Heat Season in a Small Brooklyn Building: What the City Expects From the Owner

Heat season in New York City runs from October 1 through May 31. For those eight months the city sets the temperatures your building has to hold, and the owner answers for it, whether you live upstairs or three states away. Here is what the rule says, what happens when a tenant calls 311, and what keeps a small building out of trouble.

The numbers

The rules come from HPD, the city’s housing agency, and they are short:

• Between 6:00 AM and 10:00 PM, if it is below 55 degrees outside, it has to be at least 68 degrees inside.
• Between 10:00 PM and 6:00 AM, it has to be at least 62 degrees inside, whatever the temperature is outside.
• Hot water has to be at least 120 degrees, every day of the year.

HPD publishes all of this on its heat and hot water page. Notice that the night rule has no outside trigger. A mild night does not excuse a cold apartment.

What happens when a tenant calls 311

A tenant without heat is told to contact the owner first and then 311. Once a complaint is in, HPD tries to reach the owner or the managing agent to say the building may have no heat. It may also call the tenant back to see whether service was restored. If the tenant says it was not, or HPD cannot reach the tenant, an inspector goes out.

The inspector takes a reading. If the apartment is under the numbers above, the building gets a violation. Heat and hot water violations carry civil penalties that run by the day and go up for a repeat at the same building. After two inspections that end in a violation in the same heat season, the city charges a fee for each one after that and puts it on the property’s bill from the Department of Finance. If service still is not restored, HPD can send its own contractor and bill the building for the work. The current amounts are on HPD’s page.

Why the city’s call often never reaches the owner

HPD’s first move is a phone call to whoever is on the building’s registration. Buildings with three or more apartments have to register with HPD every year, and so do one and two family houses where neither the owner nor the owner’s immediate family lives. The registration names a managing agent, who has to be a person over 21 with a business address in the city.

In small buildings this is where it goes wrong. The registration lists a phone number nobody answers anymore, or a relative who used to look after the building, or it lapsed years ago. The city calls, nobody picks up, the inspector comes, and the first thing the owner hears about is the violation. A current registration with a phone number that gets answered costs almost nothing and saves a lot.

What to check before the first cold night

Most no heat calls in a small building come from a short list of causes, and nearly all of them can be found in October instead of January:

• Have the boiler serviced and test fired before the season, not on the first cold morning.
• If the building burns oil, check the tank and put deliveries on automatic, so it never runs dry over a holiday weekend.
• Check the radiators and valves in every apartment. One apartment that will not heat is still a violation.
• Set the timer or thermostat to the city’s hours, so the building is already at temperature at 6:00 AM, not just starting to warm up.
• Make sure every tenant knows who to call, and that someone picks up at night.

If you own from a distance

None of this is complicated. It has to be done by someone who is paying attention in October and reachable in January. If that is not you, that is the job we do for small building owners in Brooklyn. When we manage a building, the tenant’s call comes to us, and the owner hears about it after it is handled.

If you want that off your plate, tell us about your building.

This is a plain summary of the city’s rules as of October 2026, not legal advice. The linked HPD pages have the current requirements.