Free New York Notice of Non-Renewal

Direct answer: how much notice you owe is a question of arithmetic, and whether you may decline to renew at all is a separate question of coverage — and you have to answer the second one on the face of the document. RPL § 226-c(2)(a) measures the period on “the cumulative amount of time the tenant has occupied the residence or the length of the tenancy in each lease, whichever is longer”: 30 days below one year, 60 days in the one-to-two-year band, 90 days above two years. Since 18 August 2024, § 226-c(1)(a) has also required that non-renewal notice to “append or contain the notice required pursuant to section two hundred thirty-one-c” — the Good Cause Eviction Law notice, which asks whether the unit is subject to article 6-A, why it is exempt if it is, and, for a covered unit, “the lawful basis for such non-renewal.” A covered New York tenancy therefore does not simply end when the term runs out. The form below asks the coverage question first, computes the § 226-c period from the tenancy facts, prints the § 231-c notice as a second page with the boxes marked, and will not generate a covered-unit notice that states no basis. The guide beneath it works through the coverage test, the nineteen municipalities that have opted in and the two parameters each of them was allowed to change, the sliding scale and its two ambiguous seams, the late-notice rule that is New York’s most distinctive mechanic, the service question that almost every ranking page gets wrong, and the 2034 sunset now visible in the statute book.

Work down the form in order, because the answers cascade. The coverage block decides whether a basis has to be stated at all; the tenancy block decides whether the period is 30, 60 or 90 days; and only then does the termination date mean anything. The generator produces two documents in one file: the § 226-c notice of non-renewal, and behind it the § 231-c Good Cause Eviction Law notice with the boxes marked from your answers, which § 226-c(1)(a) requires the non-renewal notice to append or contain. It will refuse in three situations, each of which is a defect the statute would punish anyway: a covered unit with no stated basis, a rent-regulated unit where a renewal offer is compulsory, and a demanded end date earlier than § 226-c allows.

Watch: New York non-renewal, § 226-c timing and the § 231-c notice

▶ Watch overview

Direct answer: it depends entirely on whether the Good Cause Eviction Law covers the unit — and since 18 August 2024 you have had to answer that question in writing, on paper attached to the notice, whichever way it comes out. For an exempt unit the position is the familiar one: give the § 226-c period, name a termination date, and the tenancy ends. For a covered unit the position is nearly the opposite. RPL § 216(1) provides that no landlord shall remove a tenant from a covered housing accommodation “notwithstanding that the tenant has no written lease or that the lease or other rental agreement has expired or otherwise terminated, except upon order of a court of competent jurisdiction … in which the petitioner or plaintiff has established one of the following grounds as good cause for removal or eviction.” Expiry is not on that list. The notice is still necessary, but it is no longer sufficient, and the document has to say which ground the landlord will be asking a court to find.

The two questions, in the order the statute asks them

Almost every mistake on this form is a sequencing mistake. Landlords reach for a notice period first, because that is the number the search results are full of, and then discover that the unit was covered and the notice said nothing about why. The statute runs the other way. RPL § 226-c(1)(a) is a single sentence that does both jobs at once: it triggers the written-notice duty whenever the landlord “does not intend to renew the tenancy”, and in the same breath it requires that the notice “shall append or contain the notice required pursuant to section two hundred thirty-one-c of this article”, which must state whether the unit is or is not subject to article 6-A, why it is exempt if it is exempt, and, where it is covered and the landlord is not renewing, “the lawful basis for such non-renewal.”

So the order is: coverage, then basis, then period. Getting the period right on a covered unit with no basis stated does not produce a valid notice; it produces a well-timed defective one. Our New York Good Cause Eviction Law guide works through the coverage tests in more detail than this page needs to, and the form above encodes the same order of operations.

What actually happens when a covered New York lease term ends

Nothing dramatic, which is exactly the trap. The tenant does not become a trespasser at midnight on the last day of the term. RPL § 216(1) is written in the teeth of that assumption — it applies notwithstanding that the lease has expired or otherwise terminated. What the landlord of a covered unit acquires at expiry is not a right of possession but the right to bring a proceeding, and only if a ground can be established. Meanwhile RPAPL § 711(1) — the holdover ground, which requires that the tenant “continues in possession of any portion of the premises after the expiration of his term, without the permission of the landlord” — still has to be read alongside § 216 and § 217 for a covered accommodation, because § 217 bars a judgment of possession under § 216 unless the landlord has complied with every applicable notice law, in manner, in time, and in contents.

For an exempt unit the older logic holds and the term does end. Even then the tenancy is not free of formality: if the tenant stays and the landlord keeps taking rent, a month-to-month tenancy can arise by operation of law, and ending that puts you back into § 226-c on a fresh calculation with the occupancy clock still running from the original move-in date. Our New York lease termination rules guide covers the periodic-tenancy path in more depth.

The instrument this page produces

What people search for as a “New York notice of non-renewal” is really a composite. The first document is the § 226-c notice: it identifies the tenants and the unit, states that the tenancy will not be renewed, gives the termination date, and shows the period on which that date was computed. The second is the § 231-c notice, which the first must append or contain, and which is a form of the Legislature’s own drafting with a fixed title and four numbered questions. The generator above prints both, marks the § 231-c boxes from your coverage answers, and carries the basis you typed through to question 4. Where the unit is exempt it marks question 1 No, records the exemption at question 2, and leaves question 4 as inapplicable — which is the honest answer, not a blank.

Direct answer: coverage is a two-step test — first the geography, then the fifteen exemptions in RPL § 214. The Good Cause Eviction Law took effect on 20 April 2024 as article 6-A of the Real Property Law. RPL § 212 is one sentence long and does the geography for New York City: “Upon the effective date of this section, this article shall apply to the city of New York.” Everywhere else, RPL § 213 makes it an opt-in: a village, town or city other than New York City may adopt the article by local law. If the municipality has not adopted it, no unit there is covered — and the § 231-c notice you serve says so in terms. If it has adopted it, or the unit is in New York City, you then run the unit through § 214.

Step one: the geography

RPL § 213 does more than switch the article on. It lets an adopting locality change exactly two parameters and nothing else. It may set the rent ceiling above which a unit is exempt as a percentage of fair market rent — and if the local law says nothing, “any unit … with a monthly rent greater than two hundred forty-five percent of such fair market rent shall be exempt.” And it may define “small landlord” as a landlord of no more than any number of units in the state — the default, absent a local choice, being “a landlord of no more than ten units in the state.” Beyond those two dials, § 213(4) forbids a locality to preempt or alter the terms and provisions of the article. Where a village and the surrounding town have both adopted, the village law governs inside the village boundaries.

Sections 213(5) and (6) are the part landlords should care about most, because they create the public record: adopting localities must notify the State, and the list must be published annually, on or before 1 August each year, with each locality’s fair market rent percentage and its small landlord definition. New York State Homes and Community Renewal publishes that list. The table below reproduces the list as it stood in the agency notice dated 4 May 2026.

Step two: the fifteen exemptions in RPL § 214

Section 214 applies the article to all housing accommodations except the enumerated categories. Three of them deserve a landlord’s attention before any of the others.

The small-landlord exemption is not self-proving. Section 214(1) exempts “premises owned by a small landlord provided that in connection with any eviction proceeding in which the landlord claims an exemption from the provisions of this article on the basis of being a small landlord, such landlord shall provide to the tenant or tenants subject to the proceeding the name of each natural person who owns or is a beneficial owner of, directly or indirectly, in whole or in part, the housing accommodation at issue.” The exemption is conditioned on lifting the corporate veil for the tenant’s benefit. A landlord who intends to rely on it should assume that the ownership chain will have to be disclosed on the record.

The new-construction exemption has a date and a clock. Section 214(8) exempts a housing accommodation “for which a temporary or permanent certificate of occupancy was issued on or after the first of January, two thousand nine, for a period of time of thirty years following issuance of such certificate.” It is not a permanent exemption for new buildings; it is a thirty-year window that starts at the certificate, and the earliest buildings to fall out of it will do so in 2039.

The rent-regulated exemption is the one that most often means the form on this page is the wrong document. Section 214(5) exempts a unit “where such unit is otherwise subject to regulation of rents or evictions pursuant to local, state or federal law, rule, or regulation.” Rent-stabilized and rent-controlled apartments sit here. But being outside article 6-A does not make them freely non-renewable — it makes them subject to a scheme that is considerably stricter, discussed below.

The exemption you claim goes on the notice, and it is a representation

Question 2 of the § 231-c notice is not a courtesy. It is the landlord’s written statement of why the tenant does not have article 6-A protection, made before any proceeding, and it will be read back at a hearing if the tenant contests coverage. Two habits are worth forming. First, put the facts in, not just the letter — “the owner is a natural person who owns two residential units statewide” is a representation a court can test, whereas “small landlord” alone is a conclusion. Second, pick the exemption you can actually prove today, not the one that sounds strongest. A landlord who marks the high-rent exemption at § 214(15) is asserting a specific relationship between this unit’s rent and the published fair market rent for the county, and that number changes.

Direct answer: 30, 60 or 90 days, taken from whichever is longer — how long the tenant has actually lived there, or how long the lease term is. Section 226-c is titled “Notice of rent increase or non-renewal of residential tenancy” and sits in article 7 of the Real Property Law, so it is general statewide law and does not depend on article 6-A at all. Subdivision 2(a) fixes the measure: “the required notice shall be based on the cumulative amount of time the tenant has occupied the residence or the length of the tenancy in each lease, whichever is longer.” The three tiers then follow in paragraphs (b), (c) and (d).

The dual trigger, and the case where the two measures disagree

Read the tiers carefully and you will see that each of the upper two is written disjunctively: the occupancy limb or the lease-term limb will do. That is what subdivision 2(a) means by “whichever is longer”. Two situations bring it to life.

A long tenant on a short new lease. A tenant has lived in the unit for six years under a run of one-year leases. The current lease has ten months to run. The lease-term limb points at 60 days. The occupancy limb points at 90. The answer is 90, because the statute takes the longer. This is the single most common miscalculation in New York non-renewal practice, and it is the one the live search results are least reliable on, because most of them describe the tiers without describing the tie-break.

A new tenant on a long lease. A tenant moved in three months ago on a two-year lease. Cumulative occupancy is three months, which would be 30 days. The lease term is two years, which is 90. Again 90 wins. A landlord who has just signed a long lease has, in effect, pre-committed to the longest notice period from day one.

Counting the days, and what the period actually runs to

Section 226-c speaks of days of notice, not of months or of rental periods, and it does not exclude weekends or holidays. The period runs from the giving of the notice to the date the tenancy is to end. Two practical rules follow. First, do not count from the date typed on the letter; count from the date it was actually given, which is the date § 226-c(1)(a) itself uses when it describes what happens if the notice is late. Second, build in slack. If the tenant collects mail irregularly, or if the notice will be posted and mailed, the date on which the landlord can prove actual written notice was given may be several days after the date the envelope was sealed. Landlords who serve at the exact statutory minimum are relying on the tenant not to litigate the giving date.

Where the tenancy is a month-to-month tenancy rather than a fixed term, there is a further practical point that § 226-c does not resolve. The statute sets a minimum number of days; it does not say that the termination date must fall at the end of a rental period. Long-standing New York practice for periodic tenancies has been to end them at the close of a rental period, and for a monthly tenancy in the city of New York, § 232-a is drafted around the expiry of the term. Aligning the termination date with the last day of a rental month costs nothing and removes an argument.

The late-notice rule — New York’s most distinctive mechanic

Most states treat a short notice as a nullity: it fails, and you start again. New York does something more interesting. Section 226-c(1)(a) provides that “if the landlord fails to provide timely notice, the occupant’s lawful tenancy shall continue under the existing terms of the tenancy from the date on which the landlord gave actual written notice until the notice period has expired, notwithstanding any provision of a lease or other tenancy agreement to the contrary.”

Unpack that and there are four distinct holdings in one sentence. The tenancy continues — it does not lapse and it does not become a holdover at the stated date. Under the existing terms — at the existing rent, which means a landlord cannot use a defective notice as a lever to charge use and occupancy at a higher figure for the interim. From the date on which the landlord gave actual written notice — the clock is re-anchored to reality, not to the paperwork, so a notice dated 1 March but given on 20 March runs from 20 March. Notwithstanding any provision of a lease to the contrary — the parties cannot contract out of it, and a lease clause saying the tenancy ends automatically at term regardless of notice is ineffective on this point.

The practical consequence is that a short notice is rarely fatal to the eventual outcome but is almost always fatal to the intended date. A landlord who wanted the unit back on 1 September and served 60 days when 90 were required does not lose the right to possession; the landlord loses September and October, at the old rent, and cannot bring a holdover proceeding in the meantime. If the plan was to re-let to a new tenant on 15 September, that plan is gone and the new tenant has a claim. That is why the generator refuses to print a termination date earlier than the statute allows rather than merely warning about it.

The cooperative carve-out almost nobody cites

Section 226-c(1)(b) contains a limited exception that landlords of co-op buildings should know about: “notice shall not be required under this section to be provided by a cooperative housing corporation, other than a cooperative housing corporation subject to the provisions of article two, article four, article five or article eleven of the private housing finance law, to a tenant who is a dwelling unit owner or shareholder of such corporation.” Two limits are built in. The carve-out does not reach Mitchell-Lama and the other limited-profit and limited-dividend forms governed by those Private Housing Finance Law articles. And it is expressly without prejudice: the paragraph ends by saying that nothing in it relieves the corporation of any otherwise applicable obligation to give notice under another law or under the parties’ agreement. A proprietary lease with its own notice clause still binds.

Where § 232-a and § 232-b fit

Two older sections still sit alongside § 226-c and are frequently quoted at cross purposes. RPL § 232-a governs a monthly or month-to-month tenancy in the city of New York. For a residential tenancy it now defers to § 226-c for the length of the notice, but it adds two requirements § 226-c does not: the notice must be given “in the same manner in which a notice of petition in summary proceedings is now allowed to be served by law”, and it must state that the landlord elects to terminate the tenancy and that summary proceedings to remove the tenant will follow if the tenant does not vacate by the stated day. That is a content requirement and a service requirement, and it applies only inside the five boroughs.

RPL § 232-b, which governs monthly tenancies outside the city of New York, is the one most often misquoted. As it now reads, the one-month notification it describes may be given by the tenant, or, “for a tenancy other than a residential tenancy”, by the landlord. A residential landlord upstate does not terminate a month-to-month tenancy under § 232-b; that path runs through § 226-c. Any page telling an Albany or Buffalo landlord that one month’s notice under § 232-b is enough to end a residential month-to-month tenancy is describing a version of the section that no longer exists.

Direct answer: since 18 August 2024 a New York non-renewal notice that arrives on its own is incomplete, wherever in the state it is served. RPL § 231-c(1) requires “a landlord as defined in subdivision two of section two hundred eleven of this chapter” to “append to or incorporate into any initial lease, renewal lease, notice required pursuant to paragraph (a) of subdivision one of section two hundred twenty-six-c of this article, notice required pursuant to subdivision two of section seven hundred eleven of the real property actions and proceedings law, or petition pursuant to section seven hundred forty one of the real property actions and proceedings law” the notice the section then sets out. Four different documents, one of which is precisely the § 226-c non-renewal notice this page produces. The form itself is titled NOTICE TO TENANT OF APPLICABILITY OR INAPPLICABILITY OF THE NEW YORK STATE GOOD CAUSE EVICTION LAW.

Why a landlord in a non-adopting town still serves it

This is the point that trips up upstate landlords, and it is worth being precise about. Article 6-A — the substantive good cause protection — is New York City plus opt-in. But § 231-c is not in article 6-A. It sits in article 7, the general landlord-and-tenant article, and it imposes a notice duty in general terms. The clearest internal evidence that the duty is statewide is the form’s own drafting: the first exemption option at question 2 reads that the “Village/Town/City outside of New York City has not adopted good cause eviction under … section 213 of the Real Property Law.” The Legislature built a box for exactly the situation of a landlord in a non-adopting municipality. A form cannot offer you a box to tick unless it expects you to be filling the form in.

So the correct behaviour outside the nineteen adopting localities is not to skip the notice. It is to answer question 1 No, mark that first exemption option at question 2, and serve it with the § 226-c notice. It costs one page and it removes the argument entirely. The generator above does this automatically when you select a non-adopting municipality.

The four questions, and what each one is really asking

Unit information. Street, unit or apartment number, city, town or village, state, ZIP. Trivial, but it is the only place the form identifies the premises, so it has to match the lease.

Question 1 — is this unit subject to article 6-A of the Real Property Law, known as the New York State Good Cause Eviction Law? Yes or no. There is no third option and no way to defer. This is the coverage determination, made by the landlord, in writing, before any proceeding.

Question 2 — if the unit is exempt, why is it exempt? A lettered list running from the non-adopting-municipality option through the § 214 categories: small landlord, owner-occupied buildings of ten units or fewer, units already regulated as to rents or evictions, income-restricted affordable housing, condominiums and cooperatives with an offering plan, certificates of occupancy issued on or after 1 January 2009 within the thirty-year window, seasonal dwellings, institutional and senior housing, manufactured home parks, hotels and transient use, dormitories, housing within religious facilities, and units renting above the applicable fair market rent percentage.

Question 3 — if the unit is covered and the landlord is raising the rent above the threshold for presumptively unreasonable increases, what is the justification? Two options: the rent is not being raised above the threshold, or it is, with space for the landlord’s justification. On a non-renewal notice this question is normally inapplicable, and the generator says so rather than leaving it blank — a blank invites the inference that the question was overlooked.

Question 4 — if the unit is covered and the landlord is not renewing the lease, what is the good cause? Another lettered list, tracking the grounds in RPL § 216 and the exemption-driven situations: the unit is exempt, this is a first lease, sublet recovery, employment ended, non-payment of rent, a substantial lease violation, nuisance or damage or interference with safety, illegal occupancy, illegal use, refusal of access, the landlord’s personal occupancy, demolition, withdrawal from the market, and the tenant’s refusal of reasonable lease changes. This is the box that turns a “we are not renewing” letter into a document a covered tenancy can survive contact with.

Direct answer: RPL § 216(1) lists ten, a court has to find one, and expiry of the term is not among them. The section opens by providing that no landlord shall remove a tenant from a covered housing accommodation, or attempt such removal or exclusion from possession, “notwithstanding that the tenant has no written lease or that the lease or other rental agreement has expired or otherwise terminated, except upon order of a court of competent jurisdiction entered in an appropriate judicial action or proceeding in which the petitioner or plaintiff has established one of the following grounds as good cause for removal or eviction.” The basis stated on the § 231-c notice is the ground the landlord will have to establish.

Ground (j) is the real non-renewal ground, and it has a closed window

Of the ten, only paragraph (j) is naturally an end-of-lease ground rather than a fault-based one, which is why it matters most on this form. Its text is worth quoting in full: “The tenant fails to agree to reasonable changes to a lease at renewal, including increases in rent that are not unreasonable as defined in paragraph (a) of this subdivision, as long as written notice of the changes to the lease were provided to the tenant at least thirty days, but no more than ninety days, prior to the expiration of the current lease.”

That is a window with a floor and a ceiling. Send the proposed new terms twenty days out and you are under it. Send them four months out — which many well-organised landlords do — and you are over it, and the ground is unavailable no matter how reasonable the terms were. The generator has a certification box for this, and the reason it is a separate box rather than a line of small print is that the date on which the proposed changes were sent is a fact the landlord has to be able to prove independently of the non-renewal notice itself.

There is a further wrinkle worth planning around. For a tenant of more than two years, § 226-c requires at least 90 days of notice of the non-renewal, while § 216(1)(j) requires the lease-change notice to have gone out no more than 90 days before expiry. The two requirements meet at exactly ninety days. In practice this means a (j)-based non-renewal of a long tenancy has to be run as a two-step: the proposed changes go out at the ninety-day mark or a little after, the tenant declines, and the non-renewal notice follows — by which time the ninety days of § 226-c notice will run past the end of the term and the tenancy will continue on existing terms until they expire. That is not a defect; it is what § 226-c(1)(a) says happens, and it should be built into the schedule rather than discovered in it.

“Reasonable” is doing a lot of work. Paragraph (j) imports the unreasonable-increase test from paragraph (a), which is measured against the local rent standard. RPL § 211 defines that standard as a rent increase equal to the inflation index or ten percent, whichever is lower, with the inflation index being five percent plus the annual change in the consumer price index for the region. A rent increase above that figure is presumptively unreasonable, which means a landlord relying on (j) after proposing such an increase is asking the court to find that the tenant unreasonably refused something the statute presumes was unreasonable. That is an uphill argument, and it is the reason a (j) non-renewal built around a large increase usually fails.

Direct answer: for a rent-stabilized apartment the landlord does not decide whether to renew — the Rent Stabilization Code decides, and the answer is that a renewal must be offered. Section 214(5) takes rent-regulated units outside article 6-A because they are already “subject to regulation of rents or evictions pursuant to local, state or federal law, rule, or regulation.” Landlords sometimes read that as freedom. It is the opposite. Under 9 NYCRR 2523.5(a) the owner must notify the tenant named in the expiring lease not more than 150 days and not less than 90 days before the end of the term, on a form prescribed by the Division of Housing and Community Renewal, and must offer to renew the lease at the legal regulated rent on the same terms and conditions as the expiring lease. The tenant then has 60 days from service to accept.

The sanction is severe and it is automatic

If the owner fails to deliver the executed renewal lease within thirty days of receiving the tenant’s signed acceptance, the Code provides that the owner “shall be barred from commencing any action or proceeding against the tenant based upon nonrenewal of lease.” That is a bar on the proceeding itself, not merely a defence to it. A rent-stabilized owner who lets the renewal window pass and then serves a non-renewal notice has produced a document that, on its face, announces a failure to comply with the Code.

Section 2523.5 also carries the succession rule, which is a second reason a non-renewal notice is the wrong instrument in a regulated building. Where the named tenant has permanently vacated, a family member who has resided with the tenant for no less than two years — reduced to one year for a senior citizen or a disabled person — may be named as a tenant on the renewal lease, with the same sixty-day acceptance period. A landlord who treats the departure of the named tenant as the end of the tenancy will frequently be wrong.

How to tell whether the unit is regulated at all

Landlords who bought a building recently are the group most likely to get this wrong, because regulated status attaches to the unit and travels with it. Three checks are worth doing before any notice is drafted. Ask DHCR for the rent registration history for the apartment, which will show whether it has been registered as stabilized and at what legal regulated rent. Check whether the building received a tax benefit — the 421-a and J-51 programmes carry stabilization obligations for the benefit period and sometimes beyond it. And check the building’s size and vintage: a building of six or more units built before 1974 in a locality that has declared a housing emergency is the classic stabilized profile. None of that analysis belongs in a notice; it belongs before one.

Direct answer: RPL § 226-c prescribes no manner of service at all, and RPAPL § 735 is not the general rule for New York termination notices — it is the rule for serving the notice of petition and petition. This is the single most widely repeated error in the pages currently ranking for this query, and it matters, because it sends landlords looking for formality in the wrong place while leaving the thing that actually decides the case — provable delivery on a provable date — unattended.

What § 735 actually says

Section 735 of the Real Property Actions and Proceedings Law is headed “Manner of service; filing; when service complete”, and it opens: “Service of the notice of petition and petition shall be made by personally delivering them to the respondent; or by delivering to and leaving personally with a person of suitable age and discretion who resides or is employed at the property sought to be recovered … or if admittance cannot be obtained and such person found, by affixing a copy of the notice and petition upon a conspicuous part of the property sought to be recovered or placing a copy under the entrance door of such premises; and in addition, within one day after such delivering to such suitable person or such affixing or placement, by mailing to the respondent both by registered or certified mail and by regular first class mail …” Every noun in that sentence is about the summary proceeding papers. It is not a code of service for predicate notices.

Where does § 735 reach a non-renewal notice? By importation, in one place. RPL § 232-a, for a monthly tenancy in the city of New York, requires the termination notice to be served “in the same manner in which a notice of petition in summary proceedings is now allowed to be served by law.” That is a cross-reference to the § 735 manner, and inside the five boroughs, for a monthly tenancy, it is binding. Outside that situation, describing § 735 as the service statute for a non-renewal notice is an overstatement.

What the statute does care about

Section 226-c requires written notice, and it fixes the consequence of failure by reference to “the date on which the landlord gave actual written notice.” That phrasing puts the emphasis on the fact of giving and the date of giving. The practical test therefore is evidentiary, not formal: can the landlord prove, to a judge, that this tenant received this writing on this date? A notice hand-delivered with a signed acknowledgment satisfies that test. A notice sent by certified mail with a returned receipt and a parallel first-class mailing satisfies it. A notice slipped under a door with nothing more does not, and a notice sent only by email or text message does not, whatever the lease says.

Whichever method is used, make the proof at the time and not afterwards. An affidavit of service sworn on the day, describing who did what, where and when, is worth more than a recollection six months later; our New York affidavit of service form and certification of mailing form are built for exactly this. Photograph a posting in place, keep the certified mail receipt and the green card, and keep the unopened returned envelope if it comes back — a refused certified letter is itself evidence.

Direct answer: § 226-c does not set out a content checklist, but three other provisions do the job between them — and for a covered unit, § 217 makes contents a precondition to any judgment. The result is a short list of elements that is not optional even though no single section recites it.

Two content points are worth stating plainly because they are where drafting goes wrong. First, the basis at question 4 must be a basis, not a citation. Writing “RPL 216(1)(g)” in the box discloses nothing a tenant could answer; writing that the landlord’s daughter will occupy the unit as her principal residence from the termination date discloses a fact that can be tested, and a fact the landlord is then bound to. Second, do not put a basis on the notice for an exempt unit in the hope that it strengthens the document. It does the reverse: it invites the reading that the landlord believed the unit was covered, and it supplies a fact the tenant can attack. For an exempt unit the correct answer at question 4 is that it does not apply.

Direct answer: article 6-A and § 231-c are both marked repealed on 15 June 2034, and § 226-c already carries the post-sunset text of its own key paragraph. This is unusual and worth understanding, because it changes how you read the section today. The published text of RPL § 226-c(1)(a) appears twice. The first version — the operative one — contains the requirement to append the § 231-c notice and the three things that notice must state, and it is annotated “NB Effective August 18, 2024 until June 15, 2034.” Immediately beneath it sits a shorter version containing only the notice duty and the late-notice rule, with the § 231-c cross-reference simply absent, annotated “NB Effective June 15, 2034.”

Sections 212, 214, 216, 217 and 231-c each carry the note “Repealed June 15, 2034”, and RPAPL § 711(2) likewise exists in two versions, one until that date carrying the article 6-A notice requirements and one after it without them. The whole overlay was drafted with an expiry built in.

What that means in practice, now and later

Three things. The 30/60/90 scale is not going anywhere. It lives in § 226-c(2), which carries no repeal note at all, and it survives the sunset untouched. A landlord planning a tenancy that will run past 2034 can rely on the timing rule continuing. The coverage and basis machinery is what expires. Absent legislative action, from 15 June 2034 the non-renewal notice reverts to being a pure timing document, no annexed notice, no coverage question, no stated basis. And the annotations are not a prediction. They are the published statute. The Legislature has extended and amended sunset provisions in this area before — the rent laws are full of them — so the sensible working assumption is that the date will be revisited rather than simply arriving. Diarise it; do not plan around its disappearance.

One narrow practical point for notices served close to the date. A notice given in, say, April 2034 for a ninety-day period will have its termination date fall after the repeal. Nothing in the repeal notes purges a validly served notice, and § 217’s compliance test looks at the law applicable to the notice when it was given. But a proceeding commenced after 15 June 2034 on a ground drawn from a repealed § 216 is a question we cannot answer from the statute alone, and we do not pretend otherwise. That is a moment to take advice rather than to rely on a form.

Measuring the period from the lease instead of from the tenancy

The commonest error, and the most expensive. Section 226-c(2)(a) takes the longer of cumulative occupancy and lease term. A landlord who reads only the current lease and serves 30 or 60 days on a tenant of many years has served short, and the tenancy continues on existing terms until the correct period has run from the date notice was actually given.

Counting from the date on the letter

Section 226-c(1)(a) anchors everything to “the date on which the landlord gave actual written notice.” A notice drafted on the first of the month and delivered on the twentieth runs from the twentieth. Landlords who prepare a batch of notices and serve them over the following fortnight routinely lose the days in between.

Serving the § 226-c notice without the § 231-c notice

Since 18 August 2024 the non-renewal notice is required to append or contain it. Serving the timing document alone leaves out a component the statute expressly attaches, and for a covered unit § 217 makes the contents of the notice a precondition to any judgment of possession.

Assuming a non-adopting town means no paperwork

The substantive protection is New York City plus opt-in; the notice duty in § 231-c sits in article 7 and its form carries a box for a municipality that has not adopted the law. Serving nothing is not the answer the form contemplates.

Naming a statutory letter instead of stating a basis

Question 4 asks what the good cause is. A subsection letter is a legal conclusion. The facts the landlord will prove — who will occupy, what was demolished, what the tenant refused — are the basis, and they are what the landlord will be held to later.

Using ground (j) after sending the new terms too early

Paragraph (j) requires written notice of the lease changes at least thirty days but no more than ninety days before the current lease expires. Four months out is outside the window and the ground is unavailable, however reasonable the proposed terms were.

Building a (j) non-renewal around a large rent increase

Paragraph (j) imports the unreasonableness test from paragraph (a), and RPL § 211 defines the local rent standard as the inflation index or ten percent, whichever is lower, with the inflation index being five percent plus the regional consumer price index change. Refusing an increase above that is not obviously unreasonable refusal; it is refusing something the statute presumes was unreasonable.

Serving a non-renewal on a rent-stabilized apartment

The Rent Stabilization Code requires a renewal offer between 150 and 90 days before the term ends, with 60 days for the tenant to accept, and bars a nonrenewal-based proceeding where the owner fails to deliver the executed renewal within thirty days of acceptance. A non-renewal notice in that setting is not merely ineffective; it evidences the failure.

Treating § 232-b as a landlord’s route upstate

As it now reads, § 232-b gives the one-month notification to the tenant, and to the landlord only for a tenancy other than a residential tenancy. A residential landlord outside New York City ends a month-to-month tenancy under § 226-c, on the 30/60/90 scale.

Omitting the election-to-terminate language on a New York City monthly tenancy

Section 232-a requires the notice to state that the landlord elects to terminate the tenancy and that summary proceedings will follow if the tenant does not vacate by the stated day, and to be served in the manner in which a notice of petition may be served. Both are content and service requirements peculiar to the five boroughs.

Leaving a tenant off the notice

Every adult tenant named on the lease should be named and given notice. A notice that omits one of them will not support a proceeding against that person, and in a two-tenant household that is usually fatal to recovering possession at all.

Serving inside the retaliation window without a paper trail

RPL § 223-b names refusal to renew as covered conduct and raises a rebuttable presumption where the landlord acts within one year of a good faith complaint, an enforcement action or tenants’-organisation activity. The answer is not to wait a year; it is to be able to show the decision was made for a documented reason that predates or is independent of the tenant’s protected conduct.

Direct answer: in New York a defective non-renewal notice usually does not merely delay the landlord — it keeps the tenancy alive on the existing terms, by statute, without the tenant having to do anything. That is worth landlords understanding as well as tenants, because it changes the arithmetic of cutting corners.

The tenancy simply continues

Section 226-c(1)(a) does the work automatically. Where the notice was late or short, the lawful tenancy continues under the existing terms from the date actual written notice was given until the notice period has expired. The tenant does not need to plead anything for that to be true; it is the statutory state of affairs, and any lease clause to the contrary is displaced.

Defective notice as a defence to the proceeding

If the landlord commences a holdover proceeding anyway, the defect goes in as a defence. For a covered accommodation, RPL § 217 is the provision to raise: no action is maintainable and no judgment of possession may be entered under § 216 unless the landlord complied with the applicable notice laws in manner, time and contents. A missing § 231-c notice, a blank question 4, or a period computed on the lease rather than the tenancy are each failures of contents or of time.

Coverage is contestable, and the landlord has already written down its position

Because question 1 of the § 231-c notice makes the landlord state the coverage conclusion in advance, a tenant who believes the unit is covered starts with the landlord’s own document. Exemptions that are commonly claimed and commonly wrong include small-landlord status in a locality that set the threshold at one unit, owner occupancy in a building the owner does not actually live in, and the high-rent exemption measured against the wrong fair market rent figure. The small-landlord exemption in § 214(1) also carries its own disclosure obligation: a landlord claiming it in an eviction proceeding must give the tenant the name of each natural person who owns or beneficially owns the accommodation, directly or indirectly.

Retaliation

RPL § 223-b covers serving a notice to quit, commencing an eviction action, and substantially altering the terms of the tenancy, which the section says includes the refusal to continue a tenancy, to renew the lease or offer a new lease, or offering a new lease with an unreasonable rent increase. Acting within one year after a protected complaint or enforcement action raises a rebuttable presumption. Remedies include damages, attorney’s fees and costs, and injunctive and other equitable relief.

Fair housing

A non-renewal aimed at a protected characteristic violates the federal Fair Housing Act, 42 U.S.C. § 3601 et seq., and the New York State Human Rights Law independently of any defect in the notice. New York City adds its own Human Rights Law with broader protected categories and no small-building exemption of the federal kind. Source of income is a protected category in New York State, which makes a non-renewal that follows a tenant’s move onto a voucher particularly exposed.

Where to get help

Tenants can raise coverage and notice defects in Housing Court without a lawyer, and in New York City the Universal Access to Counsel programme provides representation in eviction proceedings subject to eligibility. Statewide, New York State Homes and Community Renewal handles rent-regulation questions and publishes the good cause opt-in list; the Attorney General’s office takes complaints about landlord harassment. Our New York eviction notice rules guide sets out what happens after the notice period ends.

The search results for this query are dominated by tenant-side commentary written about New York City apartments, plus a handful of fifty-state roll-ups. Most of them state the 30/60/90 scale correctly — it is genuinely the best-documented number in this area. What they get wrong is everything the scale sits inside. The table below is a straight correction list.

The arc below assumes a covered unit and a tenant of more than two years, which is the longest and most exacting version. Shorten the clock for a shorter tenancy; drop steps three and seven for an exempt unit.

• N.Y. Real Property Law § 226-c (Notice of rent increase or non-renewal of residential tenancy), both published versions of subdivision 1(a) and the whole of subdivision 2
• N.Y. Real Property Law § 231-c (Good cause eviction law notice), including the mandated notice form and its four questions
• N.Y. Real Property Law art. 6-A (Good Cause Eviction Law): § 211 (definitions), § 212 (applicability in the city of New York), § 213 (voluntary participation by local governments outside the city of New York), § 214 (covered housing accommodations), § 215 (necessity for good cause), § 216 (grounds for removal of tenants), § 217 (preservation of existing requirements of law)
• N.Y. Real Property Law § 232-a (notice to terminate a monthly tenancy in the city of New York) and § 232-b (monthly tenancies outside the city of New York)
• N.Y. Real Property Law § 223-b (retaliation by landlord against tenant)
• N.Y. Real Property Actions and Proceedings Law § 711 (grounds where a landlord-tenant relationship exists) and § 735 (manner of service; filing; when service complete)
• Rent Stabilization Code, 9 NYCRR § 2523.5 (notice for renewal of lease and renewal procedure)
• New York State Homes and Community Renewal, Good Cause Eviction Law required notice, as of 4 May 2026 — the published list of municipalities that have opted in under § 213, with each locality’s fair market rent percentage and small-landlord definition
• Fair Housing Act, 42 U.S.C. § 3601 et seq.; New York State Human Rights Law; New York City Human Rights Law
• N.Y. General Obligations Law § 7-108 (security deposits)

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