NYC PLUTO Data Fields Explained

PLUTO is the NYC Department of City Planning's file of facts about every tax lot in the city: lot size, building size, units, floors, year built, assessed value, zoning and owner. The numbers are useful for a quick read of a building, but most of them are copied from Department of Finance tax records, and City Planning itself calls several of them rough estimates, so treat them as a starting point rather than a survey.

The "Building details" panel on every Roofy building page comes from PLUTO. This guide explains each field we show, where the value comes from, and the known traps, using the official PLUTO Data Dictionary (version 26v2, August 2026).

What PLUTO is (and isn't)

PLUTO stands for Primary Land Use Tax Lot Output. MapPLUTO is the same data attached to tax lot shapes from the Department of Finance's Digital Tax Map. City Planning describes it as a compilation of data from several agencies, with "over seventy data fields" covering lot characteristics, building characteristics and political and administrative districts.

Two things follow from that. First, PLUTO describes tax lots, not buildings or apartments. A lot can hold several buildings, and a condo tower is many tax lots rolled into one record. Second, PLUTO is only as current and accurate as the agency files it pulls from. The disclaimer at the top of the data dictionary says DCP does not warrant its completeness or accuracy.

The fields on a Roofy building page

Lot area and building area

Lot area is usually solid. For a regular lot, Finance multiplies the frontage by the depth; for an irregular one it measures the shape on the tax map. If the tax system has a zero, City Planning substitutes the area of the lot's shape on the map and flags the change.

Building area is softer. PLUTO takes gross floor area from the tax system first, then from Finance's mass appraisal system, and only as a last resort calculates it from the primary building's dimensions and stories (which leaves out any other buildings on the lot). The data dictionary calls the result "a rough estimate" that does not necessarily follow the Zoning Resolution's definition of floor area. Condo floor area comes from the condo declaration and is net, not gross. A zero means "not available" if the lot has buildings, and "not applicable" if it doesn't.

Floors and units

Floors describes the tallest building on the lot. A floor that covers only part of the footprint counts as a fraction, so a three-story house whose top floor covers half the footprint shows 2.5. Above-ground basements and roofs used for parking, gardens or playgrounds are not counted.

Residential units is the total for every building on the lot. Hotels, motels, nursing homes and SROs have no residential units in PLUTO; boarding houses do. A superintendent's basement apartment counts. Finance updates the unit count when the Department of Buildings issues a permit, so an illegal conversion that never got a permit will not show up, and a legal change can lag. If the count matters (for example, whether a building has six or more units, which affects rent stabilization), check it against the certificate of occupancy and the building's HPD registration.

Year built: right decade, not always the right year

The data dictionary is unusually blunt here: year built "is accurate for the decade, but not necessarily for the specific year." Between 1910 and 1985 most values end in 0 or 5, and many buildings from the 1800s and early 1900s are stamped 1899, 1900 or 1901. For about 26,000 buildings in historic districts, City Planning replaced the Finance value with a date from the Landmarks Preservation Commission's building database.

We checked the current file to see how strong that rounding is:

So a building listed as "1925" was probably built in the early-to-mid 1920s, and "1899" or "1901" usually just means "around the turn of the century or earlier." That matters for date cutoffs such as 1974 for rent stabilization: if a building's year is near a cutoff, confirm with the certificate of occupancy or DOB records. Our building age report shows the borough-level picture.

Assessed value

Assessed value is not what a building would sell for. Finance estimates a market value and multiplies it by the assessment ratio for the property's tax class: 6% for class 1 (most one- to three-family homes) and 45% for classes 2, 3 and 4. Increases are also capped for some properties: class 1 assessments can rise no more than 6% a year and 20% over five years, and class 2 buildings with 10 or fewer units no more than 8% a year and 30% over five years, so the figure can lag the market for years.

PLUTO updates assessed values twice a year. Tentative values come out in mid-January and final values around May 25. If the PLUTO release was built from a tax file dated between January 15 and May 25, the value is from the tentative roll. For the details, read market value vs assessed value or estimate a bill with the NYC property tax estimator.

Zoning district

Zoning District 1 is the district that covers the largest share of the lot. If a zoning line splits the lot, the second, third and fourth largest districts go in separate fields, but only if each covers at least 10% of the lot. Residence districts run from R1-1 to R12, commercial from C1-6 to C8-4, and manufacturing from M1-1 to M3-2; in general, the higher the number after the letter, the denser the district. Lots that touch mapped parks, ball fields and playgrounds are labeled PARK. To read what a district allows, see zoning, FAR and air rights.

Owner name and condo records

Owner name is the name on the Finance tax record. For private buildings it is often an LLC. City Planning normalizes public owners, so "NYC PARKS" and similar variants become "NYC DEPARTMENT OF PARKS AND RECREATION." It does not tell you who is behind an LLC; for that, follow our guide to finding who owns an LLC building.

Condos work differently. Each condo unit is its own tax lot (lot numbers 1001–6999), and each unit belongs to a billing lot (7501–7599). PLUTO rolls all the units up into one record under the billing lot, so a 20-unit condo appears once with 20 residential units. Because there is no single owner, the owner field on many of these records reads "UNAVAILABLE OWNER"; 7,583 lots in the current file do, 5,348 of them with a condo (R) building class. See BBL and BIN explained for how billing lots work.

A real record, field by field

Here is the PLUTO 26v2 record for 925 Greene Avenue in Brooklyn Community District 3 (BBL 3016170081), a three-family walk-up, read the way we suggest reading any lot:

Notice one inconsistency: the record lists 1,440 square feet of residential floor area against 2,160 square feet of total building area, with no commercial area. That is the kind of mismatch the data dictionary warns about, and a reason to use these fields for rough comparisons rather than exact numbers.

How to use PLUTO well

• Use it to compare buildings and spot questions, not to settle facts about a single apartment.
• Check unit counts and year built against the certificate of occupancy when a legal cutoff depends on them.
• Remember that each record is a tax lot: big complexes and condos may be one record covering many buildings or units.
• Expect lag: changes reach PLUTO after Finance and other agencies update their files, and PLUTO comes out in numbered releases (the current one is 26v2).
• For violations, complaints and sales, use the agency records on the same Roofy page; PLUTO does not include them.

Next, decode the building type with NYC building class codes, or see how Roofy combines PLUTO with HPD and DOB records in how to read a building page on Roofy.