New NYC Homes: Certificates of Occupancy by Year

In 2025, final certificates of occupancy (COs) in the Department of Buildings' legacy CO dataset added 22,251 net new homes in New York City. Brooklyn led with 7,777. That dataset only includes jobs filed in DOB's older BIS system. New buildings filed in DOB NOW since March 2021 are missing, so it undercounts recent years. Read the limits section before quoting a trend.

What a certificate of occupancy counts

A certificate of occupancy states a building's legal use and type of occupancy. The Department of Buildings says no one may legally occupy a building until it issues a CO or a temporary CO (TCO), and it issues a final CO when the completed work matches the approved plans for a new building or a major alteration. A final CO is the closest thing in city records to "this building is finished."

For this report we counted each job once, in the year it got its first final CO. Temporary COs are left out because a building can get many TCOs before it is done. Net new units means proposed dwelling units minus existing dwelling units on the CO. New buildings (job type NB) almost always start from zero. Major alterations (A1) can add units, for example by converting offices, or remove them, for example by combining apartments. To learn how to read one, see our guide to certificates of occupancy.

Net new units by year

In this dataset, completed units ranged from 15,700 to 25,545 a year from 2013 to 2025. The highest full year was 2019, with 25,545 net new units. 2016 and 2017 were both near 22,000, 2020 dipped to 20,495, and 2021 to 2023 were all above 24,000. 2024 fell to 19,254 and 2025 recovered to 22,251. Major alterations add a small share: 385 net units in 2025 and at most 1,958 in any year.

Through October 9, 2026, the dataset shows 12,295 net new units with a first final CO this year. That is a partial year, and late COs are sometimes added after the fact.

Fewer buildings, similar units: the system switch

The count of new buildings tells a different story from the unit count. 2,005 new buildings got a first final CO in 2016. In 2025 only 577 did, a drop of 71%. Yet units in 2025 were about the same as in 2016. The data does not show that the city stopped building. DOB moved new building and CO-changing alteration filings to DOB NOW on March 1, 2021, and since then all occupancy requests go through DOB NOW. DOB describes this legacy dataset as covering COs issued through March 2021, but it still receives final COs for jobs that were filed in BIS. COs for jobs filed in DOB NOW appear only in the separate DOB NOW CO dataset. So the jobs still showing up here are older BIS filings, and large towers from that era are still getting final COs, which keeps the unit count up while the building count falls.

We can size the gap but not date it. The DOB NOW CO dataset lists 3,074 DOB NOW-filed new-building jobs with a final CO, covering 21,769 dwelling units. Its issuance-date and submission-date fields were empty for every row when we queried it, so we cannot place those units in a year. They are not in any chart on this page. The DOB NOW CO dataset also lists 226 BIS-filed new buildings (6,804 units) with a final CO that has no matching final CO in the legacy dataset, so the legacy count misses some BIS jobs too.

Where the 2025 units went

Brooklyn added 7,777 units, followed by Manhattan (5,874), Queens (5,212) and the Bronx (3,237). Staten Island added 151, its lowest full-year total in this dataset. Because DOB NOW-filed jobs are missing, low recent totals should not be read as a real collapse in any borough.

The neighborhoods that added the most homes, 2021–2025

Over the five years from 2021 to 2025, the 20 neighborhoods below added 53,123 of the 115,181 net new units in the dataset (46%). Hunters Point-Sunnyside-West Maspeth in Queens led by a wide margin, ahead of Midtown-Midtown South in Manhattan. Neighborhood names are the city's Neighborhood Tabulation Areas (NTAs) as recorded on each CO. 2,452 units had no NTA and are not in the table.

The largest new buildings completed in 2025

These ten buildings account for 6,273 of the 21,866 new-building units in 2025. A handful of large towers can swing a year's total by thousands of units, which is why year-to-year changes in this data are noisy.

The full yearly table

What this data can and cannot tell you

Check a building yourself

Before you rent or buy in a new building, confirm it has a CO that matches how it is being used. Look up the address on Roofy's NYC building lookup, then read how to read DOB permits and job filings. To see what is coming next, read our report on new building applications. For the existing stock, see NYC housing stock by building type and how old NYC's buildings are.