Heat certifications mostly arrive on time. Half never arrive.
HPD classes an active heat or hot water outage as Class C, immediately hazardous, and HPD's correction table gives no time to restore it before civil penalties can apply. The certification that the repair was made is due by a separate date the notice sets, a median of 13 days after the inspection. From August 7, 2023 through September 24, 2026, HPD recorded 149,537 Class C heat and hot water violations. By that date 73,049 of them, 48.9%, had a certification on file, and 93.1% of those were filed by the certify-by date, at a median of 9 days. The gap is the other half: 76,488 had no certification at all, and 19,631 had sat open more than a year with nothing filed.
Class C heat and hot water violations, August 7, 2023 through September 24, 2026.
Two clocks, and the one HPD's data can read
Two clocks run on a heat violation. The first is for restoring heat and hot water, which HPD's table gives no time for, and HPD's data has no field for when that happened. The certify-by date is for filing the certification, and HPD's data has both dates, so that is the comparison this page makes. Through September 24, 2026, among the 73,049 certifications that had a certify-by date, 68,001 met it. The median of 9 days and the 90th percentile of 15 days are computed only among violations that have a certification: a filing time cannot be measured on a violation with none. The 76,488 with none are a separate, larger figure, shown above rather than folded into the same average.
By class
Class C is 94.2% of the heat and hot water violations from August 7, 2023 through September 24, 2026. The other two classes carry 30 days (Class B) and 90 days (Class A) in HPD's table.
| Class | Violations | Share of the period |
|---|---|---|
| C (no time to correct) | 149,537 | 94.2% |
| B (30-day window) | 6,476 | 4.1% |
| A (90-day window) | 2,679 | 1.7% |
Year over year
The certification rate has held close to half in every year in our copy, and has not drifted up or down with volume. 2026 is a partial year, since our copy runs through September 24, 2026.
| Year | Class C violations | Ever certified corrected |
|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 18,982 | 48.7% |
| 2024 | 43,713 | 49.2% |
| 2025 | 51,130 | 48.3% |
| 2026 (partial year) | 35,712 | 49.3% |
How this is counted
Violations whose HPD description text matches "heat" or "hot water" (case-insensitive), the same definition already used for the Heat and Hot Water category elsewhere on this site. A text match, not an exact statute classification.
Quote this finding
Quote it directly. The sentence below carries its own denominator and date, which is what a fact-checker will ask for:
“From August 7, 2023 through September 24, 2026, HPD recorded 149,537 Class C heat and hot water violations; 48.9% had a certification on file and 93.1% of those met the notice’s certify-by date; 19,631 had sat open more than a year with nothing filed.” ViolationScout, September 26, 2026
Method: every Class C heat and hot water violation in our copy of HPD’s data, measured from inspection date to the date a certification was filed. The data is public on NYC Open Data. Ask us for the query behind any figure here: press@violationscout.com.
Cite this page
ViolationScout, Heat certifications: on time or never, our copy of HPD Housing Maintenance Code Violations (NYC Open Data, dataset wvxf-dwi5), frozen when published and not updated since. Figures through September 24, 2026, read on September 26, 2026. https://violationscout.com/research/heat-24-hours
Violations whose HPD description text matches "heat" or "hot water" (case-insensitive), the same definition already used for the Heat and Hot Water category elsewhere on this site. A text match, not an exact statute classification. Source: NYC Open Data. How every figure here is counted: /methodology.
149,537 Class C heat and hot water violations, pulled September 26, 2026, covering inspections from August 7, 2023 through September 24, 2026. Against the 2,961,943 HPD violations in our copy through September 24, 2026, heat and hot water violations are 5.4% of the total. The month-by-month pattern behind these violations is on the seasonal-spike page. Heat season rules and last season's count, citywide counts, ViolationScout. If you have a heat violation, what to do next, by status, season and borough: the heat guide.
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