Tenant Information in New York City: Collection, Sharing and Retention

Most tenant-information rules ask what a landlord is allowed to collect or act on. The Fair Chance for Housing Act asks something different: what order the steps happen in. A landlord who eventually makes a perfectly defensible decision can still violate the law if a background check happened at the wrong point in the process, before a conditional offer rather than after. That's a genuinely different kind of compliance risk than the other three systems covered here, which govern what information matters, not when it's reviewed.

Keeping this distinction in mind changes how a landlord should actually build a screening workflow: the Fair Chance Act needs to be built into the sequence of steps itself, not just checked as a substantive rule at the end

Effective January 1, 2025, the Act applies to most NYC rentals, sales, co-ops, and condo boards, with two specific exemptions: owner-occupied buildings of two or fewer units where the owner or their family lives in one, and state or federally funded housing providers who have their own mandated criminal-history requirements. Within covered housing, the process has to run in a specific order. First, a landlord evaluates general eligibility, income, credit, references, without any inquiry into criminal history, and can't include background-check language in advertisements or applications. Second, if the applicant clears that review, the landlord extends a conditional written offer based solely on those non-criminal factors. Only after that conditional offer can a criminal background check happen, and only if the landlord chooses to run one at all.

If the check turns something up, an individualized assessment follows, not an automatic reversal of the offer, and the applicant gets a copy of the rights notice, the criminal history information reviewed, and 5 business days to respond with corrections, context, or evidence of rehabilitation before any final decision. A landlord who wants to withdraw the offer has to provide a written explanation connecting the specific criminal history to a legitimate business interest.

Even after a conditional offer, the range of criminal history a landlord can weigh is narrow. Only three categories are reviewable: current sex offense registry convictions, felony convictions within five years of release or sentencing, and misdemeanor convictions within three years of release or sentencing. Everything else is off the table regardless of timing: sealed or expunged convictions, violations, certain out-of-state convictions, adjournments in contemplation of dismissal, juvenile adjudications, arrests and pending cases, and any favorable termination, an acquittal, a reversal on appeal, an exoneration.

This is a meaningfully narrower list than "anything on a background check," and treating an unreviewable category as fair game because it showed up in a report is a common, costly mistake given the statute's damages exposure, up to $125,000 in civil damages generally, and up to $250,000 where a violation is found willful or malicious.

NYC Human Rights Law protects an applicant's source of income independently of the Fair Chance for Housing Act, covering Section 8, Supplemental Security Income, HIV/AIDS Services Administration assistance, CityFHEPS, FHEPS, the Veterans' GI Bill, and one-time emergency or security-deposit assistance grants, among other categories. A landlord can't reject an application because of how rent will be paid, can't advertise "no vouchers," and can't delay or refuse necessary repairs because a tenant pays with public assistance. This protection applies to nearly all NYC rentals, including apartments in co-op and condo buildings.

This is worth separating clearly from the Fair Chance Act in a landlord's own compliance process, since the two systems protect different things: one governs criminal history sequencing, the other governs how rent is funded, and a landlord could be fully compliant on one while violating the other.

New York caps the fee a landlord, sub-lessor, or grantor can charge for background and credit checks at $20. This cap doesn't apply to co-op or condo sale transactions, fees a co-op or condo board imposes directly, or situations where the prospective tenant has hired their own agent. On top of the state fee cap, federal consumer report rules apply whenever a credit or background report factors into a decision: the applicant is entitled to notice before an adverse action is taken based on that report, along with the name of the reporting agency and information about their right to dispute inaccuracies in the report.

Neither NYC's local rules nor the state and federal frameworks above set a specific numeric retention period for tenant screening records. The governing principle, consistent with how this series treats retention across jurisdictions, is to keep information only as long as there's a genuine legal or business reason to hold it, destroying application and screening materials once a decision is finalized and there's no ongoing purpose, rather than defaulting to indefinite storage.