NYC Pied-à-Terre Tax 2026: Miss the Majority of Days, Pay 4%

The NYC pied-à-terre tax is real, it started on July 1, 2026, and it turns on one question: were you in the place a majority of days last year? New York Tax Law Article 30-C imposes an annual surcharge on New York City residential property that is not a primary residence. It is not means-tested against your income and it does not care where your domicile is. It is a percentage of the property's market value, added to the statement of account and billed with your property taxes.

Here is the part owners have not absorbed. The City does not start by asking whether your apartment is a primary residence. Section 1352 directs the Department of Finance to "make, on an annual basis, an initial determination that a covered property ... is not a primary residence." The default is that you owe. You rebut it with proof. And if the notice never reaches you, that is your problem: "Failure to provide the notice required by this section shall not affect the validity of the imposition of the surcharge."

The burden is yours, the currency is days, and nobody counted your 2026 days for you.

What is the NYC pied-à-terre tax?

Article 30-C runs from §1350 to §1356. Section 1350 is the operative language, and it is unusually direct:

"In addition to any other tax or assessment imposed by this chapter or other law, there is hereby imposed, beginning on July first, two thousand twenty-six, a surcharge in accordance with this article on a covered property ... that is not a primary residence." — Tax Law §1350

Two words matter more than the rest: hereby imposed. Every earlier pied-à-terre proposal in New York died waiting on a local vote. This one sits in state law with a start date already behind us. Sections 1355 and 1356 do refer to "the administrative code imposing the surcharge," so local implementation language is contemplated and the Department of Finance still has rules to write, but the imposition itself is in the Tax Law.

Owners and brokers call it the pied-a-terre tax; 2026 is simply the year it started. The statute never uses the phrase. Section 1350 is headed "Imposition of surcharge," and every section carries the same note: repealed June 30, 2031. That is a five-year run covering the 2026 through 2030 calendar years of day counting, and New York has a habit of extending temporary provisions.

One structural point saves confusion later. This is a property surcharge, not an income tax. It attaches to a building, not to you. A lifelong Floridian who has never filed a New York return can owe it, because the question the statute asks is about the apartment.

Who pays the Article 30-C surcharge?

The NYC pied-à-terre tax reaches three kinds of property. Section 1351 defines "covered property" as real property, other than excluded property, classified as:

• class one property, other than vacant land;
• class two property that is a residential cooperative property in which at least one unit clears the value threshold and is not a primary residence; and
• class two property that is a residential condominium dwelling unit.

In New York City terms, class one is essentially one-, two- and three-family houses. Class two is the rest of residential, where condominium units and cooperative apartments live. The surcharge covers the townhouse in Brooklyn Heights, the condo in Hudson Yards and the co-op on Park Avenue, at a different threshold for each. Section 1351 carves out only "excluded property": a unit awaiting a required certificate of occupancy, and a sponsor-held condo or co-op unit under an offering plan filed under General Business Law §352-e. Unsold new construction is not the target. Your apartment is.

The exemption that matters to most owners is the tenancy exemption, and it is narrower than people assume. Section 1351 treats a unit as a primary residence when it is occupied by "one or more lessees, and any sub-lessees ... provided any such lessee or sub-lessee is a natural person occupying such covered property ... pursuant to a bona fide lease agreement negotiated in an arms-length transaction with a term of not less than one year."

Read that as a checklist. Natural person. Bona fide. Arm's length. Twelve months minimum. A corporate lease for a visiting executive fails the natural-person test. A furnished six-month let fails the term test. A below-market lease to your nephew invites a hard look at "arms-length." If you plan to rent your way out of this, it has to be a real one-year lease to a real person who actually lives there.

What are the NYC pied-à-terre tax rates in 2026?

Section 1353 sets the rates and splits them into two phases. Phase one runs for fiscal years beginning July 1, 2026 through June 30, 2028. From July 1, 2028 a single uniform threshold applies to everything.

Phase	Property type	Market value band	Surcharge rate
Phase one (7/1/2026–6/30/2028)	Class one (1–3 family homes)	$5M to $15M	0.8%
Phase one	Class one	Above $15M to $25M	1.05%
Phase one	Class one	Above $25M	1.3%
Phase one	Condo or co-op unit	$1M to $3M	4.0%
Phase one	Condo or co-op unit	Above $3M to $5M	5.25%
Phase one	Condo or co-op unit	Above $5M	6.5%
Phase two (from 7/1/2028)	All covered property	$5M to $15M	0.8%
Phase two	All covered property	Above $15M to $25M	1.05%
Phase two	All covered property	Above $25M	1.3%
Sunset	All	—	Article repealed 6/30/2031

The statute writes the first condo band as value "greater than or equal to one million dollars, but less than or equal to three million dollars, at a rate of 4.0 percent."

Notice the spread. An apartment pays five times the class one rate at the entry band and enters the regime at one fifth of the value. The pied-à-terre surcharge rates were built to hit apartments, and the New York City condo tax threshold of $1 million pulls in a great deal of ordinary Manhattan and Brooklyn inventory.

Notice also the cliffs. These are rates on the whole value, not marginal rates on the slice above a threshold. A condo valued at exactly $3 million pays 4.0%, or $120,000. A dollar more and 5.25% applies to the entire value, or $157,500. One dollar of value costs $37,500. The same shape appears at the $15 million and $25 million class one edges. If your Notice of Property Value lands near a band edge, the appeal is worth filing.

The number that decides everything is not your broker's number

The rate applies to "phase one market value," which §1351 defines as the value "as determined by the department of finance pursuant to chapter fifty-eight of the New York city charter." Not the sale price. For a condo or co-op in phase one, that Finance figure comes out of the comparable-rental constraints of Real Property Tax Law §581, which routinely values New York City apartments far below what they trade for.

Phase two drops that constraint deliberately, requiring a method "that considers sales of comparable residential condominium dwelling units ... without regard to the restrictions described in section five hundred eighty-one of the real property tax law." So phase two is not the relief it looks like: the threshold rises to $5 million and the top rate falls to 1.3%, but the value it is measured against switches from a rental-capped number to something closer to a real sale price. Pull your actual Notice of Property Value before concluding anything about either phase.

What does "a majority of days" mean?

The whole NYC pied-à-terre tax turns on one sentence. Section 1352 tells the Department of Finance to determine primary residence "based on factors identified by rules of the department of finance, including but not limited to whether such covered property or residential cooperative dwelling unit was occupied in aggregate for a majority of days during a calendar year by a covered owner."

A majority of a 365-day calendar year is 183 days. In a leap year it is 184. That is the whole test, arithmetically. Three things about the majority of days primary residence standard are worth pinning down.

First, it is a calendar-year count feeding a fiscal-year bill. The City's fiscal year starts July 1; the occupancy question looks back at a calendar year. Section 1351 adds a third date, defining primary residence as use of the property "as of the taxable status date immediately preceding the fiscal year in which the surcharge described by this article is imposed." Your status is fixed at a point in time, but you prove it with a full year of days.

Second, "including but not limited to" is doing real work. Section 1352 also lists documentary proof that has nothing to do with counting: the address you listed as your permanent home on your New York State return, a STAR exemption under Real Property Tax Law §425, or the credit under Tax Law §606(eee).

Third, the statute does not say how a day is counted. New York State's own rule for statutory residency counts any part of a day as a full day. Article 30-C says "occupied," which reads more like nights, but never defines the term. Until the rules say otherwise, record both. "Aggregate" is equally undefined: if two spouses each own a share and both sleep there the same 170 nights, the property was occupied 170 days, not 340. Neither point is one to guess at.

Who counts as a covered owner?

Section 1351 defines "covered owner" in five buckets: the owner of class one property; a tenant-stockholder of a cooperative corporation; the owner of a residential condominium dwelling unit; where the property is held in trust, a beneficial owner "provided that such beneficial owner or owners are the sole beneficiaries of such trust"; and where it is held by a partnership, corporation or LLC, a partner, shareholder or member "provided that such partner or partners, shareholder or shareholders, or member or members hold a majority interest."

Two of those five carry conditions, and the conditions are the interesting part: the trust rule reaches only sole beneficiaries, the entity rule only majority holders. That gets its own section below. For a straightforward owner the analysis is short. If your name is on the deed or the stock certificate, you are a covered owner, and your days in the apartment are the days that count.

How does the City verify primary residence, and how far back can it audit?

Section 1352 requires the Department of Finance to make an annual initial determination of non-primary status, then send notice. For the fiscal year that began July 1, 2026, notice was due by August 30, 2026, and it must "include an opportunity for such owner to submit proof of primary residence, to the satisfaction of such department." Section 1352 then authorizes rules under which the department "may audit any certification or documentation of primary residency submitted pursuant to this section within six years of such submission." Six years. A certification about your 2026 days is reviewable into 2032, a year after the article itself sunsets.

Section 1354 supplies the teeth:

• Penalties up to 50% of the surcharge for a certification containing "inaccurate or misleading information" that is "material to the determination of the imposition of such surcharge" and "was submitted negligently or in bad faith."
• Subpoena power. The Finance commissioner "may subpoena and require the attendance of witnesses and the production of books, papers and documents to secure information pertinent to the determination of the surcharge."
• An anti-subdivision rule where a condominium unit "has been divided into more than three units to avoid application of such surcharge" in bad faith.
• No relief from abatements. The surcharge is administered like property tax "except that any abatement, credit or exemption authorized by law shall not apply."
• Co-op boards become collectors. Unit-level surcharges go on the building's statement of account and are then "collected by the cooperative corporation from the tenant-stockholder."

Then there is §1356, the provision I would underline for anyone who recently changed their state residency:

"A city having a population of one million or more imposing a surcharge pursuant to this article shall, upon request by the commissioner of taxation and finance, provide the department of taxation and finance with any records in its possession used or considered in determining whether a covered property ... is not a primary residence. ... Information shared pursuant to this subsection shall not be subject to disclosure pursuant to article six of the public officers law." — Tax Law §1356

That is a two-way pipe between the City's Department of Finance and the State's Department of Taxation and Finance, expressly walled off from the Freedom of Information Law. Anyone certifying "this is my primary residence" to the City while telling the State they are a Florida domiciliary has now put both statements in front of both agencies, which is how an NYC pied-à-terre tax dispute becomes an NYC residency audit. It is the cross-referencing problem I wrote about in how states use smart meter and cell phone data to test residency claims, except here the statute builds the pipe for them.

A worked example: a $2.4 million condo and 170 nights

Take a couple who own a Manhattan condominium with a Department of Finance phase one market value of $2.4 million. In 2026 they spent 170 nights in it and 195 elsewhere, mostly at their house in Palm Beach.

The majority-of-days test. A majority of 365 is 183. They occupied the unit 170 days, so they are 13 short. The apartment is not their primary residence under §1352, and no argument about where their heart is changes an integer.

The bill. A phase one market value of $2.4 million sits in the first condo band, "greater than or equal to one million dollars, but less than or equal to three million dollars," at 4.0%. That is $96,000 for the year, added to their statement of account, with no abatement to offset it, recurring until either the day count changes or the article sunsets in 2031.

What 13 days were worth. Thirteen more nights would have made it 183 and eliminated the $96,000. Roughly $7,400 a night, in a place they already own.

Now the state test, which is a different question entirely. New York State treats you as a statutory resident if you maintain a permanent place of abode for substantially all of the taxable year and spend 184 days or more in New York State. At 170 days, this couple is 14 days under that line. They pay the City surcharge and they do not pay New York income tax on their worldwide income.

Look at the gap. The surcharge is avoided at 183 days of occupancy; statutory residency attaches at 184 days in the state. In a 365-day year there is exactly one number, 183, that clears both. At 182 you pay the surcharge. At 184 you are a New York resident for income tax purposes, which for a high earner is a far bigger number than $96,000. Then 2028 arrives with 366 days, a majority becomes 184, and the one-day window closes. Threading this needs a day counter, not a calendar.

Is the NYC pied-à-terre tax the same as the New York 183-day rule?

No, and conflating them is the most expensive mistake available here. They differ on four axes.

	Article 30-C surcharge	NY State statutory residency
What is counted	Days the specific property was occupied by a covered owner	Days present anywhere in New York State
The number	A majority of the calendar year (183, or 184 in a leap year)	184 days or more
Second condition	Property value at or above the threshold	Permanent place of abode maintained substantially all year
The consequence	0.8% to 6.5% of the property's market value	State and city income tax on worldwide income

The counts are not independent, and that is the trap. Every night you sleep in the Manhattan apartment is also a day present in New York State. Push occupancy to 183 to escape the surcharge and you have put 183 days on the statutory residency clock, leaving one day of margin for a lunch in Westchester or a layover at LaGuardia. New York counts any part of a day as a full day.

If you are on the wrong side of both, domicile is the next layer down: the five-factor test and what a clean exit requires are covered in how New York tracks former residents, with the state rules summarized in the New York residency guide. If you commute out of the city for work, sourcing problems stack on top of both tests, which is the multi-state tax problem nobody warns New Yorkers about. And because domicile survives you, the estate tax domicile trap is worth reading before deciding the apartment is harmless. Run your numbers through the 183-day calculator and the audit risk score so you know which side of each line you are on.

What evidence proves you lived there a majority of days?

The certification asks a factual question and the burden is yours. Section 1352 names three proofs; the rest is corroboration you assemble.

Evidence	What it proves	How to keep it
Contemporaneous day-by-day location log	Nights at the unit versus elsewhere; the backbone of the count	Capture automatically, export to PDF annually, store offline
NY State return listing the address as permanent home	Named in §1352(a)(2)(A) as acceptable proof	Keep the return and transcript seven years
STAR exemption (RPTL §425) or the §606(eee) credit	Named in §1352(a)(2)(B); a statutory proxy	Keep the approval notice and the year it covered
Bona fide one-year lease to a natural person	The tenancy exemption under §1351	Signed lease, rent ledger, tenant's proof of occupancy
Utility, internet and cable bills	Monthly occupancy pattern, the "utility heartbeat"	Download PDFs monthly; providers purge older data
Package logs, key fob swipes, doorman logs	Third-party dated occupancy you did not author	Annual export from the managing agent each January
Card, transit and toll records near the unit	Specific dates; catches gaps in the primary log	Annual statement exports; E-ZPass history downloads

The failure mode is almost never that people were not there. It is that they cannot show it six years later. Utility portals hold 12 to 24 months. Carriers purge faster. Managing agents change. A calendar reconstructed at audit time from memory and boarding passes is exactly the evidence New York case law treats as weak, for the reasons covered in what to expect in a residency audit and how to prepare.

This is the specific problem iReside was built for. It runs in the background on your iPhone and records where you were each day, so a per-property night count for a New York City address exists as a byproduct of living rather than a project you start after the notice arrives. You can watch that count against the majority-of-days line while there is still time to change the answer, and export a dated day-by-day PDF for a primary residence certification or for your CPA. The point is not the report. The point is that the record was made at the time, which is the only kind that holds up.

What if I own through an LLC or trust?

Bring this section to your attorney, because the text raises a question it does not answer.

Section 1351 reaches through entities, but conditionally. A trust beneficiary is a covered owner only where the beneficiaries "are the sole beneficiaries of such trust." An LLC member, partner or shareholder is one only where they "hold a majority interest." Now read that against the primary residence definition, which requires use as the primary residence of "one or more of the covered owners, or an immediate family member of one or more of the covered owners, provided such covered owners are natural persons," or of a qualifying long-term lessee.

Follow the logic. If the apartment is held by an LLC with four equal 25% members, no member holds a majority interest, so arguably no natural person is a covered owner. If it is held by a discretionary trust with contingent remainder beneficiaries, there may be no "sole beneficiaries." In either case the first route to primary residence status may not be available no matter how many nights someone sleeps there. What remains is a bona fide arm's-length lease of at least one year to a natural person.

That is my reading of the text as written, not a settled interpretation, and §1354(e) lets the Department of Finance write rules that "authorize persons other than a covered owner to submit proof of primary residency on behalf of a covered owner." But if your apartment sits inside a structure with no majority holder or no sole beneficiary, ask now rather than after a $96,000 line appears on the statement of account. The mirror image matters too: a single-member LLC is no shield, because the member is the covered owner and the member's days are the days that count.

What should NYC second home owners do before the first certification?

Six things, in this order.

1. Pull your actual Notice of Property Value. Not the sale price, not a broker estimate. The Finance market value is the only number §1353 multiplies. Near a band edge, get an appraisal and consider a challenge: at the $3 million condo edge a dollar is worth $37,500.

2. Confirm your class and threshold. A townhouse is class one at $5 million. A condo or co-op is class two at $1 million in phase one. Owners of $1.5 million apartments who assumed the NYC pied-à-terre tax was a mansion tax are the ones getting surprised.

3. Count 2026 honestly, right now. Not the year you intended, the year that happened. At 150 nights with four months left, you know what December has to look like. At 40, stop optimizing days and start on documentation and the lease analysis instead.

4. Pick one of the two exits and commit. Either a covered owner occupies the unit a majority of days, or you place a real one-year arm's-length lease with a natural person. Half-measures — a six-month furnished let, a corporate lease, 175 nights — get you the NYC second home tax and the paperwork.

5. Reconcile the certification with everything else you have told a government. Section 1356 hands it to the same agency that reads your IT-203, outside FOIL. Check it against your state return, your STAR status, any Florida homestead exemption, and your voter registration. Inconsistency is what auditors look for.

6. Start the day record now and keep it running. Six years of exposure means the 2026 certification is live until 2032, through changes of phone, accountant and carrier.

The bottom line

The NYC pied-à-terre tax converts a fuzzy question about where you really live into an integer, then bills you a percentage of your apartment for getting the integer wrong. A $2.4 million condo at 4.0% is $96,000 a year, the default is that you owe it, and the City can look back six years at whatever you file.

There is no clever argument against a day count. There is only the count, and whether you have a record of it that was made at the time. Most owners will discover in 2032 that the hard part was never the law. It was that nobody wrote down where they slept in 2026.

Track your New York days automatically with iReside.

Sources

All sources accessed September 8, 2026.

• NY Tax Law §1350, Imposition of surcharge
• NY Tax Law §1351, Definitions
• NY Tax Law §1352, Primary residence
• NY Tax Law §1353, Surcharge rates
• NY Tax Law §1354, Administration of surcharge
• NY Tax Law §1355, Administrative and judicial review
• NY Tax Law §1356, Information sharing
• NY Real Property Tax Law §1802, Classification of real property
• NYS Department of Taxation and Finance, income tax definitions
• Hodgson Russ LLP, "The Pied-à-Terre Tax Has Landed!" (Westlaw Today, June 5, 2026) and "Second Home, New Tax: Navigating NYC's Pied-à-Terre Surcharge" (Tax Notes, July 8, 2026), listed at hodgsonruss.com

Nothing in this article should be considered or construed as tax or legal advice. iReside does not dispense tax advice. We always recommend that taxpayers consult their accountants, CPAs, or attorneys for guidance on their specific situation.