NYC boiler inspection rules: annual reports and defects

Which buildings need an annual boiler inspection

Low-pressure boilers in residential buildings with six or more families, and in commercial and mixed-use buildings, must be inspected every calendar year and the report filed in DOB NOW: Safety within 14 days. That is the rule for low-pressure boilers, which is the kind that heats most apartment buildings in the city: steam or hot water, fired by gas or oil, sitting in the basement and feeding the risers.

The test is the building, not the boiler. A six-family walk-up in Brooklyn with a boiler from the 1970s and a 300-unit tower in Manhattan with a modern condensing plant are both in the program. So is any commercial or mixed-use building with a low-pressure boiler: a storefront with apartments above, an office building, a school, a house of worship.

The exemptions are narrow. Registered low-pressure boilers in residential buildings with five families or fewer, and a single boiler inside one dwelling unit heating only that unit, do not need the annual inspection. In practice that takes out one to five family houses, and the apartment-sized units that some condo buildings install in each unit. Everything else with a registered low-pressure boiler files every year.

High-pressure boilers, the kind found in hospitals, large commercial plants and some older residential complexes, are on a separate program and are inspected by DOB's own Boiler Unit rather than by a hired inspector. This guide covers the low-pressure program, because that is where almost every residential building in the city sits.

Who may inspect

Low-pressure boiler inspections may only be performed by qualified installers licensed by DOB or by an authorized boiler insurance company. The owner hires them. DOB does not send its own inspectors to low-pressure boilers. The owner arranges the inspection, pays for it, and is responsible for the report reaching DOB on time.

In practice most buildings use one of two routes. The boiler's insurance company sends an inspector as part of the policy, and the insurer files the report. Or the owner's heating contractor, if that firm holds a DOB boiler installer license, does the inspection as part of the annual service and files it. Either way the inspector looks at the boiler, the burner, the controls, the relief valves, the venting and the room, and records what was found.

The inspector, not the owner, decides whether the boiler passes clean or with defects. A managing agent cannot file a boiler report, and an unlicensed contractor's view that the boiler is fine has no standing. What has standing is the report on file in DOB NOW: Safety and the date it was filed.

The 14-day report deadline

The inspection has to happen within the calendar year, and the report has to be filed in DOB NOW: Safety within 14 days of the inspection date. The two deadlines are separate. An inspection done in late December with a report filed in mid January is late for the filing even though the inspection itself was on time.

The report is filed by the inspector, under their license or the insurance company's authorization, and the owner's registered contact sees it in DOB NOW. The filing records the boiler's identification number, the inspection date, the inspector, and whether defects were found. Each boiler in a building is filed separately, so a building with three boilers has three reports and three sets of penalties if they are missed.

There is no grace period written into the rule for the annual deadline. Owners who leave the inspection to the end of the year find that inspectors are booked and the filing slips into the next year, which DOB counts as a missed year.

What happens when defects are found

A boiler report can come back clean, or it can list defects. A defect is anything the inspector found that does not meet the code: a failed relief valve, a cracked section, a flue problem, a low-water cutoff that does not trip, missing or failed controls, a room with no combustion air. The inspector records each one.

Defects found in a boiler inspection must be corrected within 90 days of the initial inspection date, with a subsequent inspection report filed within 14 days of the follow-up inspection. The clock runs from the initial inspection, not from the filing, so an owner who sits on a defect report for two weeks before reading it has already used two weeks of the window.

That second report is the one that closes the matter. Until it is filed, the defect stays open on the record. If the defect cannot be corrected in time, the owner needs to deal with DOB before the 90 days run out rather than after. In the heating season the 90-day window is also the practical window: a building with a defective boiler in November has a repair deadline that lands in February, and tenants who have been without reliable heat for the whole of it. Heat and hot water complaints go to HPD, which runs its own enforcement, so an open boiler defect in winter can bring two agencies rather than one.

Penalties

DOB sets civil penalties for late and missing low-pressure boiler reports:

A boiler report filed late carries $50 per month per boiler, up to $600. A report never filed carries a failure-to-file penalty of $1,000 per boiler. The penalties are per boiler, not per building, and they attach to the owner. DOB publishes the schedule on its boiler compliance page. Penalties for failing to correct a defect are a separate matter handled through violations rather than a fixed filing fee, and we do not quote figures for them here.

For most buildings the direct penalty is small next to the cost of the repair itself. The record is what matters. A building that is late, or has an open defect, shows it in DOB NOW: Safety and on NYC Open Data, where anyone can see it.

How many buildings file defects

Our count of DOB boiler filings in 2026 shows about 100 buildings a week with an inspection report that lists defects. That is our count of DOB NOW: Safety boiler filings on NYC Open Data, and it covers the whole city across the year. The number rises going into the heating season, when inspectors are busiest and more boilers are fired up after sitting idle through the summer.

Each of those filings is a building where a licensed inspector has recorded, on a dated public document, that the boiler needs work, and where the owner has 90 days to get it done. Most of those owners already have a service contractor. Not all of them have one who can do the repair the inspector listed, and some of the defects are the kind that end in a replacement rather than a fix.

What this means for heating contractors

The boiler program is different from the facade and garage programs in one way that matters. Local Law 11 and Local Law 126 run on multi-year cycles, so the filings arrive in waves by sub-cycle. Boiler reports arrive every year, for every covered building, so the defect filings come in a steady stream rather than a wave. A heating contractor who reads them gets a weekly list of buildings with a filed reason to call, all year round.

The filing tells you the building, the date, and that defects were found. It does not tell you what the defects are in any detail, and it does not tell you who to call. The owner on file with the City, usually an LLC, and the managing agent registered with HPD are the people who have to get the repair done inside the 90 days. The boiler feed is the planned weekly list of those buildings with the owner and agent attached. For buildings on the gas side, the Local Law 152 guide covers the periodic gas piping inspection that often involves the same contractor.