A BIN is the seven-digit number New York City assigns to a single building. The first digit is the borough, on the same scheme as a BBL — 1 Manhattan, 2 the Bronx, 3 Brooklyn, 4 Queens, 5 Staten Island — and the remaining six identify the structure itself.
One lot, many buildings
The clearest way to see what a BIN is for is a lot with more than one building on it. Co-op City in the Bronx sits largely on a single tax lot, BBL 2051410120, which the city's property file records as carrying 250 buildings. Every one of those has its own BIN. These are real rows from the Department of Buildings' facade filings, all on the same tax block:
| BIN | Address |
|---|---|
| 2096813 | 120 Dekruif Place |
| 2096807 | 100 Casals Place |
| 2096806 | 100 Carver Loop |
| 2096811 | 100 Debs Place |
| 2095397 | 600 Baychester Avenue |
Ask for that lot's ownership and you get one answer, because one owner holds the land. Ask for its elevator inspections and the question is meaningless until you say which building.
Which records use which number
| Filed against the BBL (the land) | Filed against the BIN (the structure) |
|---|---|
| Deeds and mortgages (ACRIS) | Elevator inspections |
| Assessments and tax bills | Boiler filings |
| Zoning and lot dimensions | Facade reports (Local Law 11) |
| Ownership registration | Most DOB permits and job filings |
Some records carry both, and a few carry neither cleanly, which is the everyday difficulty of assembling a building's history from separate systems.
Placeholder BINs
Not every BIN refers to a real structure. Each borough has a generic placeholder ending in 000000 — 1000000, 2000000 and so on — used when a record has to be filed before a building has been identified, or when a filing covers a lot rather than a building. If you see one of those, it is not your building; it is the absence of one.
When a building's BIN is missing from a dataset
A BIN that appears on a permit does not always appear in every other city file. New construction is the common case: a job is filed, a BIN is issued, and other datasets catch up later. This is one of the reasons a lookup here falls back to the BBL when a BIN draws a blank rather than reporting that a building has no records. How that matching works, and where it is imperfect, is set out here.
Finding a BIN
Search an address on Check a Building and the BIN appears under the address alongside the BBL. It is also on DOB's Building Information System, on any permit posted at a job site, and in the city's building footprints file.
Sources: NYC Department of Buildings — Facades Compliance Filings (xubg-57si); NYC Department of City Planning — PLUTO (64uk-42ks). Values above are live rows on the dates queried. General information about public records, not legal advice.