| One of three | 34,965 | 56.6% | 9.1% |
| Two of three | 13,237 | 21.4% | 13.2% |
| All three | 13,589 | 22.0% | 77.6% |
Five seasons sharpen the picture. 79,161 buildings appear at least once, 8,871 appear in all five, and those 8,871 hold 64.8% of the 1,298,938 complaints filed over the five years. Narrow to buildings that reached ten complaints in every one of the five seasons and 1,274 remain, holding 31.3% of everything and 185,370 apartments between them.
Size explains part of this. Among the tax lots we could match to the city tax lot file, MapPLUTO, the median three-season building holds 37 apartments against 7 for a one-season building. Per 1,000 apartments in those matched lots, one-season buildings ran 54.4 complaints last season, two-season buildings 112.6, and three-season buildings 296.4. The chronic group is five times as loud per apartment, not simply larger. The 13,073 three-season buildings we could match hold 835,916 apartments, 29.1% of the city's stock of three-or-more-apartment housing, so this is not a fringe.
One Season as a Predictor of the Next
How heavy a building's record is in one season decides how likely that record repeats. Following each of the 30,419 buildings that complained in 2023-24 into the two seasons after it gives the slope.
| Complaints in 2023-24 | Buildings | Complained again in 2024-25 | Complained in both later seasons |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 11,779 | 34.3% | 21.6% |
| 2 to 4 | 9,273 | 55.8% | 41.9% |
| 5 to 9 | 4,398 | 77.0% | 65.7% |
| 10 to 19 | 2,612 | 88.7% | 80.1% |
| 20 or more | 2,357 | 96.1% | 92.4% |
A single complaint carries almost no information about next winter. Twenty carries almost all of it. Of the buildings at 20 or more complaints in 2023-24, 72.0% were still at ten or more two seasons later.
Enforcement at Chronic Addresses
Chronic buildings do draw enforcement, and the share rises with every season of repetition.
| Persistence group | Buildings | Drew a heat violation | Drew a heat court case |
|---|---|---|---|
| One of three seasons | 34,965 | 15.0% | 3.2% |
| Two of three seasons | 13,237 | 36.2% | 10.5% |
| All three seasons | 13,589 | 66.6% | 31.1% |
| Ten or more in all three | 2,330 | 91.5% | 63.0% |
A heat violation here means an HPD notice of violation under sections 27-2028, 27-2029 or 27-2031, the duties to supply heat and hot water, identified by HPD's own order numbers and filtered on inspection date. The 2025-26 season produced 27,345 of them across 9,703 buildings, 11,886 for heat and 15,459 for hot water. HPD's own fiscal 2026 report counts 11,883 heat violations issued, within three of our season figure, which is the check that the filter reads the right rows.
A court case means an HPD litigation of case type heat and hot water. HPD opened 10,519 of those between October 2021 and October 2026 across 7,338 buildings, and 41.8% of the buildings sued had reached ten complaints last season alone. The file records a judgment in 503 of the 10,519 cases, 4.8%, and 1,117 were still pending when we pulled it.
The buildings that escape are the reason to read a record rather than trust that the city has already acted. 169 of the 2,330 buildings at ten or more complaints in all three recent seasons, 7.3%, carry no heat violation in any of those seasons, no heat court case since 2021 and no distressed-building designation, and 22 of them drew no Class C violation of any kind last season either. At the other end, 29,330 of the 34,965 one-season buildings, 83.9%, show nothing either, which is what a boiler that failed once and got fixed looks like in the records.
The Alternative Enforcement Program and Its Selection Rule
HPD's program for the worst buildings is the Alternative Enforcement Program. On February 9, 2026 the department named its nineteenth round: 250 buildings holding 7,038 homes, carrying 54,909 open housing code violations between them, whose owners owe the city nearly $4.5 million for emergency repairs HPD has already paid for. HPD's litigation division was in housing court against the owners of 138 of the 250.
Section 27-2153 of the Housing Maintenance Code sets who gets picked, and complaints are not in the test. HPD counts open hazardous and immediately hazardous violations for every dwelling unit, three or more per unit in a building of twenty units or larger, together with paid and unpaid emergency repair charges of $5,000 or more in those buildings. A building whose tenants call every winter but whose calls never become violations fails that test, and the 7.3% above says such buildings exist in quantity.
The program also runs small against the problem it addresses. Each round since 2021 has held exactly 250 buildings, 1,500 designations in six years across 1,332 distinct buildings, 149 of which were picked more than once. Of the 1,274 buildings that reached ten heat complaints in all five seasons, 151 drew a designation from 2021 on. For the buildings it does reach the program has teeth: an owner has four months from HPD's written notice to correct, discharge requires every heat and hot water violation and every immediately hazardous mold violation corrected, plus 80% each of hazardous mold, vermin, and other open hazardous or immediately hazardous violations, HPD then monitors the building at least every three months for a year, and HPD discharged 5,078 units for owner compliance in fiscal 2026, 11% more than the year before.
Three Seasons of History Before You Sign
Two seasons separate a bad boiler year from a pattern, and three settle it.
Of the buildings whose record in our window starts in 2023-24, with nothing the season before, 33.7% complained again in 2025-26 and 5.4% reached ten complaints. Of the buildings that had also complained in 2022-23, 75.7% complained again and 32.1% reached ten. Same later season, twice the repeat rate and six times the chronic rate, on the strength of one extra season of history.
Reading backward agrees. 89.3% of last season's chronic buildings had complained the season before, and 82.4% the season before that, so two seasons of record catch nearly nine in ten of them. A clean record carries information too. Of the 148,163 three-or-more-apartment lots with no 2023-24 complaint, 9.5% drew one last season and 0.8% drew ten or more. Of the 131,782 lots clean across three seasons, 6.5% drew one and 0.3% drew ten or more.
One quiet season is not a repair. 3,533 buildings complained in 2023-24 and again in 2025-26 while skipping 2024-25 entirely. Pull the building's own record before you sign, and read three things off it: how many separate days produced a complaint, whether HPD wrote a violation on any of them, and whether the pattern survives more than one winter. The building's heat complaint history sits in the same public file we queried here, one address at a time.
If you already live in one of these buildings, a 311 call starts the dated record, and an HP action in housing court is the step that can compel the owner to restore heat. A heat or hot water condition is immediately hazardous with no grace period, and the civil penalty runs from $350 to $1,250 a day, rising to $500 to $1,500 for a subsequent violation at the same building.
Limits of a Building-Level Count
A BBL is a tax lot rather than a structure. A complex of several buildings on one lot counts once here, and a condominium whose units carry their own lot numbers can split across several rows, so both ends of the size distribution are noisier than the counts imply.
Public housing sits outside the file. NYCHA residents report repairs to NYCHA's own call center, and those tickets never become HPD complaints or violations, so developments read as quiet here whatever their conditions.
Complaint counts measure tenants as well as boilers. A building with an organized tenant association shows more records than an identical building where one person calls, which is why we published the complaint-day figures beside the raw counts. A building-level count also answers a different question from a per-neighborhood heat complaint rate, which averages good and bad addresses inside one ZIP code. None of the figures above judges an individual address, and no building is named.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many heat complaints is too many for one NYC building?
Scale the count. The median complained-about building filed two complaints across the whole 2025-26 season, and 37.4% filed exactly one. Ten or more puts a building in the top 19.1% of the file, and that group drew a heat or hot water violation 79.7% of the time. Twenty or more puts it in the top 9.8%. Weigh the number against the apartment count and against how many separate days produced a call.
Do the same NYC buildings have heat problems every winter?
Many do. 13,589 buildings complained in each of the three seasons ending May 2026, and they account for 77.6% of the complaints filed in that stretch. Over five seasons, 8,871 buildings appear every year and hold 64.8% of the complaints. Scaled for size, those buildings ran 296.4 complaints per 1,000 apartments last season against 54.4 for a building that appeared in one season only.
Does anything happen to a landlord whose building is cold every winter?
Often, though not always. Of the 2,330 buildings at ten or more complaints in all three recent seasons, 91.5% drew a heat or hot water violation and 63.0% drew an HPD housing court case. For 7.3% none of that happened, and no distressed-building designation followed either. HPD opened 10,519 heat cases in five years, and the litigation file records a judgment in 503 of them.
How many seasons of heat complaints should I check before renting?
Three. One season cannot separate a failed boiler from a pattern: buildings with a single complaint in 2023-24 repeated 34.3% of the time, against 96.1% for buildings with 20 or more. Two seasons of record catch 89.3% of the buildings that turned chronic last winter. The third season catches the 3,533 buildings that skipped a winter and came back.
What is the Alternative Enforcement Program?
It is HPD's enforcement route for the city's most distressed buildings, in its nineteenth round as of February 2026 and holding 250 buildings a year. Section 27-2153 picks them on open hazardous violations per apartment and on emergency repair charges, so complaint volume alone will not get a building in. The owner then has four months to correct, and discharge requires every heat and hot water violation fixed.
Does the 311 heat category include hot water?
Yes. HPD files both duties under one HEAT/HOT WATER type whose primary descriptor records only whether a whole building or one apartment lost service. A second descriptor splits them: of the 341,824 complaints last season, 211,741 reported no heat, 91,693 reported no heat and no hot water, and 38,390 reported hot water alone. Any building-level heat count from 311, including this one, carries hot water inside it.
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