NYC Bed Bug Reports by Borough: What Landlord Filings Show

For the year ending October 31, 2025, NYC landlords reported 5,548 apartments with a bed bug infestation, out of 2,383,390 units covered by their filings. That is about 2.33 infested units per 1,000, down from 2.74 the year before. Brooklyn had the highest borough rate and Manhattan the most infested units. These are numbers owners report about their own buildings, so read them as a floor, not a full count.

Where this data comes from

Under Local Law 69 of 2017, owners of multiple dwellings (apartment buildings) must try to get each unit's bed bug history and file an annual bed bug report with HPD. According to HPD, each filing covers November 1 to October 31 of the prior year and is due between December 1 and December 31. It lists the number of units, the number with a bed bug infestation during the year as reported to or known by the owner, the number where eradication measures were used, and the number re-infested after treatment. Owners must give each tenant the filing receipt at the start of a new lease and at each renewal, or post it in a prominent place in the building. In this report, "2025" means the filing year ending October 31, 2025.

The reported rate has fallen every year

The rate of infested units fell in every filing year we looked at, from 8.97 per 1,000 units in the year ending October 2019 to 2.33 in 2025. The count of infested units fell from 12,029 in 2020 to 5,548 in 2025. Be careful with the earliest year: only 31,490 buildings filed for 2019, against 88,866 the next year, so the 2019 figure covers far fewer buildings and is not directly comparable. Since 2021, filings have stayed between 88,771 and 108,996 a year, which makes the later years a fairer comparison.

Boroughs: similar rates, different totals

In 2025, Brooklyn had the highest reported rate at 2.62 infested units per 1,000, and Bronx and Manhattan the lowest at 2.13 each. The spread is narrow, under one unit per 1,000 between the highest and lowest borough. Manhattan reported the most infested units (1,944) because its filings cover the most apartments (911,793). Staten Island's figures rest on only 1,363 filings, so a few buildings can swing its rate.

ZIP codes with the most reported infestations

Of 183 ZIP codes with filings in 2025, 160 had at least one infested unit reported. ZIP 11226 in Brooklyn led with 131 infested units, followed by 10025 (Manhattan, 112) and 11373 (Queens, 104). Manhattan holds 13 of the top 20. Among those 20, the highest rates were in 10030 (8.52 per 1,000), 11691 (7.68) and 10037 (7.56), more than three times the citywide 2.33. Counts of under a few hundred units can move a lot from year to year when one large building reports a problem, so look at more than one year before drawing conclusions about a ZIP.

How we cleaned the data

The raw dataset has 722,511 rows. Some buildings file more than once for the same year. The dataset description says the later filing is the active one, so we kept only the latest filing per building per year, leaving 664,141 filings. We then dropped 36 records that cannot be right or cannot be used:

• missing unit or infested count: 17
• every unit of a 100+ unit building reported infested: 11
• more than 10,000 units on one building: 8

These few records matter a lot. One Queens building record reports 414,754 units, all infested, in each of the last three years. Left in, that single record would add more than 414,754 infested units a year, more than 70 times the real citywide total, and push the reported rate above 100 per 1,000. Other records list hundreds of thousands of units on one building. We also left out the very first filing period (ending November 2018), which used different dates.

Limits of this data

• Self-reported. Owners report what tenants told them or what they know. The dataset shows no independent check of the numbers.
• Not every building files. Coverage grew sharply after the first years, and buildings that do not file are missing.
• Only multiple dwellings. The filing rule applies to multiple dwellings, so smaller homes are not in this data.
• Eradicated counts look inconsistent. Many filings report more units treated than infested, so we do not analyze that field.
• Late filings still arrive. Data pulled on 2026-10-12; figures for 2025 may change slightly.

Method

We downloaded every row of NYC Open Data dataset wz6d-d3jb on 2026-10-12 with four paged SoQL queries (saved in this report's data file), grouped filings by building and filing period (the period end date), kept the latest filing, applied the cleaning rules above, and summed units, infested units and re-infested units by year, borough and ZIP. The rate is infested units divided by units in the same filings, times 1,000.