News release · Data analysis

We Analyzed All 959,710 Records on NYC's Pied-à-Terre Tax Roll: Only 2.5% Can Actually Owe the Tax — but the Typical Bill Tops $50,000

An independent analysis of the Department of Finance's July 2026 Supplemental Market Value Roll finds 24,222 over-threshold records, a maximum pre-exemption take of about $1.74 billion a year, and a $40,000 cliff sitting one dollar above each threshold.

Published July 29, 2026 · Conquest · piedaterretax.nyc · Leer en español

NEW YORK, July 29, 2026 — When the Department of Finance published its supplemental market value roll last week, coverage focused on the headline count: roughly 960,000 properties "that may be subject" to the city's new non-primary residence surcharge, the so-called pied-à-terre tax. We downloaded the city's actual data files and checked every record. The picture that emerges is very different from the headlines — in both directions.

How many properties can actually owe the pied-à-terre tax?

Of the 959,710 records on the roll, only 24,222 — about 2.5% — have a DOF market value at or above a surcharge threshold ($5 million for one- to three-family homes; $1 million for condos and co-ops through June 2028). The other 97.5% cannot owe the surcharge at their current valuations no matter what they file, because DOF built the roll deliberately broadly: the agency states it "includes, but is not limited to" properties that may be subject. A record on the roll is not a tax bill — for most owners, it is not even the possibility of one.

The over-threshold records break down as 6,802 one- to three-family homes, 11,834 condo units, and 5,586 co-op units in the buildings for which DOF published unit-level values. These are records, not confirmed pieds-à-terre: any owner who claims the property as a primary residence by the August 2026 deadlines drops off the list.

How big are the bills?

Far bigger than most owners assume. The surcharge is a flat rate applied to the entire market value — not, as widely assumed, only to the value above the threshold. DOF's own rule is explicit: "If a property or cooperative dwelling unit's valuation exceeds the threshold, the entirety of the property's value is subject to the surcharge." The result: the median potential bill is $53,852 for affected houses, $54,213 for affected condo units, and $51,916 for affected co-op units — roughly $52,000–$54,000 across every segment.

Maximum potential annual surcharge by segment

Flat statutory rate × full DOF market value, Phase 1 (2026–2028), before primary-residence exemptions · $ millions

Summed across segments, the maximum potential first-year take is about $1.74 billion a year — a figure that is simultaneously an undercount of the theoretical maximum, because most of the city's co-op units have no published values in the roll, and far above what will actually be collected, because owners who file primary-residence exemptions owe nothing. Both qualifiers matter equally.

What happens at the threshold? A $40,000 cliff.

Because the rate applies to the full value, the thresholds are cliffs, not on-ramps. A house valued at $4,999,999 owes zero; at $5,000,000 it owes $40,000 a year (0.8% of the full value). A non-primary condo at $999,999 owes zero; at $1,000,000 it owes $40,000 (4% of the full value). The populations sitting near the edge are substantial: 1,752 houses are valued within 10% below the $5 million line, and 2,879 condo and 1,526 co-op records sit within 10% below $1 million. For these owners, next year's routine revaluation is worth up to $40,000.

The cliff: annual surcharge for a 1–3 family home, by market value

Flat 0.8% rate on the entire value once it reaches $5,000,000

Who owns the affected properties?

Roughly 52% of the over-threshold condo units and 44% of the over-threshold houses are held by LLCs, corporations, trusts, or other entities rather than individuals under their own names, based on owner-name matching in the roll. (Co-op unit records name shareholders directly and show effectively no entity ownership.) Geographically, affected condos are 94.6% in Manhattan — Tribeca's 10013 is the single most affected ZIP — but the $5 million-plus houses split almost evenly between Manhattan (3,356) and Brooklyn (3,311), led by Brooklyn Heights and Park Slope. This is not only a Billionaires' Row tax.

Top five ZIP codes by affected records. The full ZIP-level dataset is available as a downloadable CSV.

Why does most of the tax disappear in 2028?

In Phase 2, beginning July 1, 2028, the condo/co-op threshold rises from $1 million to $5 million and the rates fall to the Class 1 schedule — and because of that threshold jump, 98.4% of currently affected condo units and 99.7% of co-op units drop out of the tax entirely, collapsing the maximum condo/co-op take from about $1.2 billion to about $14 million a year, a 99% reduction. The pied-à-terre tax as most affected owners will experience it is, by design, a two-year event — unless Albany revisits the schedule before then. The entire surcharge sunsets on June 30, 2031.

Condo & co-op maximum surcharge: Phase 1 vs Phase 2

Phase 2 (from July 2028) raises the condo/co-op threshold from $1M to $5M · $ millions

Is Co-op City really on the pied-à-terre list?

Yes — and it illustrates how broad the roll is. Co-op City in the Bronx is the largest housing cooperative in the world: roughly 15,000 apartments and more than 40,000 residents, built under the Mitchell-Lama program as affordable housing for working families — about as far from a luxury pied-à-terre as New York housing gets. Yet because DOF listed entire co-op corporations as single records, Co-op City (Riverbay Corporation, $606 million) is on the roll, alongside Rochdale Village in Queens, Penn South in Chelsea, and Southbridge Towers — all landmark affordable and limited-equity cooperatives whose residents are overwhelmingly primary occupants. If a list of possible pieds-à-terre includes 40,000 working-class Bronx residents, that tells you what the list is: a valuation inventory of buildings, not a list of taxpayers. Being on it does not mean a shareholder owes anything.

How can co-op units be valued without each owner's share percentage?

Because the city already did that allocation. The surcharge applies to DOF's market value of the individual cooperative dwelling unit, and DOF produces that number itself: it values the co-op building as a whole, then allocates the value to units using each unit's proportionate interest — the same share allocation that appears on a shareholder's stock certificate and behind the maintenance bill, as reported to the city by the cooperative corporation. The unit-level co-op records in the roll are the published output of that allocation, so no owner-supplied share percentage is needed for the units we counted. For the majority of co-op buildings, DOF published only a single building-level value and no unit allocations — for those we estimated nothing, which is why our co-op figures are labeled as a subset. Note also that DOF values co-ops by rental comparison rather than sales, so a unit that would sell above $1 million can carry a DOF value below it and owe nothing.

Where does the $1.74 billion figure come from?

It is a straightforward sum: for every record over a threshold, apply the flat statutory rate to its full DOF market value — as if every one were billed — and add it up.

Read it as a scale estimate, not a revenue forecast: the true citywide maximum is somewhat higher than $1.74 billion (thousands of co-op units have no published DOF values and so contribute nothing to the sum), while actual collections will be far lower (most of these 24,222 owners are primary residents who will file the exemption and owe $0).

Methodology

We analyzed the two files DOF published on July 24, 2026 as the "Supplemental market value roll – July 2026" (Tax Class 1: 684,619 records; Tax Class 2: 275,091 records; 959,710 total). Surcharge amounts apply the statutory flat rates to full DOF market value per the DOF final rule: Class 1 at 0.8%/1.05%/1.3% (≥$5M/≥$15M/≥$25M); condo and co-op units in Phase 1 at 4%/5.25%/6.5% (≥$1M/≥$3M/≥$5M). "Condo units" are Tax Class 2 records of record type 1 with building class R, excluding bulk and condop lots (apartment field beginning RES/RSD, values above $50M, or owner names matching co-op-corporation patterns — 330 records excluded; exact filter regex published in the dataset notes). "Co-op units" are record type U, which DOF published for only 764 parcels, nearly all in Manhattan — citywide co-op exposure is therefore understated. All figures are maximums before primary-residence exemptions (filing deadlines August 21–24, 2026); DOF states the roll is intentionally over-inclusive. Entity-ownership shares are approximate (owner-name pattern matching on a truncated field). Every statistic in this release was independently reproduced by two separate reviewers before publication. The roll remains open for public inspection and correction through December 31, 2026; figures will be refreshed if DOF revises the files.

Sources: DOF Assessments — Supplemental Market Value Roll (July 2026) · DOF final rule on the non-primary residence surcharge · DOF surcharge page · NY Tax Law art. 30-C; NYC Admin. Code §§ 11-3202–11-3204.