What NYC Tenants Complain About Most

Heat is the biggest housing complaint in New York City by a wide margin. Of the 532,962 complaints tenants made to HPD in 2025, 315,142 (59%) were about heat or hot water. The next largest group was unsanitary conditions, mainly pests and mold, followed by plumbing and paint or plaster. In winter, heat dominates. In summer, the mix shifts toward pests, plumbing and other repairs.

How a complaint gets into this data

HPD asks tenants to contact the landlord first and to file through 311 if the landlord does not respond, according to its guidance on reporting a quality or safety issue. HPD then tries to reach the managing agent and calls the tenant back to see if the condition was fixed. If it was not, or HPD cannot reach the tenant, it sends a Code Enforcement inspector, who can issue a violation. Each complaint is logged in the Housing Maintenance Code complaints dataset, with one or more problems, each tagged with a major and minor category. A single complaint can list several problems, so the 532,962 complaints in 2025 included 856,280 problems.

Heat is more than half of all complaints

Heat and hot water complaints (315,142) were about three times the next category, unsanitary conditions (100,565). Plumbing (62,212) and paint or plaster (49,345) round out the top four. Door and window problems, water leaks and general building issues each came to between about 34,000 and 45,000 complaints. Elevator complaints were rare in this dataset (1,659). The category totals add up to more than 532,962 because one complaint can fall in more than one category.

Winter vs summer: the mix flips

Total complaints peaked in Jan 2025 (84,776) and bottomed out in Aug (21,810). The swing is almost all heat: heat complaints went from 66,552 in January to 3,229 in Aug, then jumped back to 31,692 in October when heat season began. In December, January and February heat made up 77% of complaints. In June, July and August it was just 16%. HPD requires heat only from October 1 to May 31, while hot water at 120°F or more is required all year (see the heat and hot water rules).

Other problems are much steadier through the year. Unsanitary conditions peaked in Jul (10,120) and were lowest in Feb (6,646). In summer, unsanitary conditions were 39% of all complaints, against 11% in winter. Plumbing and paint or plaster stayed in a narrow band all year. The chart below takes heat out so these smaller lines are easier to read.

The specific problems behind the categories

Within heat, 208,621 complaints were for the entire building and 107,705 for a single apartment. Outside heat, the most common specific problems were pests (54,561 complaints) and mold (37,718), followed by paint or plaster problems on walls, door problems, paint or plaster on ceilings, floor problems and water supply problems. Read more about your landlord’s duties on pests and mold.

Limits of this data

• Complaints are not violations. A complaint is a tenant’s report. Many are resolved before an inspection or cannot be confirmed. See HPD complaints vs violations and our report on violations.
• One problem, many complaints. A building-wide heat outage can produce many complaints from different tenants. Counts reflect reports, not separate problems.
• Not per unit. Boroughs and buildings with more rental apartments will log more complaints. Compare a building with its own history.
• Data is revised. HPD updates the dataset daily, so figures may shift slightly. These were pulled on 2026-10-12.

Every major and minor category

Method

We queried NYC Open Data dataset ygpa-z7cr on 2026-10-12 with SoQL, filtering to received dates from January 1 through December 31, 2025. We counted distinct complaint IDs (and problem rows) grouped by major category, minor category, month and borough. The exact query URLs are stored with this report’s data file.