Which NYC ZIPs and Buildings Get the Most Heat Complaints

Heat complaints in NYC are highly concentrated. In the 2025-26 heat season, 38,294 properties had at least one heat or hot water complaint, but just 2,068 of them (about 5%) produced half of all complaints. The busiest ZIP codes are in the Bronx, northern Manhattan and central Brooklyn.

A few properties, most of the complaints

Of the 339,043 complaints that HPD tied to a tax lot, the top 1% of properties (383) accounted for 24%. The top 5% accounted for 49%, the top 10% for 63% and the top 20% for 77%. At the other end, 14,371 properties (38% of all properties with any complaint) had exactly one complaint all season.

The chart and table tell the same story from two sides. Most properties are in the small buckets: one complaint, or two to five. But the 1,077 properties with more than 50 complaints each (3% of the total) produced 38% of all complaints, more than any other bucket.

The busiest properties are not always the biggest

Large buildings have more tenants who can call, so you might expect the top of the list to be the biggest buildings. It is mixed. We looked up the residential unit count in PLUTO for the ten properties with the most complaints. 6 of the ten are in the Bronx. They range from 2 to 538 apartments, and 8 of the ten were built in 1940 or earlier. The single busiest property, with 2,401 complaints, is listed in PLUTO with only 2 residential units, and 2,399 of those complaints were logged for the same apartment. So a top rank can reflect repeated reports from one home, not thousands of separate tenants. The data does not say why each complaint was filed or whether it was valid.

We do not list these properties by address. A complaint count alone does not show whether a landlord failed to provide heat, so to judge a specific building, look it up in the NYC building lookup and check its open violations, not just complaints. Our guide to checking a building's heat complaint history shows how.

The top ZIP codes

Complaints came from 193 ZIP codes. The top 20 produced 140,893 complaints, 41% of the citywide total. ZIP 11226 in Brooklyn ranked first with 11,151, followed by 10468 and 10458 in the Bronx. Of the top 25 ZIPs, 13 are in the Bronx, 9 in Manhattan and 3 in Brooklyn. None are in Queens or Staten Island.

ZIP rankings partly reflect how many apartments each ZIP has. A useful second number is complaints per property with any complaint, shown in the table below. ZIPs where that ratio is high have fewer affected properties with more complaints each; ZIPs where it is low have problems spread across many properties.

Limits of this data

• Complaints are reports, not findings. HPD may find heat working, fail to get access, or issue a violation. Repeat calls about one outage each count as separate complaints.
• A "property" is a tax lot (BBL). Some lots hold several buildings, such as a complex with multiple addresses, so one property can cover more than one building.
• Missing locations. 1,153 of 340,196 complaints had no tax lot and are left out of the property analysis. They are included in ZIP totals where a ZIP was recorded.
• Not adjusted for size. ZIP and property counts are raw totals, not per apartment.
• Snapshot. Data was pulled on 2026-10-12; HPD updates the dataset daily, and the latest record was received on 2026-10-11.

Method

We queried NYC Open Data dataset ygpa-z7cr on 2026-10-12, filtering to major_category = HEAT/HOT WATER and received dates from October 1, 2025 through May 31, 2026. We counted distinct complaint IDs by ZIP code (post_code) and by tax lot (BBL), pulling every lot rather than a top-N sample, then ranked lots to measure concentration. Unit counts for the ten busiest lots come from PLUTO. Query URLs are saved with this report's data file.