8 Repairs New York Landlords Must Make, and What Renters Can Do When They Stall

A pipe bursts under a Bronx kitchen sink on a Friday night, and the landlord’s voicemail fills up by Monday.

The tenant patches it with a towel and a bucket for three weeks straight.

The landlord is on the wrong side of the law.

These are the repairs New York landlords are legally required to make, and what renters can do about it if they stall.

Note: This is general information, not legal advice. Rental rules and notice periods are subject to change, so confirm the current requirements with the New York State Attorney General’s office.

1. Pest Infestation Removal

New York landlords have to keep a rental free of insect and rodent infestations.

That duty comes from the state’s warranty of habitability, the guarantee built into every lease that a rented home has to be livable.

It’s automatic.

No landlord can write it out of a lease.

The statute itself never names roaches, mice, or rats.

It just bars conditions “dangerous, hazardous or detrimental” to a tenant’s health.

New York courts have read a persistent pest problem straight into that language for decades: Letting one continue counts as a breach on its own.

In buildings with three or more apartments, New York City’s Local Law 55 spells the duty out further, requiring a landlord to inspect every unit for pests once a year instead of waiting for a tenant to complain first.

Waiting for a complaint used to be normal.

The annual inspection requirement changed that math in New York City.

If pests turn up anyway, the extermination bill belongs to the landlord, not a cost split with the tenant down the hall.

2. Heat During Heating Season

New York landlords have to supply heat every day of the heating season, which runs from October 1 through May 31.

The rule comes with exact numbers attached.

Whenever it’s colder than 55 degrees outside between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m., the apartment has to hit at least 68 degrees inside.

Overnight, from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m., the minimum drops to 62 degrees, no matter what it’s doing outside.

New York City writes those exact numbers into its housing code.

Landlords elsewhere in the state answer to the same basic duty, even where the local heat rule looks different county to county.

An old boiler or a high gas bill doesn’t change the number a landlord has to hit.

A cold apartment in a cold snap is still a code violation.

3. Hot Water Year-Round

New York landlords also owe tenants hot water 365 days a year, not just through the cold months.

New York City’s housing code, the same code that sets the heat minimums, requires that water to reach at least 120 degrees at the tap.

Landlords elsewhere in the state carry the same year-round hot-water duty under the warranty of habitability, even where the local code doesn’t spell out that exact number.

A landlord can’t wait for cooler weather to fix a broken water heater.

Cold showers in July break the law exactly as much as cold showers in January.

It’s often the repair building staff put off longest since a tenant without heat in December calls loudest, while a tenant without hot water in July complains and moves on.

4. Working Plumbing and Electrical Systems

New York landlords carry a parallel duty into a unit’s plumbing, electrical, and sanitary systems, keeping them in good and safe working order.

That obligation comes from the Multiple Dwelling Law and, outside the state’s largest cities, the Multiple Residence Law, not just the warranty of habitability that covers heat, hot water, and pest control.

State lawmakers added another layer in 2019.

The Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act wrote an explicit “duty to repair” into the law alongside the warranty of habitability, a phrase now built into New York’s anti-retaliation protections for tenants who complain about a violation.

It covers more than pipes and outlets.

Any appliance the landlord installed, like the stove or the refrigerator, falls under the same requirement.

A cracked stovetop or a sparking outlet isn’t a tenant’s problem to fix on their own with a makeshift patch job.

That’s the landlord’s repair, start to finish.

5. Mold Remediation

New York landlords have to deal with mold, not paint over it and hope it goes away.

Under the same Local Law 55 that covers pests, owners of buildings with three or more units have to inspect every apartment for mold once a year and fix the leak or moisture problem causing it, not just paint over the mold.

That inspection mandate is a New York City rule.

Landlords in the rest of the state still answer to the warranty of habitability, which treats hazardous mold as the kind of “dangerous, hazardous or detrimental” condition a landlord has to fix, even without an annual inspection requirement behind it.

Bigger buildings carry a bigger requirement.

In buildings with 10 or more units, any patch of mold over 10 square feet has to go to a state-licensed mold assessor and a separate state-licensed remediator, never the super with a spray bottle.

The worst mold violations, patches of 30 square feet or more, get 21 days to fix.

A mice or roach infestation carries that same 21-day window on its own, not only when the two problems show up together.

A landlord who paints over mold instead of fixing what caused it hasn’t made the repair.

The mold comes back within a season, and the underlying leak is still unfixed.

6. Smoke and Carbon Monoxide Detectors

New York landlords have to install and maintain a working smoke detector in every rental unit, no exceptions for older buildings.

If the unit has a gas or oil appliance, a carbon monoxide (CO) detector has to go in too, positioned within 15 feet of every bedroom door.

The tenant pays a small reimbursement, about $25, when a landlord installs a new CO alarm.

Once a detector is up, New York landlords still carry a repair-and-replacement duty on it, and that’s where the responsibilities split.

Tenants keep the batteries fresh and are responsible for replacing a detector that gets stolen, removed, or goes missing during the lease.

Landlords carry the other half of that duty: A detector that fails within its first year because of a manufacturing defect, through no fault of the tenant, is the landlord’s replacement, and it has to go back up within 30 days.

A silent alarm during a gas leak because a landlord never swapped out a defective unit points back to the landlord, not the tenant who reported it.

7. Lead Paint Hazard Removal

New York landlords in older buildings carry a lead paint duty that New York City spells out under Local Law 1.

Local Law 1’s inspection and repair rules are a New York City program, but landlords statewide face a related duty of their own.

Federal law requires disclosing known lead paint hazards in any pre-1978 rental anywhere in the country.

New York’s own Public Health Law layers on additional notice and testing requirements on top of that.

Any New York City building with three or more units built before 1960 falls under Local Law 1 automatically.

So do 1960-to-1978 buildings where the owner already knows lead paint is present.

The trigger is a child under six who lives in the unit, or routinely spends 10 or more hours a week there.

Once that’s true, a landlord has to treat any peeling or damaged paint as a hazard and fix it using certified workers and safe work practices, not a regular paint roller.

A tenant with a paint scraper and good intentions can’t legally do this repair instead.

Every January, landlords send tenants a notice asking whether a young child lives there.

Tenants have until February 16 to send it back.

Skip that step, and a landlord loses the excuse that they didn’t know.

8. Window Guards for Young Children

New York landlords in buildings with three or more units have to install window guards under Local Law 57 once a child 10 or younger lives in the apartment, no request required.

Installing them is only the start of a New York landlord’s job.

A worn, bent, or missing guard is the landlord’s repair to make, at the landlord’s cost, for as long as a qualifying child lives there.

Every window counts, including first-floor bathrooms and any window leading onto a balcony or terrace.

The only exceptions are windows that open onto a fire escape and certain first-floor windows required as a secondary exit.

Everything else needs a guard, kept in working condition.

A landlord who installs guards on the living room windows and skips the bathroom hasn’t finished the job.

Any tenant can request guards in writing too, even without a child in the home.

The landlord still has to install and maintain them.

Filing an HPD Complaint When Repairs Stall

New York renters don’t have to keep calling a landlord who stopped picking up.

311 exists for exactly this.

New York City’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) takes complaints through 311, by phone or online, and opens an inspection from there.

Heat and hot water complaints alone topped 246,700 in a single year, proof that a stalled repair is one of the most common landlord-tenant fights in the state, not a rare one.

An inspector who confirms the problem issues a violation, and the class of that violation decides how fast the clock runs.

HP Cases: Forcing a New York Landlord’s Hand in Court

New York renters can escalate a stalled repair well beyond a 311 call, straight into housing court.

Court, not just complaints.

An HP case, short for Housing Part, lets a tenant, or HPD itself, ask a judge to order a landlord to fix a violation on a court-enforced deadline instead of an honor system.

HP cases move fast by court standards.

HPD itself can file one on a tenant’s behalf when conditions are bad enough.

A renter isn’t required to hire a lawyer to get the process started.

Article 7-A and the Repair-and-Deduct Question

A New York landlord who loses an HP case hasn’t necessarily seen the toughest consequence available.

Under Article 7-A, a judge can strip that landlord of control over rent collection entirely and hand it to a court-appointed administrator, who uses that rent to pay for the repairs directly.

Judges reach for that power when conditions are bad enough that trusting the landlord to spend rent money on repairs isn’t realistic.

New York does recognize a narrower version of that same idea outside Article 7-A.

Courts have allowed a tenant to make necessary repairs and deduct the reasonable cost from rent under the warranty of habitability, when the landlord had notice of the problem and a fair chance to fix it first.

It isn’t a bright-line, codified right the way it is in some other states.

The New York State Attorney General’s own guidance calls it appropriate only in extenuating circumstances, so trying it alone without documentation is risky.

The safer version of the same idea already exists in Article 7-A, with a judge signing off instead of a tenant guessing.