Why is my co-op on the pied-à-terre tax list?

Almost certainly because of how DOF assesses co-ops, not because anyone owes anything. Most co-op buildings on the roll are under the threshold once the rule is applied the way the city applies it.

The numbers on the published roll

Of the 6,011 co-op buildings DOF put on the roll, 5,525 fall under the $1,000,000-per-apartment line and owe nothing. Only 486 are actually charged.

Some of the largest are the clearest cases. Co-op City is assessed as one parcel across 10,914 apartments, which works out to roughly $56,000 each. Roosevelt Island's buildings land near $164,000 an apartment. Both carry nine-figure parcel values and neither comes close to the threshold, and getting this backwards would charge moderate-income housing tens of millions of dollars a year.

Where the co-ops that are charged sit

They are mostly small: nineteenth-century loft co-ops in SoHo and Tribeca with a handful of large apartments, where dividing the parcel value by four or five units clears $1M easily. A five-apartment Prince Street building works out above $6M per apartment.

So the question for any co-op is not "is our building worth over $1M". Nearly every co-op building in New York is. It is "is one apartment worth over $1M to DOF", and DOF's value for a co-op is derived from comparable rental income rather than sale prices, which puts it well below what an apartment would sell for. Across the roll, co-op apartments have sold for a median of about 3× DOF's per-apartment value.

If your building is charged, who actually pays?

The parcel is assessed and billed to the cooperative corporation, not to individual shareholders. The corporation then allocates costs the way it allocates everything: by shares, not per door. So a per-apartment figure is a useful scale, not a bill: a larger apartment carries more shares and would absorb more of it.

A shareholder who uses the apartment as a primary residence is exempt, but somebody has to claim it. In practice this usually means the board or managing agent coordinating applications, because the corporation is the taxpayer of record.

One thing worth checking

The per-apartment figure depends on the apartment count. We use DOF's own count from its assessment roll, which agrees with the city's PLUTO land-use file on 6,001 of the 6,011 buildings, but if the count shown for your building looks wrong, the per-apartment value is wrong with it, and that changes whether the threshold is met at all.

The five exemption routes and what DOF asks for → · Appeal deadlines run to March 2027 →