Questions unit owners are asking

Between 17.5 and 28.1 percent of the property tax attributable to your unit, every year, with the percentage set by the building's average unit assessed value. The checker on the front page computes your building's tier and an estimated dollar figure from the city's published roll. The city computes the real number on your unit's own net tax after any exemptions, so your bill's figure will differ from the building average, but the tier itself is not a matter of opinion.

The building. The statute puts the application and the annual renewal in the hands of the board of managers or the co-op's board of directors, in practice through the managing agent, on a deadline no later than February 15. What you file as an owner is the primary residence certification that supports your unit's place in it. If your building has never applied, that is a board conversation, and it is one MGNY has walked hundreds of boards through.

Eligibility is judged as of the taxable status date in early January, so a purchase after it generally waits for the next fiscal year's cycle, and you should expect the first year's bills at the full rate. The move that costs people money is missing the following February too, because nobody added the unit to the renewal. Getting the certification in on the first eligible cycle is the whole game for a new owner.

Not while it is. The city does not grant the abatement to units held by an LLC or other business entity, because an entity cannot have a primary residence. Units held in trust for the benefit of a person who would otherwise qualify do get it, by statute. Moving a unit from an LLC to its people, or to a trust, restores eligibility from the next taxable status date, and weighing that against the reasons the LLC exists is a conversation worth having with your advisors.

Yes. STAR, the senior citizen homeowners' exemption, the disabled homeowners' exemption, veterans exemptions and the solar abatement all coexist with it: exemptions reduce the tax first and the abatement percentage applies to what remains. What does not coexist: 421-a, 420-c and a J-51 exemption, among others. A J-51 abatement, a different instrument than the exemption, does coexist and is simply deducted first.

Since fiscal 2022, buildings with thirty or more apartments and an average unit assessed value over $60,000, and smaller buildings whose average tops $100,000, qualify only if the board certifies that building service employees, doormen, porters, supers, handymen, receive the prevailing wage for the life of the abatement. The affidavit is filed with the annual application, the comptroller polices the wages, and a building that cannot certify is out of the program entirely. Most large buildings already comply; the failure mode is the affidavit nobody filed, not the wages nobody paid.

The current text authorizes it through the fiscal year ending June 30, 2027, and that is exactly how the law has always been written: in multi-year installments that Albany has renewed again and again since 1996. Nobody can promise the next renewal, but the practical answer is unchanged either way: buildings that are in the program collect every authorized year, and buildings that are not collect none of them.

Yes, in defined circumstances: building service workers not paid the certified prevailing wage, tax, water or sewer arrears outside a payment agreement, a transfer made primarily to capture the benefit, or a certification that does not hold up. All of them are avoidable with attention, which is much of what an annual compliance relationship is for.