Updated September 2026. New York City now charges a surcharge on homes, condos and co-op units that are not anybody’s primary residence, popularly called the pied-à-terre tax. Owners who received a notice have until October 6, 2026 to claim an exemption. If that is what brought you here, the surcharge, explained covers the notice itself, and the free instant check shows what it would cost for a specific property.

Since July, more New Yorkers have typed pied-à-terre into a search box than at any time in living memory, and most of them were not looking for a dictionary. They had a letter from the Department of Finance, or a neighbor had one, and the phrase in the news did not match the phrase on the paper. This page does both jobs: what the word means, what it means in New York City specifically, and how the new tax decides which apartments count.

What does pied-à-terre mean?

A pied-à-terre is a second home kept for occasional use, almost always a small apartment in a city, by someone whose primary home is somewhere else. The French phrase means “foot on the ground”: a place to land. It is pronounced pee-ay-da-TAIR, and the plural is pieds-à-terre, with the s on the first word.

Three things separate a pied-à-terre from an ordinary second home. It is urban, where a second home is usually rural or coastal. It is used in short stays rather than seasons. And it is defined by the owner’s other life: a suburban commuter who keeps a studio near the office, a family with a child at Columbia, an executive who is in the city one week a month, a couple who moved to Florida and kept the apartment. The property is the same as any other; the pattern of use is what earns it the name.

What counts as a pied-à-terre in New York City?

In everyday New York usage the term is broad and casual: any apartment that is not somebody’s main home. The city’s new surcharge is narrower and more mechanical, and it never uses the word at all. The notice says non-primary residence property surcharge. Newspapers say pied-à-terre tax, and law firms writing to clients have shortened that to the PAT tax. Whichever name you know it by, the charge is the same one, and it turns on two questions.

Is the property anybody’s primary residence? Not only the owner’s. Under the rule, a home is a primary residence if any one of five people lives in it as their main home: the owner, a tenant or subtenant, the people who together hold a majority interest in the LLC, corporation or partnership that owns it, an immediate family member of the owner or of that majority holder, or the sole beneficiary of a trust that holds it. An apartment rented to a full-time tenant is therefore not a pied-à-terre in the city’s eyes, even if the owner lives in Connecticut. The question is judged as of the taxable status date, January 5, so what matters is who lived there at the start of the year, not what has been arranged since.

Is it valuable enough? The surcharge reaches condominium and cooperative units the Department of Finance values at $1 million or more, and one- to three-family homes it values at $5 million or more. The value that counts is DOF’s own market value from the assessment roll, which is not a sale price and is often well below one. Commercial property, utility property and vacant land are outside the surcharge entirely.

Put those together and the city’s definition of a pied-à-terre is any residential property above its threshold with no qualifying primary resident on record. The rates and exemptions guide works through the close cases, including LLC ownership, trusts and family use.

Who owns pieds-à-terre in New York?

The stereotype is a foreign buyer with an empty tower apartment, and some owners fit it. Most do not. The July mailing went to roughly 17,000 property owners, the Department of Finance’s own figure, and the responses so far come from commuters, retirees who kept the family apartment, parents housing a student, estates in the middle of probate, and small landlords between tenants. A rented apartment is exempt, so the pool is not “investors” in any simple sense; it is everyone whose valuable apartment had no qualifying resident on January 5.

Two lists are being confused in the process. The public supplemental assessment roll names every property DOF values above the thresholds, resident or not. The notices went only to the subset DOF could not match to a primary resident. Being on the roll means nothing by itself; receiving a letter means DOF needs an answer. The NYC pied-à-terre tax list untangles the two.

The pied-à-terre tax: the cost

The surcharge is a percentage of the property’s entire DOF market value, not only the part above the threshold, which is why a valuation just over the line can be expensive. The first-phase rates, for the 2026-27 and 2027-28 tax years, are:

A condo DOF values at $1.2 million, which in Manhattan can describe an apartment that would sell for several times that, owes $48,000 a year at the 4.00% rate. The surcharge took effect July 1, 2026, first appears on the property tax bill of January 1, 2027, and sunsets on June 30, 2031. From July 1, 2028 the way co-ops and condos are valued changes to a comparable-sales basis, which is a separate subject for a later year.

Who does not owe it?

Anybody whose property is a primary residence in one of the five relationships above. The exemption is not automatic: somebody has to tell the Department of Finance which relationship applies, with documents, through the city’s response portal, and the deadline to do so for this year is October 6, 2026. An owner who disputes the value rather than the residency can also challenge the valuation at the Tax Commission, which is the ordinary property tax appeal process in New York City. A court challenge to the surcharge is pending; the deadline stands while it is. The court order that lasted one evening has the current status.

Is my apartment a pied-à-terre in the city’s eyes?

The fastest answer is to look up the property. The free instant check shows the market value the Department of Finance carries for it, which side of the threshold that falls on, and what the surcharge would cost each year if no exemption is granted, with no account and no payment details. If the value is above the line, the next question is which of the five relationships fits, and the portal’s guide to the tax walks through them. If a notice arrived, the October 6 date is the one that matters.

What does it cost to ask MGNY?

Nothing. A real person answers at (212) 343-1111, right away, and the consultation is free. You engage us only if you want the response handled for you. MGNY has worked NYC property tax since 2008, across 900+ tax abatement developments, with $23.6M in tax refunds secured for owners.

Sources: Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary on the word itself; NYC Department of Finance, nyc.gov/npsurcharge, program page and response portal, read September 2026; Tax Law Article 30-C and the adopted rule at 19 RCNY 62; Mayor’s Office releases of July 22, 2026 announcing the mailing and August 1, 2026 announcing the first extension; the Department of Finance’s roughly-17,000 figure as reported by the New York Daily News on August 3, 2026. MGNY Consulting is a private consulting firm and is not affiliated with the NYC Department of Finance. Property owners can respond to the notice themselves at nyc.gov/npsurcharge.

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