CityFHEPS for NYC Landlords: A Comprehensive Guide

Start with a number that slipped past almost everybody.

The 2026 CityFHEPS payment standards took effect on April 1, and they went down. Not up. Down, in every single bedroom count.

A two-bedroom that carried a $3,058 maximum in 2025 now carries $2,997. A studio went from $2,646 to $2,604. A three-bedroom fell from $3,811 to $3,753. Small numbers individually, and I am guessing you did not get a phone call about it.

So here is the whole program, written the way an owner-operator would want it explained rather than the way a fact sheet explains it. I am going to be specific, because vagueness is how people end up on a disqualification list.

What CityFHEPS actually is

CityFHEPS is a rental assistance supplement run by the Department of Social Services, which includes HRA and DHS. It helps people find and keep an apartment, a room, or an SRO unit. If you house a CityFHEPS tenant, DSS and HRA pay you directly.

Rent levels are indexed to the Section 8 standard adopted by NYCHA, which is why they move when NYCHA moves.

One wrinkle worth knowing up front. A full apartment can be rented with CityFHEPS anywhere in New York State. A single room in a shared apartment, or an SRO unit, only works inside the five boroughs.

The 2026 payment standards

These are the maximum subsidy amounts, and they assume all utilities are included in the lease. If the tenant pays utilities, a utility allowance gets subtracted from these figures.

• SRO, one person: $1,953 (was $1,985)
• Studio, one person: $2,604 (was $2,646)
• One bedroom, one or two people: $2,734 (was $2,762)
• Two bedroom, three or four people: $2,997 (was $3,058)
• Three bedroom, five or six people: $3,753 (was $3,811)
• Four bedroom, seven or eight people: $4,077 (was $4,111)
• Five bedroom, nine or ten people: $4,689 (was $4,728)
• Six bedroom, eleven or twelve people: $5,301 (was $5,345)

Renting a room rather than a unit works differently. The maximum rent is $1,100, and the supplement covers the gap between the actual rent and the tenant’s contribution, which is $50 or their monthly shelter allowance, whichever is greater. Heat, hot water, electricity, and cooking gas all have to be included if the stove is not electric.

Check nyc.gov/dsshousing before you rely on any of these figures. They are revised annually and this post will eventually go stale.

The money that arrives up front

This is the part owners underrate, and it is unusually generous.

For a new apartment or SRO, you can take the first month’s rent in full plus the next three months of the supplement, paid up front. For a room, it is the first four months in full, unless the household receives a shelter allowance, in which case it is the first month in full plus three months of the supplement.

On top of that, a unit hold incentive equal to one month’s rent is available if you agree to hold the apartment while the housing packet gets processed. Brokers can collect a fee of up to 15% of annual rent.

After that, monthly payments run for up to five years as long as your tenant stays eligible and you stay compliant, with extensions past five years available for good cause.

Add it up and you are looking at four months of rent in hand plus a held-unit payment before the tenant has unpacked. Very few private-market deals in this city front-load like that.

The late fee rule that almost everyone gets wrong

This is the single most misunderstood provision in the program, and it causes real fights.

If the payment is made in the month that the rent is due, it is not late. That is the rule. Your lease may say rent is due on the first with a late fee after the fifth, and for a CityFHEPS payment, that language does not control.

The fact sheet is blunt about it. When HRA issues the monthly rental assistance payment in full by the final day of the month, the payment is deemed timely, regardless of any provisions in the lease to the contrary.

And it goes further. Under state law, a landlord cannot successfully bring a tenant to housing court just for late fees, and cannot bring the tenant to small claims court for late fees charged on the CityFHEPS portion of the rent.

So if your ledger is automatically assessing a late fee on the sixth of the month against a CityFHEPS balance, you are generating a number you cannot collect and a conversation you cannot win. Fix the ledger.

Side deals will end you

Under the CityFHEPS rules, side deals are strictly prohibited. You must not demand, request, or receive any amount above the rent and the reasonable fees stipulated in the lease. That holds regardless of any change in household composition.

You are also required to accept the HRA security voucher in place of a cash security deposit, and you may not ask the tenant for anything additional on top of it.

And note that the subsidy covers rent only. Amenity fees, service charges, and similar extras are not covered, so do not build a deal that assumes they are.

The five-business-day rules, which is where owners actually get hurt

Now we arrive at the part of this program that has nothing to do with money and everything to do with follow-up. These are the obligations that get landlords disqualified, and every one of them is an administrative task that is easy to forget.

• ⏰ You must notify HRA within five business days of learning that the household no longer resides in the unit.
• ⚖️ You must notify HRA within five business days if any legal proceeding affecting the participant’s tenancy is commenced.
• 🔄 You must notify HRA promptly if the landlord, the owner of the premises, or the management company changes.
• ↩️ If the household stops living in the unit, you must return any HRA payments covering the period they were not there.
• 💰 You must promptly return any overpayment, including money paid in error or paid because of inaccurate or incomplete information you submitted.
• 🚫 You may not move a household from one unit to another without prior written approval from both HRA and the household.

Notifications have to be in writing, sent to CityFHEPS at the NYC Human Resources Administration, 109 East 16th Street, 10th Floor, New York, NY 10003.

And here is the consequence, stated plainly in the fact sheet. Landlords may be banned from participation in City rental assistance programs for violating any of the landlord requirements. Before you land on a disqualification list, HRA will notify you and give you a chance to object in writing.

Read that sentence again with an operator’s eyes. You can be banned from a program that pays you four months up front for failing to send a letter within five business days.

Rent reasonableness and the DHCR check

Every unit goes through a rent reasonableness assessment. The rent you are charging cannot exceed what comparable units in the development or the vicinity command.

If the unit is rent stabilized, DSS pulls DHCR data to verify the stabilization status and the maximum legal rent, and confirms your number sits at or below the legal limit.

If your registered legal rent and the rent on your proposed lease disagree, this is where that gets discovered. Reconcile it beforehand rather than during the review.

⚖️ Selecting and rejecting tenants

This is where owners get themselves into genuine legal trouble, so let me be direct.

The HPD and HDC Marketing Handbook, updated April 2025, is the governing document for city-assisted housing, and it says this plainly: applicants may not be rejected solely on the basis that they receive Section 8 or other qualifying government rental subsidy. CityFHEPS is named in the handbook as one of the two most common subsidy types.

Lawful source of income is a protected class, alongside race, color, religion, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity or expression, national origin, age, disability, veteran status, immigration status, lawful occupation, marital or partnership status, pregnancy, presence of children, height and weight, and status as a survivor of domestic violence, sexual violence, or stalking.

Voucher-holders are not judged on income

This one trips up owners constantly. Applicants with tenant-based Section 8 or another qualifying subsidy are not subject to your advertised minimum income levels at all.

They must be considered so long as the subsidy’s payment standard, net of any utility allowance, meets the advertised rent. They still have to satisfy your other criteria, including maximum income, but you cannot apply a minimum income test to somebody whose rent is being paid by the city.

Two related points. Shelter clients may qualify for Augmented CityFHEPS, which uses a higher payment standard, and a shelter letter is sufficient proof of eligibility. And where a voucher-holder is processed for non-tax-code units only, the review is streamlined: the voucher eligibility determination itself satisfies income eligibility, so no further income documentation is required.

You cannot invent a reason later

One structural rule gets missed almost universally.

Your rejection criteria have to be specified in the Marketing Plan and approved by the Agency during pre-marketing, before you ever see an applicant. An applicant may not be rejected for any reason that is not consistent with those approved criteria and the Agency selection policies, and the criteria must be applied fairly and equitably to every applicant.

No application may be found ineligible before it enters the lottery. Every application gets a log number first.

Separately, the HPD and HDC tenant selection criteria describe the most stringent screening permitted. You may always be less strict. You may never be stricter. Off limits for every applicant:

• 🚫 Housing court history or prior landlord-tenant actions
• 🚫 Home visits, photos, or video of the applicant’s current home
• 🚫 Debt-to-income ratios
• 🚫 Lack of credit history or lack of rental history
• 🚫 Requiring a guarantor or co-signer
• 🚫 Personal references
• 🚫 Contacting a previous landlord or neighbors for information

And the one that surprises nearly everybody: credit checks are not permitted at all for voucher-holders, homeless referrals, or clients in process for project-based subsidy or supportive units. If your screening runs credit on a CityFHEPS applicant, stop today.

So what do you do if you think you have a valid reason?

Do not decide alone. That is the whole point of the process.

Take it to your Agency monitor, HPD or HDC depending on the project, and check the reason against the rejection criteria approved in your Marketing Plan and the detailed selection policies in Section 5 of the handbook. The handbook is explicit that questions arising during review go to the Agency.

If you do reject, the applicant may appeal in writing, and their place on the log is held while it is reviewed. That appeal must be reviewed by a supervisor who was not the initial reviewer. If the rejection stands, the appeal rejection notice has to give specific and detailed reasons, on the Agency template. The applicant then has five business days to complain directly to HPD or HDC.

And note two hard stops. No lease may be signed and nobody may move in until the Agency has completed its review of the applicant screening. You also may not collect a security deposit or rent from a prospective resident before that review is finished.

A rejection reviewed against approved criteria and documented is a defensible business decision. The same rejection made alone on a Tuesday afternoon is a complaint waiting to be filed, and your recollection of why will not help you a year later.

One scope note. All of the above governs city-assisted affordable housing with a Marketing Plan and an Agency monitor. If you are a private owner renting at market rate and simply accepting a CityFHEPS voucher, you have no marketing agent to call, but the source of income protections apply to you exactly the same. Write your criteria down before you advertise, apply them identically to everyone, and keep the file.

🔒 Criminal history: what you may and may not consider

Read this section carefully and then talk to your attorney before acting on any of it. This is the single most legally dangerous decision an owner makes, the rules are narrower than almost anyone expects, and getting it wrong is a discrimination claim rather than a paperwork problem. What follows is a plain-English summary of HPD and HDC guidance, not legal advice.

The guidance is Attachment AA-1 to the Marketing Handbook, and it applies to anyone who determines eligibility: case managers, project managers, clerks, and independent contractors alike.

What you may never consider

• 🚫 Arrests that did not result in a conviction
• 🚫 Youthful offender adjudications
• 🚫 Convictions excused by pardon, overturned on appeal, sealed, or otherwise vacated
• 🚫 Any offense committed before the applicant turned 17. There is no exception to this one.
• 🚫 Any conviction that does not appear on the list described below

Only prior convictions count, and only for offenses that involved physical violence to persons or property, or that adversely affected the health, safety, and welfare of other people.

The list is the gate

Attachment AA-4 sets out 160 applicable New York State Penal Law convictions. If a conviction is not on that list, it may not be factored into the application at all. For a conviction under some other body of law, you must determine whether it is comparable in nature and severity to something on the list, and articulate that reasoning in writing.

The lookback windows

Even a listed conviction ages out. You may only consider:

• ⏱️ A felony conviction within five years prior to consideration
• ⏱️ A conviction resulting in incarceration where release occurred within one year prior
• ⏱️ A misdemeanor conviction within one year prior

Anything outside those windows may not be the basis for rejection or for further consideration. It is simply gone.

And even then, it is never automatic

This is the part owners get wrong most often. A conviction that is on the list and inside the lookback window is still not grounds for automatic rejection.

You must perform an individualized assessment using the mandatory Worksheet, Attachment AA-2, weighing the offense against the applicant’s age at the time, the time elapsed, and evidence of rehabilitation. No factor may be considered in isolation. Automatic bars exist only where HUD requires them for specific federally assisted programs, and even then you must give HPD or HDC prior notice and get approval before issuing a rejection.

On age, the guidance is explicit that offenses committed between 17 and 25 must be evaluated with the understanding that people who exercise poor judgment as young adults very often mature into law-abiding ones.

On rehabilitation, completed treatment, vocational or educational programming, employment, and volunteer work all count in the applicant’s favor. Two traps here: the absence of drug or alcohol treatment must be treated neutrally rather than as a negative, because you may not assume a problem existed. And while community recommendations help, an applicant’s failure to provide one from a current or former landlord cannot be held against them.

What you owe the applicant

• 📋 A written explanation of your background check procedures, and of their right to review, contest, and explain the record
• ✉️ Outreach using Attachment AA-3 before any rejection on these grounds, giving no less than ten business days to respond
• 💬 Their choice of submitting through Housing Connect, by email, or in person, plus the option to review it with you in person, by phone, or virtually
• 📄 On rejection, a written explanation plus copies of every document you reviewed, including the completed Worksheet
• ⚖️ No less than ten business days to appeal, and notice of their right to complain to HPD or HDC if the appeal fails
• 🗄️ Records retained for a minimum of five years

Use a reputable background check company and comply with the Fair Credit Reporting Act. Under Part M of the Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act of 2019, the fee you may charge for background and credit checks combined is capped at actual cost or $20, whichever is less, and must be waived entirely if the applicant hands you a check conducted within the past 30 days.

Last word, and I mean it. HPD says plainly that this guidance is not a comprehensive Fair Housing guide, and neither is this article. The rules change, they differ by program, and the consequences of a wrong call land on you rather than on whoever gave you the advice. Run your criminal history policy past counsel before you apply it to a single applicant.

Getting a unit approved

The sequence runs roughly like this. The unit gets registered on the DSS Offer Registration site, by you or by the tenant’s housing specialist. DSS runs the rent reasonableness assessment. A preclearance follows, and the unit and building have to be clear of a specific set of violations. Then a physical walkthrough gets scheduled.

Pass the walkthrough and the housing specialist helps assemble the packet and schedules a lease signing. The lease has to be signed and dated by both parties and must show the complete address including the unit number.

One line in the fact sheet deserves your attention: you, the landlord or broker, are responsible for providing all necessary documentation and for making sure the packet gets submitted. Not the caseworker. You.

After final review and approval, a key and check exchange gets scheduled. You hand over keys to the same unit shown on the lease, and you collect the unit hold payment, the first several months of rent, and the security voucher.

Renewals, which are quietly the whole game

Tenants renew participation annually, and DSS recalculates the tenant contribution against their current income at renewal. Your total stays roughly stable while the split between HRA and tenant moves.

On your side, CityFHEPS landlords are not required to renew a tenant unless some other law requires it. But there is a real cost to walking away. A landlord who declines to offer a renewal lease may lose eligibility for the financial incentives to place another CityFHEPS tenant in that same unit, unless there was good cause.

In other words, the unit hold payment and the up-front months are not guaranteed to be there for you the second time around.

And now the part that will sound familiar

For program questions and payment inquiries, you call the HRA Rental Assistance Call Center at 718-557-1399. It is open Monday through Friday, 9 AM to 5 PM.

Forty hours out of 168. The agency administering your tenant’s rent is itself a 23.8% operation.

I point that out with sympathy rather than snark. HRA is doing a hard job with a hard caseload. But it does mean that when your tenant texts you at 9pm on a Saturday asking why HRA has not paid this month, nobody on that side is available to answer, and the question lands on you.

Which is the honest argument for having a level one of your own. The compliance calendar in this program is unforgiving and entirely mechanical: the five-day notifications, the annual renewal, the recertification, the ledger that has to know a CityFHEPS payment is not late. Every one of those is exactly the kind of task that gets deferred to next week until a disqualification notice arrives.

That is what Maya is for, and it is also precisely where she stops. She can track the calendar, answer the routine question at 9pm, and reconcile what HRA actually paid against what the ledger expected. She does not advise you on housing law, and she should not. For that, call your attorney.

Have further questions about running a CityFHEPS tenancy? We answer them.

Frequently asked questions

How much does CityFHEPS pay a landlord in 2026?

For leases starting April 1, 2026 or later, the maximums are $2,604 for a studio, $2,734 for a one bedroom, $2,997 for a two bedroom, and $3,753 for a three bedroom, assuming all utilities are included. If the tenant pays utilities, a utility allowance is subtracted. Every 2026 figure is slightly lower than its 2025 counterpart.

Can I charge a CityFHEPS tenant a late fee?

Not if the payment arrives within the month it is due. A payment made in the month rent is due is not considered late, and when HRA pays in full by the final day of the month it is deemed timely regardless of what your lease says. A landlord also cannot successfully take a tenant to housing court just for late fees, or to small claims court for late fees on the CityFHEPS portion.

How does CityFHEPS pay landlords each month?

DSS issues a check to the landlord each month for the CityFHEPS portion of the rent. If the tenant has income, they pay their own portion separately, and that split is recalculated at each annual renewal.

What can get a landlord banned from CityFHEPS?

Violating any of the landlord requirements can lead to disqualification from City rental assistance programs. The common ones are administrative: missing the five-business-day notification when a household moves out or when a legal proceeding starts, failing to return payments or overpayments, demanding money above the lease, refusing the HRA security voucher, or moving a household between units without written approval. HRA gives notice and an opportunity to object before placing a landlord on a disqualification list.

Does CityFHEPS work outside New York City?

A full apartment can be rented with CityFHEPS anywhere in New York State, though the payment standards differ outside the five boroughs. Single rooms in shared apartments and SRO units are limited to the five boroughs.

A necessary note

This is a plain-English summary of a government program, not legal advice, and it reflects the DSS fact sheet as of early 2026. Payment standards and utility allowances are updated annually. Confirm current figures at nyc.gov/dsshousing, and talk to your attorney about anything touching your specific tenancy.