New York tenant screening & landlord laws
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New York tenant screening
New York is one of the more heavily regulated states in the country for residential landlords, and tenant screening sits right at the center of that regulation. On top of the federal Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), which governs how landlords may use background and credit reports nationwide, New York layers its own statewide rules on application and screening fees, source-of-income discrimination, security deposits, and eviction procedure.
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This page focuses on the rules that apply statewide, and notes where New York City (or other individual municipalities) diverge.
How to screen a tenant in New York
- Use a consistent, written screening policy. Apply the same criteria to every applicant to reduce fair-housing risk, including under New York's source-of-income and criminal-history protections discussed below.
- Get written authorization before pulling any report. Federal FCRA requires a landlord to obtain the applicant's consent before ordering a background or credit check.
- Cap what you charge for the check. New York limits background/credit check fees to the actual cost of the check or $20, whichever is less, and requires the fee to be waived in some circumstances (see below).
- Evaluate income, credit, and rental history without regard to lawful source of income, including housing vouchers, since New York's Human Rights Law protects applicants who rely on public assistance or a housing subsidy.
- Handle criminal history carefully and consistently, being mindful of New York's statewide restrictions on considering certain sealed or favorably-resolved records — and, if the property is in New York City, the additional sequencing rules under the Fair Chance for Housing Act.
- Send a compliant adverse action notice if you deny an applicant, raise a deposit, or require a co-signer based even partly on a consumer report.
Screening rules to follow in New York
Screening fees
New York's Real Property Law § 238-a generally bars landlords from charging application-processing fees at all, with one narrow exception: landlords may charge a fee to cover the cost of a background check and credit check, but that fee may not exceed the actual cost of the checks or $20, whichever is less. A few procedural details matter here and are easy to miss:
- The fee must be waived if the applicant provides a copy of a background or credit check that was conducted within the past thirty days.
- Landlords must provide the receipt or invoice from the screening company, along with a copy of the report, before they can collect the fee — the statute conditions the right to charge on that disclosure.
- Cooperative housing corporations get a narrower carve-out: a co-op may charge a fee above $20 to a prospective purchaser/shareholder for background and credit checks, limited to actual cost, and co-ops regulated under certain provisions of the Private Housing Finance Law must also get the fee approved by their supervising agency.
- The same section separately caps late fees at $50 or 5% of monthly rent (whichever is less), and only after rent is five days late — a related but distinct protection from the application-fee cap.
- Any lease clause attempting to waive these protections is void as a matter of public policy.
Criminal history
Statewide, New York's Human Rights Law restricts what landlords can ask about and act on with respect to certain categories of criminal history. Under N.Y. Executive Law § 296(16), a landlord may not inquire about, or take adverse action based on, an arrest that was resolved in the applicant's favor, a case adjourned in contemplation of dismissal, a sealed conviction record, or a youthful offender adjudication — in housing as well as employment, licensing, and credit. Applicants who are asked an unlawful question may lawfully answer as though the protected record does not exist. These state protections are narrower than an outright ban on considering convictions generally; they focus specifically on non-conviction, resolved, or sealed records.
Separately, New York's tenant-blacklisting law, RPL § 227-f, prohibits landlords from refusing to rent to someone because they were named in a past or pending landlord-tenant (housing court) proceeding, and creates a rebuttable presumption of a violation if a landlord requested tenant-screening or court records and then denied the application. The New York Attorney General enforces this provision with civil penalties of $500–$1,000 per violation; there's no private right of action.
New York City goes considerably further with its own Fair Chance for Housing Act (Local Law 24 of 2024, effective January 1, 2025), which restricts most consideration of criminal conviction history citywide and requires a conditional offer before any criminal background check.
Source of income
Since April 12, 2019, New York's Human Rights Law has prohibited housing discrimination based on a person's lawful source of income — this is a statewide protection, not a New York City–only rule. Under N.Y. Executive Law § 296(5) (private housing), § 296(2-a) (publicly-assisted housing), and § 292(36) (definitions), landlords, brokers, co-op and condo boards, and their agents may not refuse to rent, offer different terms, or advertise a refusal to accept housing vouchers, Section 8, SSI, child support, alimony, foster-care subsidies, or other forms of lawful income.
According to the NYS Division of Human Rights' published guidance, the statewide protection applies broadly, with the guidance identifying two narrow carve-outs: a rental unit in a two-family home occupied by the owner, and rooming houses occupied by the owner. Some secondary sources describe additional carve-outs, such as senior housing or same-sex room rentals in dormitory-style housing; those do not appear in DHR's own published guidance, so landlords should treat the DHR-listed exceptions above as the baseline and confirm any additional exemption with counsel before relying on it. Landlords may still ask about and document income, including requiring proof of income, but may not use income screening in a way that has the effect of excluding voucher holders — for example, through wealth or income formulas calibrated to the full market rent rather than the tenant's actual rent obligation after subsidy.
New York City layers additional, separately enforced source-of-income protections under its own Human Rights Law (in effect for larger buildings since 2008 and expanded to cover most rental units regardless of size effective February 15, 2021).
FCRA and adverse action
The federal Fair Credit Reporting Act sets the baseline for any landlord using a third-party consumer report to screen a tenant nationwide.
Under FCRA and FTC guidance for landlords, landlords must:
- Certify a permissible purpose with the screening company before ordering a report, and obtain the applicant's authorization.
- Send an adverse action notice whenever a consumer report is even a minor factor in denying an application, requiring a co-signer, raising a deposit, or otherwise imposing a burden not required of other applicants.
- Include, in that notice, the name, address, and phone number of the consumer reporting agency, a statement that the agency did not make the decision and cannot explain the reason for it, and notice of the applicant's right to a free copy of the report and to dispute inaccurate information — consistent with CFPB guidance on rental background checks.
Landlords in New York should layer the state and local rules above (fee caps, source-of-income, criminal-history, and tenant-blacklisting protections) on top of this federal floor rather than treating FCRA compliance alone as sufficient.
Landlord obligations beyond screening
Security deposits
For non-rent-stabilized dwelling units, N.Y. General Obligations Law § 7-108 — enacted as part of the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act — sets out detailed deposit rules:
- The deposit cannot exceed one month's rent, regardless of the length of the tenancy (with limited exceptions for seasonal-use dwellings and owner-occupied cooperative apartments, and the statute does not apply to certain regulated housing types such as continuing care retirement communities, licensed assisted-living providers, and adult care facilities).
- Landlords must return the deposit, with an itemized statement of any deductions, within fourteen days after the tenant vacates. If the landlord misses that window, the statute says the landlord forfeits the right to retain any portion of the deposit.
- Deductions are limited to unpaid rent, damage beyond normal wear and tear, unpaid utility charges billed directly by the landlord, and moving/storage costs — landlords cannot deduct for a prior tenant's damage or for ordinary wear and tear.
- Tenants have inspection rights both at move-in (if requested, with a written condition report) and before move-out (with at least 48 hours' notice of the inspection date), and a documented chance to cure any cited issues before the tenancy ends.
- The landlord bears the burden of proof if a deduction is disputed, and a willful violation exposes the landlord to punitive damages of up to twice the deposit amount, on top of actual damages.
This section governs non-rent-stabilized units specifically; a related provision, GOB § 7-107, separately addresses deposits for rent-stabilized units, and landlords with rent-stabilized inventory should confirm which provision — and which local rent-stabilization rules — apply to a given unit before assuming the § 7-108 procedures control.
Rent caps and just-cause eviction (Good Cause Eviction)
New York enacted a statewide "Good Cause Eviction" framework, codified at RPL Article 6-A, when Governor Hochul signed it into law on April 20, 2024. The law is scheduled to sunset ("repealed") on June 15, 2034 unless extended. Its scope is more limited and more opt-in-dependent than headlines sometimes suggest:
- It applies automatically in New York City under RPL § 212, for covered units.
- Everywhere else in the state, it only applies if a village, town, or city separately opts in by passing its own local law under RPL § 213. According to New York's Division of Housing and Community Renewal's most recent published notice, municipalities that have opted in include the cities of Albany, Beacon, Binghamton, Hudson, Ithaca, Kingston, Middletown, New Rochelle, Newburgh, Poughkeepsie, Rochester, and White Plains, the towns of Fishkill and Poughkeepsie, and several villages including Catskill, Croton-on-Hudson, New Paltz, Nyack, and Tarrytown. As of that same notice, there is no indication that Buffalo or Yonkers have opted in — landlords in those cities should not assume Good Cause Eviction applies there.
- Where it does apply, covered landlords generally need a statutorily defined "good cause" to evict a tenant or decline to renew a lease, and rent increases above a locally-set threshold (tied to the Consumer Price Index) can be treated as evidence of bad faith, functioning as a soft rent-increase guardrail rather than a hard rent cap.
- Meaningful exemptions apply, including for small landlords (definitions vary by municipality — DHCR's list shows most opt-in localities defining a "small landlord" as someone who owns no more than one unit statewide, though at least one municipality, White Plains, has set the threshold at four units), owner-occupied buildings with a limited number of units, units above a fair-market-rent threshold (245% of HUD fair market rent by default, though opt-in municipalities may set a different percentage), buildings with a certificate of occupancy issued after January 1, 2009 (exempt for 30 years from issuance), and certain other categories such as seasonal dwellings, hospital/medical-facility units, school dormitories, and religious-institution housing.
Good Cause Eviction is a distinct, newer framework from New York's long-standing rent stabilization and rent control system, which caps rent increases and limits non-renewal for certain older or specifically regulated buildings — that system is concentrated in New York City and a handful of other municipalities and does not apply to the general statewide rental market. Landlords should not assume either framework applies to a given unit without checking its specific status.
Rules that vary by city
New York City carries the deepest additional layer of tenant-screening and landlord regulation in the state, including the Fair Chance for Housing Act's restrictions on criminal-history screening (effective January 1, 2025), the city's own longer-running Human Rights Law source-of-income enforcement regime, and the automatic (non-opt-in) application of Good Cause Eviction.
Outside New York City, most of the statewide protections described above apply uniformly, with Good Cause Eviction as the main exception — it only reaches municipalities that have affirmatively opted in. Based on the state's own published list, cities including Albany, Rochester, Binghamton, Middletown, and New Rochelle (among others) have opted in, while Buffalo and Yonkers had not opted in as of the most recent state notice reviewed for this guide. Landlords operating in multiple New York municipalities should confirm current opt-in status directly with DHCR before assuming a given city's rules, since this list is updated periodically and municipalities can add local laws.
Frequently asked questions
Can a landlord in New York charge whatever they want for a rental application?
No. Under RPL § 238-a, most application-processing fees are prohibited outright, and any fee charged to cover a background or credit check is capped at the actual cost of the check or $20, whichever is less, with the fee waived if the applicant supplies a report from the prior thirty days.
Does New York require landlords to accept housing vouchers?
Statewide, yes, in most cases — New York's Human Rights Law bars refusing an applicant based on a lawful source of income, including housing vouchers, with narrow exceptions such as owner-occupied two-family homes and owner-occupied rooming houses, per current DHR guidance.
How much can a security deposit be, and how fast must it be returned in New York?
For non-rent-stabilized units, GOB § 7-108 generally caps the deposit at one month's rent and requires an itemized accounting and return of any remaining balance within fourteen days of move-out, with limited exceptions for certain licensed or regulated housing types.
Does Good Cause Eviction apply to every rental in New York State?
No. It applies automatically in New York City and only in other municipalities that have separately opted in by local law, and even then it carries exemptions for small landlords, certain newer buildings, and units above a fair-market-rent threshold — it is not a uniform statewide rent cap or just-cause requirement.
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Checkr can help New York landlords and property managers run consistent, FCRA-compliant tenant screening while keeping an eye on New York's statewide fee caps, source-of-income protections, and criminal-history rules described above. Get started with Checkr to build a screening workflow suited to your New York rental portfolio.
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Disclaimer
The resources and information provided here are for educational and informational purposes only and do not constitute legal advice. Always consult your own counsel for up-to-date legal advice and guidance related to your practices, needs, and compliance with applicable laws.