To check a New York City building's violations you have to search three separate systems: DOB violations (the building and its construction), HPD violations (living conditions in a residential building), and ECB violations (summonses that carry money and are decided at a hearing). They do not share numbering, status vocabulary, or even a common idea of what "closed" means. Checking one of them is not checking the building.
This guide is about reading a record that already exists. If your building has a problem you want to report, the guide you want is how to file a complaint about your landlord or building.
The three systems, and what each covers
| System | Covers | Records on file |
|---|---|---|
| DOB violations | The building itself: structure, equipment, elevators, boilers, work without a permit | 2,475,963 |
| HPD violations | Living conditions in residential buildings: heat, hot water, leaks, mould, pests, paint | 11,146,609 |
| ECB violations | Summonses with a penalty, heard and decided at OATH | 1,827,780 |
The counts are live totals from the city's own files on the date this was written; they move constantly and are quoted here as evidence of scale. The shape of them is the point: HPD's file is four times the size of the other two combined, because it records conditions inside apartments across the whole rental stock.
Note that the same underlying event can appear in more than one place. Work done without a permit can produce a DOB violation and an ECB summons with a penalty attached. Two records, one problem. Adding them up double-counts.
Reading a DOB violation: mind the asterisk
DOB does not use a numbered severity class. It uses a category code that carries the status inside it, and the convention is easy to miss: an asterisk means the record is no longer active.
| Category | Records | Open? |
|---|---|---|
| V*-DOB VIOLATION - DISMISSED | 1,166,436 | No |
| V*-DOB VIOLATION - Resolved | 673,545 | No |
| V-DOB VIOLATION - ACTIVE | 555,210 | Yes |
| VW*-VIOLATION - WORK W/O PERMIT DISMISSED | 23,487 | No |
| VW-VIOLATION WORK WITHOUT PERMIT - ACTIVE | 12,996 | Yes |
Read that table again and the headline number changes meaning entirely: of nearly 2.5 million DOB violations on file, the large majority are dismissed or resolved. Roughly one in five is active. Anyone quoting a raw DOB violation count for a building without separating on the asterisk is quoting a number that mostly describes history. The detail is set out at DOB violation classes.
Reading an HPD violation: the class is the hazard
HPD does use a letter class, and it does mean severity — with one exception that catches everyone.
| Class | Means | Records |
|---|---|---|
| A | Non-hazardous | 2,550,485 |
| B | Hazardous | 5,225,071 |
| C | Immediately hazardous — heat, hot water, lead, no gas | 2,565,516 |
| I | Not a hazard grade at all: a registration issue | 805,537 |
Class I is the trap. It sits in the same column as A, B and C and looks like a fourth severity level. It is not — it concerns the owner's failure to register the property properly. A building with a pile of Class I violations has a paperwork problem, not a habitability problem. The classes are explained record by record at HPD violation classes.
The status field matters as much as the class. HPD's file currently runs about 8.3 million closed against 2.9 million open. Within the statuses you will see:
- VIOLATION CLOSED — corrected and confirmed. About 4.96 million records.
- VIOLATION DISMISSED — the violation was withdrawn or defeated. About 3.26 million.
- NOV SENT OUT — the notice of violation has been issued and the clock is running; nothing has been corrected yet. About 1.70 million. See NOV.
- NOT COMPLIED WITH — the deadline passed and the condition was not corrected. About 239,000, and the status most worth noticing on a building you are considering.
- FIRST NO ACCESS TO RE-INSPECT VIOLATION — the inspector could not get in. About 324,000. This says something about access, not about the condition.
Reading an ECB violation: it is an allegation until it is heard
An ECB violation is a summons with a monetary penalty, and it is decided by a hearing at the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings. Until that hearing happens nothing has been determined. A status of PENDING with a future hearing date means exactly that: the penalty shown is the amount charged, not an amount upheld. A substantial share of ECB summonses are dismissed at hearing. A default means nobody turned up, which is enforceable but records an absence rather than a finding on the merits. Both are covered at ECB violation and OATH hearing.
How to check a building, step by step
- Get the address resolved to its identifiers — the BBL for the tax lot and the BIN for the building. Violations are filed against these, and an address string alone will miss records.
- Search DOB violations and split active from closed on the asterisk. Count only the active ones.
- Search HPD violations and read class and status together. Open Class C is the line to look at first; Class I is a registration matter.
- Search ECB violations and check the hearing status before treating any penalty as real.
- Look at the dates. A cluster of open violations from the last twelve months is a live situation. The same count spread across twenty years is a different building.
- Compare against the building's size and age, which is the honest denominator — a 300-unit pre-war building will out-record a six-unit walk-up without being worse run.
Doing all six by hand across three city systems is most of an afternoon. Check a Building does it in one search, free, and shows the status fields as the city publishes them rather than collapsing everything into a single violation count — because the difference between active, dismissed and pending is the whole substance of the record. How the matching works, and where it stops being reliable, is on the methodology page.
What a violation count does not prove
Please read this part before drawing conclusions.
- Volume tracks size and age. More apartments and more decades means more records. Compare like with like.
- Most records are not open. Across both DOB and HPD, closed and dismissed records heavily outnumber active ones.
- A violation is about a condition at a moment. It says what an inspector found on one day. It does not describe the building today unless it is still open.
- Ownership changes. A record from 2011 may predate the current owner entirely; check the deed history alongside it.
- This is building research. Everything here is a public record about a property. It is tenant education and property research, not tenant screening and not a background check on any person.
Related
To report something rather than read it: how to file a complaint, and for the most common single complaint, no heat or hot water. To understand who has to fix what: how to look up your NYC landlord. For the construction side of the record: how to read NYC building permits.
General information about public building records, not legal advice, and not tenant screening. All counts are live totals from NYC Open Data on the date queried and will move. Sources: NYC Open Data — DOB Violations (3h2n-5cm9), Housing Maintenance Code Violations (wvxf-dwi5), DOB/ECB Violations (6bgk-3dad); NYC HPD and NYC DOB published guidance.