Heat certifications mostly arrive on time. Half never arrive.
HPD classes an active heat or hot water outage as Class C, immediately hazardous, and the housing code gives 24 hours to restore it. The certification that the repair was made is due by a separate date the notice sets, a median of 13 days after the inspection. HPD has recorded 149,537 Class C heat and hot water violations since August 7, 2023. 73,049 of them, 48.9%, have a certification on file, and 93.1% of those were filed by that date, at a median of 9 days. The gap is the other half: 76,488 have no certification at all, and 19,631 have sat open more than a year with nothing filed.
Two clocks, and the one HPD's data can read
Two clocks run on a heat violation. The 24-hour standard is for restoring heat and hot water, 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. Among the 73,049 certifications that have 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 in this period. The other two classes carry longer correction windows and are not subject to the 24-hour standard above.
| Class | Violations | Share of the period |
|---|---|---|
| C (24-hour window) | 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 we hold, 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:
“Since August 7, 2023, HPD has recorded 149,537 Class C heat and hot water violations; 48.9% have a certification on file and 93.1% of those met the notice’s certify-by date; 19,631 have 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. This season, 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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