NYC Sidewalk Sheds and Scaffolds: Permits by Borough

The NYC Department of Buildings issued 11,947 sidewalk shed permits in 2025 in its DOB NOW system, counting renewals, plus 6,050 supported scaffold permits. On 2026-10-12, 7,712 sidewalk shed permits were active at 6,707 buildings. Manhattan accounts for 45.1% of 2025 shed permits, and Upper East Side-Carnegie Hill had more than any other neighborhood.

Why sheds go up

A sidewalk shed is the covered walkway built over a sidewalk to protect people from falling debris during construction or facade work. One common reason is the facade program: when an inspector rates a facade Unsafe, DOB says the owner must immediately install protection such as a sidewalk shed (source: DOB Façade & Local Law). Sheds also go up for new buildings, demolitions and other work. The permit data does not reliably say which reason applies, so this report counts all of them. For the facade side, see how many NYC facades are rated Unsafe.

The trend: steady at about 11,500 to 13,000 a year

From 2019 to 2025, DOB NOW issued between 11,516 and 13,042 sidewalk shed permits a year. The peak was 2024 with 13,042; 2025 was lower at 11,947, close to the 11,592 issued in 2019. Supported scaffold permits held between about 5,700 and 6,500 a year.

About half of each year's shed permits are renewals of an existing shed. In 2025, 6,162 were initial permits and 5,785 were renewals. That split matters for 2026, below.

2026: renewals jump under the 90-day rule

Local Law 48 of 2025 limits sidewalk shed permits to 90 days. DOB's January 2026 service notice says shed permits issued or renewed on or after February 2, 2026 expire every 90 days, are not automatically renewed, and cost $130 per renewal (sources: DOB service notice, Local Law 48). The data shows the effect. The median shed permit issued in 2024 or 2025 ran 365 days; in 2026 it is 90.

So the higher 2026 count reflects more paperwork per shed, not more sheds: initial permits are slightly lower than last year. Compare years with care from 2026 on.

Where: Manhattan leads, and the Upper East Side tops the list

Manhattan had 5,383 shed permits in 2025, more than Brooklyn (3,134) and the Bronx (1,916) combined. Staten Island had 126. The ranking is the same for sheds active today.

At the neighborhood level, 17 of the top 20 neighborhoods for 2025 shed permits are in Manhattan; the others are in Brooklyn. These are raw counts, so areas with many tall or older buildings rank higher simply because they have more buildings that need inspections and work.

How long sheds stay up

For the 7,041 shed jobs with an active permit, we measured the time since the first shed permit on the same job. The median is 0.9 years. 3,746 are under a year old, 1,429 are one to two years old, 1,540 are two to five years old and 326 are older than five years. A shed that started in DOB's older BIS system, or was moved to a new job number, will look younger than it is, so these are minimums.

Limits of this data

• These are permit records, not sheds. A single shed can have an initial permit and many renewals, and one building can have more than one shed.
• Only DOB NOW permits are counted. Sheds permitted in the older BIS system are not in this dataset.
• "Active" means the permit is in "Permit Issued" status and has not expired. A shed can be taken down before its permit expires, or stay up after.
• The data does not reliably record why a shed is up, so we can't split facade repairs from other construction.
• The 2026 rule change roughly quadrupled how often a shed needs a permit, so year-over-year totals are not comparable from 2026.