Bedbugs are the one building problem New York decided to solve with paperwork, and the paperwork is unusually useful. Owners of multiple dwellings must ask their tenants about infestations once a year, file the answers with the city, and hand the building's recent history to anyone about to sign a lease. Most prospective tenants never ask for it.
The annual filing
Administrative Code sections 27-2018.1 and 27-2018.2, as amended by Local Law 69 of 2017, require the owner of a multiple dwelling to obtain from every occupant, each year, whether the unit had a bedbug infestation and whether eradication measures were taken. The owner then files a Bedbug Annual Report with HPD.
The dates are specific and worth knowing, because they tell you how current any disclosure you are handed actually is:
- Reporting period: 1 November to 31 October.
- Filing window: 1 December to 31 December, for the period that ended 31 October.
So a disclosure handed to you in, say, June describes a window that closed the previous October. It is a real record, and it is not a statement about last week.
What you are owed before you sign
The owner must provide the building's bedbug history to a prospective tenant before the lease is signed. Two practical points follow.
First, ask in writing and keep the reply. A disclosure you were given is dated evidence of what you were told; a disclosure you were told about over the phone is not. If a problem emerges later, the difference between those two matters.
Second, read what it covers. The disclosure is about the building and about your unit, and a building-wide "no" is a weaker statement than it looks in a large building where the owner depends on occupants answering the annual question honestly.
Which buildings this applies to
The requirement runs to multiple dwellings — three or more units — under HPD's jurisdiction, which takes in rental buildings and generally co-ops and condominiums. An owner-occupied one- or two-family house that is not rented out is not covered. If you are renting a floor of a two-family house, you are outside this particular protection, though not outside the Housing Maintenance Code generally.
If you already have them
Report it through 311, which routes a pest complaint to HPD. An infestation is a condition the owner must address, and Local Law 55 of 2018 — the same law that governs mold — treats indoor pest infestation as an allergen hazard the owner has a duty to remediate, using prescribed work practices rather than whatever is cheapest.
Getting an inspector to confirm the condition creates a dated public record. That record is what makes a later dispute a matter of evidence rather than of recollection — the same argument as in landlord will not make repairs.
Reading a building before you rent
The bedbug filing is not the only thing worth checking, and on its own it is thin. What tells you more is the pattern around it: open pest and mold violations, how old they are, whether the same conditions recur, and whether the city has had to step in and do work itself — see emergency repair charges. All of it is public, and all of it is on a building's page on this site.
A building with a clean bedbug filing and forty open class B violations is not a well-run building. A building with one honest bedbug entry and a record of prompt correction may well be.
What the paperwork cannot do
The annual report is built from what occupants tell the owner. An occupant who does not answer, or who does not want to say, produces a gap rather than a "no" — and the filing has no way to show the difference. Treat it as one dated data point from a system that depends on self-reporting, and weigh it against the inspected record, which does not.
General information about public records and about the law as written, not legal advice, and not tenant screening. Statutory citations: NYC Administrative Code sections 27-2018.1 and 27-2018.2 (Housing Maintenance Code), as amended by Local Law 69 of 2017; Local Law 55 of 2018 for pest infestation as an indoor allergen hazard. Filing window and reporting period as published by NYC HPD. Checked 8 August 2026 — confirm the current filing dates with HPD before relying on them.