Guide

NYC has 13,002 active 'work without a permit' violations — 81% in Brooklyn and Queens

New York City's building department has 13,002 active violations for 'work without a permit' — a flag that construction or alteration happened without the required city approval. That count comes from NYC OpenData's DOB Violations dataset, queried in July 2026. About 81 percent of the active cases sit in just two boroughs: Brooklyn and Queens hold 10,573 of them combined. The same boroughs lead the city in new construction. Here is what the public data shows, and what it does not.

What the data shows

NYC OpenData's DOB Violations dataset — the record kept in the Department of Buildings' Building Information System, or BIS — lists 13,002 active violations for work without a permit. A 'work without a permit' violation means the city recorded construction or alteration done without the approval it requires. The figure is drawn from NYC OpenData, DOB Violations (dataset 3h2n-5cm9), queried July 2026.

That 13,002 is a small slice of the file. The same dataset holds 2,475,641 DOB violations of all types, accumulated over decades. The work-without-permit flags are the ones that point specifically at unpermitted building.

Where the active violations cluster

The active work-without-permit cases are heavily concentrated. Brooklyn has 5,848 and Queens has 4,725 — together 10,573, or about 81 percent of the citywide total.

The other three boroughs trail well behind. Manhattan has 1,224, the Bronx has 654, and Staten Island has 551.

The same boroughs are building the most

Brooklyn and Queens are also where much of the city's new construction is happening, so the concentration is not surprising on its face. More building generally means more chances for work to begin ahead of a permit.

Manhattan is a partial exception. With 1,224 active flags it sits far below the outer-borough leaders — the same borough that leads in alteration permits but trails in new construction.

What 'active' does and does not mean

'Active' in the BIS system is not the same as 'current' or 'confirmed today.' The status can include older, uncertified cases that may be stale — a violation resolved in practice but never formally closed can still read as active.

This dataset also carries no dollar penalties. Fines for building violations live in a separate system run by the Environmental Control Board and the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings — the ECB/OATH system — not in the BIS file counted here.

Category labels in the source data are inconsistent, so any single count should be read as an indicator rather than an exact tally. Treat these figures as general information, not legal advice.

How to check a specific building

Because the citywide numbers are indicators, verify a specific building or case against the official agency before drawing conclusions about an address. The Department of Buildings publishes the authoritative record for any given property.

For a quicker starting point, RegWatch, a tool that lets you search a building's DOB violations by address, flags work-without-permit cases among the results. Use it to find leads, then confirm the details in the city's own system.