The Radiator Rules: NYC's Heat Law, Decoded

NYC's heat season runs October 1 through May 31. During it, landlords must keep apartments at 68°F between 6am and 10pm whenever it's below 55°F outside, and at 62°F overnight no matter what. Hot water must be 120°F year-round. No heat is an immediately hazardous violation — here's how the rules work and what to do when they're broken.

Every October, the same negotiation begins in a few hundred thousand apartments: you, a radiator, and a landlord with a different opinion about what "cold" means. The good news is that the law took your side on this — one hundred and eight years ago.

The rules, exactly

New York's heat law is mercifully specific. From October 1 through May 31 — heat season — every residential building owner must maintain:

• Daytime (6am–10pm): at least 68°F indoors whenever the outdoor temperature drops below 55°F.
• Nighttime (10pm–6am): at least 62°F indoors, regardless of the temperature outside. No trigger, no conditions. Sixty-two, period.
• Hot water: at least 120°F, every day of the year. Hot water never has an off-season.

That 68-degree number isn't arbitrary, by the way — it entered the city's Sanitary Code in October 1918 and has survived every mayor since. Your radiator is governed by a rule older than the Empire State Building. Whether your radiator knows that is a separate question, and it's the one this post is really about.

What the records say about how it's going

The law is clear. The compliance is a dataset. In the last two years of city records, tenants filed 652,100 heat and hot-water complaints — and the seasonal shape is exactly what you'd guess: 80,117 complaints in January 2026 alone, against 14,760 across the entire June-to-September stretch. When it gets cold, the phones get busy.

But here's the number that matters if you're choosing a building rather than surviving one: 19,721 buildings generated heat complaints in both of the last two winters. Not one bad cold snap. Both winters, same building, again. At that point the file isn't describing bad luck — it's describing equipment, or management, or both. It's describing a schedule. And the schedule is public.

If your heat is off right now

The escalation path, in order:

1. Tell the landlord, super, or managing agent. Most outages end here, and the law expects you to start here.
2. Call 311 or file at 311 online. The complaint routes to HPD and lands on the building's permanent record either way — which is why complaint histories are so honest.
3. HPD can inspect. If an inspector confirms the outage during heat season, that's a Class C violation — immediately hazardous — with a 24-hour legal deadline to fix. (What the classes mean.) HPD can and does escalate against owners who don't restore service; heat cases are also a straight line into housing litigation.

One practical note: keep your own log — dates, indoor temps if you can measure them, photos of the thermostat. Boring, five seconds a day, and exactly the record that makes every later step faster.

The pre-lease version of this post

If you're reading this in a viewing-and-applying phase rather than a wearing-gloves-indoors phase: the entire heat story of any building you're considering is already written down. Complaint clusters every November. Violations that opened in January and closed in June — or didn't close. A boiler with a defect history. The apartment shows beautifully in July; the file remembers February.

Check the building's complaint and violation history before you sign — the winter record specifically. Or run one VeriCrib report and get the whole file read for you: heat history, violations, boiler records, and the rest of the building's story, with a verdict in plain language. Your first three reports are full reports, free.

Sixty-eight degrees is the law. Whether a given building treats that as a floor or a suggestion is the most checkable fact in this city.