New York City sends 11,000 more pied-à-terre tax letters as it apologizes to the 1,200 wrongly targeted because it didn’t check 2025 tax returns

New York City’s Department of Finance is sending a second wave of pied-à-terre tax letters to roughly 10,800 property owners, even as it mails a very different kind of letter to other owners from the first round, telling them, in effect, never mind.

Roughly 17,000 owners received a notice this summer warning they might owe the surcharge, which applies only to non-primary residences amounts, with a rate of 0.8%–1.3% on homes over $5 million and 4%-6.5% on condos and co-ops over $1 million.

But 1,210 are now being cleared outright, according to new court filings disclosed this week.

The reason has nothing to do with a change in the law and everything to do with timing: New York State sent the city’s DOF preliminary 2025 income-tax records on Aug.

12, several months earlier than the agency would normally begin receiving them.

Of that group, 630 owners were cleared because their 2025 tax returns listed the property as their primary home address; another 580 were cleared using a mix of 2025 extension filings and 2024 returns.

“So by my last count, I think we sent out less than 20,000, ‘you may be subject to’ letters, I think it was about 17,000 or 18,000.

And at the time that we sent those out, we did not have access to the 2025 income tax filings,” said Mayor Zohran Mamdani at a Wednesday press conference .

He noted the timing wasn’t unusual on the state’s end: 2025 filings are “typically released in February of the next calendar year,” and the state simply gave DOF early access this time.

Randy Mastro, the attorney suing the city over the rollout (and a longtime suer of the city in general), made his thoughts known in the court filing.

“There are many thousands fewer property owners subject to this surcharge than this administration originally boasted when it flooded the landscape with 17,000 threatening Mailed Notices.” “The City has now effectively admitted” that some people who received the letters, Mastro said, “do not actually owe this surcharge.” He also argued the timing undercuts the city’s excuse: “The City admits that, after this lawsuit was filed on August 7, it obtained 2025 tax information within five days,” which is evidence, he claimed, that DOF could have gotten the same data before mailing anything, not just after being sued.

Mamdani laid out three categories of properties the city is targeting.

One is properties owned by a corporate entity like an LLC or a trust, about 6,400 households, where DOF doesn’t have enough information on primary residence holder.

The 1,210 owners who were being cleared make up the second category.