An NOV — Notice of Violation — is the written notice a city agency issues when an inspector finds a condition that breaches the code. It is the document that starts a violation: it names the condition, cites the code section, identifies the property, and sets the deadline by which the condition must be corrected. Almost every violation you will ever read on a building record began as one.
What it is not
An NOV is a charge, not a verdict. It records what one inspector found on one day. Nothing has yet been proved, corrected or decided, and depending on which agency issued it the notice may be dismissed, cured, resolved after re-inspection, or contested at a hearing. That distinction matters constantly when reading building records, because a raw violation count treats a notice issued yesterday and a case dismissed a decade ago as the same thing.
Three agencies, three flavours
| Issuer | What the NOV concerns | How it ends |
|---|---|---|
| HPD | Living conditions in a residential building — heat, hot water, leaks, pests, paint | Correction and re-inspection, or dismissal |
| DOB | The building and its construction — structure, equipment, work without a permit | Certificate of correction, then dismissal or resolution |
| DOB via ECB | The same subject matter, but as a summons carrying a monetary penalty | A hearing at OATH |
The third row is the one that surprises people. A single condition can generate a DOB violation and an ECB summons, because one is an order to fix something and the other is a charge that carries money. Two records, one problem. See ECB violation and OATH hearing.
Where you see the phrase in the data
HPD's public violations file uses the notice explicitly as a status. Of roughly 11.1 million HPD violation records, about 1.70 million currently sit at NOV SENT OUT — the notice has gone to the owner and the correction period is running, but nothing has been fixed or confirmed. A further 235,170 are at INFO NOV SENT OUT, an informational notice rather than an enforceable order.
The file also carries the notice's own fields, which is what makes a single record readable:
| Field | What it holds |
|---|---|
| novid | The identifier of the notice document itself |
| novdescription | The condition, in the inspector's words |
| novissueddate | The day the notice was issued |
| currentstatus | Where the notice has got to since |
| originalcorrectbydate | The deadline set when it was issued |
Read novissueddate against originalcorrectbydate and the class together and you have the whole shape of a violation: how serious it was held to be, how long the owner was given, and whether that window has passed.
The correction clock
The deadline is not discretionary — it follows the hazard class. HPD grades conditions A (non-hazardous), B (hazardous) and C (immediately hazardous), and the more serious the class the shorter the window. Heat and hot water are Class C. Which is why, on a building record, an open Class C notice past its correct-by date is a far stronger signal than a dozen old Class A notices that were closed on time. The classes are set out at HPD violation classes; DOB's rather different scheme is at DOB violation classes.
What happens after
The owner corrects the condition and certifies the correction, and the agency may re-inspect. If it is satisfied, the record closes. If the deadline passes with nothing done, the status moves to something like NOT COMPLIED WITH — about 239,000 HPD records sit there — and enforcement escalates: the city can carry out an emergency repair itself and bill the owner, or take the building to housing court. If the notice was an ECB summons instead, it goes to a hearing, and a respondent who does not appear is in default.
Reading one on your own building
Notices are public records. Check a Building shows them with the agency's own status and dates rather than collapsing them into a single count, because the difference between a notice sent last week and one dismissed in 2012 is the entire substance of the record. If you are the person who reported the condition, the notice is also how you find out an inspector agreed with you — see how to file a complaint. For reading a whole building's record rather than one notice, see how to check a building's violations.
Sources: NYC Open Data — Housing Maintenance Code Violations (wvxf-dwi5); NYC HPD and NYC DOB published guidance. Counts are live totals on the date queried and will move. General information about public records, not legal advice.