New York City · Local Law 97
The fine for not filing has nothing to do with your emissions.
Miss the Local Law 97 report and the penalty is $0.50 per square foot per month, for up to twelve months — charged on floor area, whatever your building actually emits. A spotless 100,000 sq ft building that simply forgets the date is fined exactly as hard as a filthy one.
Type your address. We will show you your building’s limit, its next deadline, and what missing it would cost — from New York’s own published data, with every figure traceable back to it.
Free, and there is nothing to sign up for. Type the address as New York writes it, or the building’s name.
The two penalties, and why one of them is the one to worry about
Going over your carbon cap — $268 per tonne, per year
This is the one everybody writes about, and it is a capital-works problem. Getting under the cap means boilers, controls, sometimes electrification — real money and a long lead time. Software cannot fix it, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
Not filing at all — $0.50 per square foot per month
This one is a paperwork problem. It is levied on floor area, it runs for up to twelve months, and it applies to a building that is comfortably inside its limit just as much as to one that is not. For most buildings it is the larger of the two numbers by some margin — and it is entirely avoidable by knowing that the report is due on 1 May, every year, covering the year before.
Knowing a date is not hard. Knowing it across forty buildings, when the person who knew it has left, is where it goes wrong.
What this tool will not do
- It will not quote you half a calculation. A penalty is the gap between two numbers — your limit and your emissions — and it is only as sound as the weaker of them. Every limit here, all sixty property types across all four periods, is transcribed from the rule itself rather than from a summary of it, and so is every fuel coefficient we use to work out emissions. Where the City has not published one, you get silence rather than an estimate: the rule prices fuel to 2034 and no further, so the tool says nothing about 2035 onwards even though the limits for those years are known.
- It will not repeat back energy data it thinks is wrong. A whole site’s fuel filed against one lot produces an inflated penalty that sorts straight to the top of any list. Where the reported use is not physically plausible for the building, we say so instead of quoting you the number.
- It cannot see what you have not filed. This reads the City’s published disclosure, which runs a year or so behind. It is a reading of public data, not compliance advice, and it is worth checking against your own records.
Local Law 97 is one line in a long year.
The emissions report is due 1 May. So is your benchmarking, and they are two different filings. The registration renews 1 September. The window guard notice goes to every unit in the first fortnight of January. Somewhere in there sit a gas piping inspection on a four‑year cycle and a façade filing on a six‑year one, and neither falls in the same year for any two buildings.
TenureBook keeps that whole year, per building, and shows you what is coming before it arrives. The façade sub‑cycle it works out from the building’s tax block number, which is already in its lot number. The rest it builds from a short list of facts about each building — the community district, the storey count, whether there is an elevator or a cooling tower.
Where a date depends on something we have not been told — how many storeys, whether there is an elevator or a cooling tower — it asks rather than guesses. A diary that invents a deadline is one you stop trusting, and then it is worth nothing on the deadline that was real.
$395 a month, for three people and the whole product. Cancel any month, and take your data with you in a spreadsheet whenever you like.