NYC Rat Inspections: Failure Rates by Borough and Neighborhood

In 2025, NYC Health Department inspectors made 144,314 initial rat inspections, and 17.8% of them (25,678) failed because inspectors found active rat signs. That rate is down from 22.9% in 2024 and is the lowest since 2019. By borough, Queens had the highest failure rate (25.6%), while Brooklyn had the most failed inspections (10,058).

What a failed rat inspection means

The Health Department records two kinds of first-visit inspections as "initial": inspections in response to a 311 complaint, and proactive inspections done through its neighborhood indexing program. If a property fails, the department comes back for a compliance inspection. This report counts initial inspections only, so a property that is inspected and then re-inspected is not double counted for the same problem.

According to the department, a property fails when inspectors find any sign of rats. Active rat signs include fresh tracks, fresh droppings, active burrows, runways and rub marks, fresh gnawing and live rats. The dataset has four results: passed, failed for rat activity, failed for rat activity and another reason, and failed for another reason only. We count the first two together as "failed for rat activity." In 2025, 8,597 more initial inspections (6.0%) failed for other reasons without rat signs. Read the Health Department's inspection terms for the full definitions.

Failure rate by borough

Brooklyn, Manhattan and the Bronx account for 94% of all initial inspections, and their failure rates were close together: 17.4% in Brooklyn, 16.2% in Manhattan and 19.6% in the Bronx. Queens had a much higher rate, 25.6%, but on far fewer inspections (7,355). Staten Island had 1,137 initial inspections and a 6.3% failure rate.

The gap between Queens and Brooklyn does not by itself show where rats are worse. Where the department inspects proactively, it visits many properties that nobody complained about, which tends to pull the failure rate down. Where most inspections come from 311 complaints, a higher share of visits will find rats because someone already saw a problem. The dataset does not label which initial inspections came from complaints and which came from indexing, so we cannot separate the two.

The trend since 2015

From 2015 to 2019 the failure rate stayed between 11.5% and 12.9%, on roughly 98,000 to 179,000 initial inspections a year. Inspections fell to 55,961 in 2020 and 67,441 in 2021, and the failure rate rose to 28.8% in 2021. With far fewer total visits, that rate is not directly comparable to the years around it. Volume came back in 2022 (167,174 inspections) with a failure rate of 23.2%, and the rate stayed near 23% through 2024 before dropping to 17.8% in 2025. That is still higher than the 12.8% recorded in 2019.

This year is running slightly lower. From January 1 to October 9, 2026, inspectors made 113,947 initial inspections and 16.0% failed for rat activity. Over the same dates in 2025 the rate was 17.9% on 120,332 inspections.

Neighborhoods with the most failed inspections

Brooklyn neighborhoods top the list. Bedford-Stuyvesant (West) had 1,867 rat-activity failures in 2025, followed by Bushwick (West) (1,819) and Bedford-Stuyvesant (East) (1,436). These are also the places with the most inspections by far: the five NTAs with the most failures accounted for 31% of all initial inspections in the city.

That pattern matches where the city focuses its effort. NYC has four Rat Mitigation Zones: Grand Concourse in the Bronx, Harlem and East Village/Chinatown in Manhattan, and Bed-Stuy/Bushwick in Brooklyn. The city says people in these zones can expect more frequent inspections. Many of the neighborhoods in the chart sit in or next to those zones, so their high counts reflect both rat activity and inspection intensity.

Ranking by rate instead of count gives a different list. Among NTAs with at least 200 inspections, the highest 2025 failure rates were in Flatbush (63% of 276), East Williamsburg (59% of 264), Clinton Hill (59% of 343), Sunset Park (West) (55% of 305), and Astoria (Central) (53% of 226). These areas had relatively few inspections. That fits a pattern where more of the visits follow complaints, but the dataset does not record why each inspection happened.

Borough table

What the data can and cannot tell you

What to do with this

If you are looking at an apartment, the block matters more than the borough. Look up the address on Roofy's NYC building lookup for its HPD record, which includes pest violations, and check the walkway, trash area and yard during your viewing using our apartment viewing checklist. If you already live with rats or mice, read your landlord's duty to deal with pests and how to file a complaint through 311. For what tenants report inside apartments, see NYC apartment pest complaints.