The Fairness in Apartment Rental Expenses Act took effect on June 11, 2025. The law was framed at passage as the most significant change to NYC rental economics in a generation: roughly $13,000 in average upfront moving costs, a substantial portion of which had been the broker fee, was supposed to drop overnight.
One year later, broker fees didn't disappear so much as migrate — into new line items, new paperwork, and, in some cases, higher asking rents.
The Department of Consumer and Worker Protection has received more than 2,000 broker-fee complaints since the law took effect. Some are about brokers openly continuing to charge fees in violation of the law. Many more are about something subtler: fees that have been renamed, restructured, or pushed into other parts of the transaction.
The law worked. The market is also working around it.
What is illegal now, in plain terms
Under the FARE Act, a broker who represents a landlord — including any broker who publishes a listing with the landlord's permission — cannot charge a broker fee to the prospective tenant. There is a rebuttable presumption that any broker who lists an apartment is doing so on behalf of the landlord.
That presumption is the heart of the law. Before FARE, landlords could plausibly claim the broker who showed an apartment was acting as the tenant's broker, and bill the tenant accordingly. Now, the burden is reversed. The broker who lists is presumed to represent the landlord, and the landlord pays.
Tenants can still hire their own broker if they want to. They can still pay that broker. The law only restricts the case where the listing broker is representing the landlord — which is how most NYC rentals are marketed.
Penalties for violations: $750 for a first offense, $1,800 for a second, $2,000 for any subsequent. Tenants can also sue privately to recover any fees illegally charged.
What landlords have actually done
Three patterns have surfaced in the year since the law took effect.
The new fees. The DCWP has fielded complaints about "administrative fees," "processing fees," "move-in coordination fees," "leasing services charges," and "technology fees" introduced for the first time after June 11, often totaling between $1,000 and $4,200 per lease. A fee is more likely to be a workaround when three things are true together: it appeared after June 11, 2025; it sits in roughly the same dollar range as the prior broker fee on the same unit; and it is not tied to a verifiable third-party service like a credit or background check (which remain legal up to $20). Where all three apply, regulators have been treating those fees as challengeable in DCWP enforcement actions and in private litigation.
The tenant-broker relabel. Some brokers have begun asking tenants to sign forms designating the broker as the tenant's representative, even when the broker is the one who listed the unit on the landlord's behalf. The FARE Act explicitly anticipated this. Council Member Chi Ossé's office, which sponsored the law, has publicly stated that any broker who lists an apartment with the landlord's permission cannot subsequently claim to represent the tenant on the same transaction.
The rent increase. This is the workaround that does not violate any law. A landlord facing the cost of paying the broker fee that used to be paid by the tenant can simply raise the asking rent on the unit. THE CITY documented one example shortly after the law took effect: a Bensonhurst studio listed at $1,500 per month was relisted at $1,850 — a 23 percent increase — between when one prospective tenant submitted an application and when the rent was finalized. The listing still indicated a one-month broker's fee.
Some landlords are clearly trying to recoup the shift. Whether that behavior shows up meaningfully in citywide rent indices is harder to isolate. Asking rents in NYC rose 4.8 percent in 2025, according to StreetEasy market data, with steeper increases on smaller units. Some portion of that increase is normal market movement. Some portion is broker-fee absorption. There is no clean way, in aggregate market data, to separate the two.
What is documentable is that the up-front cost of moving has dropped meaningfully for tenants who are not charged a broker fee, and that the monthly cost of living in some new units has risen.
What the data says about enforcement so far
The DCWP's enforcement record in the first year has a clear shape: complaints high, penalties limited. By the law's first anniversary, the agency had logged more than 2,000 complaints. It had issued 74 summonses alleging 100 separate violations; 46 of those violations produced roughly $27,000 in penalties, and the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings has ordered about $15,000 in fees returned to tenants. Against more than two thousand complaints, that is a narrow band of formal enforcement.
The gap between complaint volume and formal enforcement is partly procedural — the full pipeline from complaint to penalty takes months, and many complaints settle before reaching OATH at all. Part of it reflects agency capacity. Tenant advocates have called for more inspectors and faster turnaround. Industry groups have argued the law itself is producing the friction.
The Real Estate Board of New York, which represents landlord and broker interests, sued in federal court to block the law on constitutional grounds — arguing it violates brokers' First Amendment rights and the Constitution's Contracts Clause. The district court denied an injunction, and the law took effect on schedule. REBNY appealed to the Second Circuit in July 2025; that court declined to pause the law in September 2025. As of June 2026 the appeal is still pending on the merits, with no final ruling. The legal challenge has not stopped the law from being enforced — through a full year, enforcement never paused — but it has shaped the political environment in which enforcement is happening.
What an apartment hunter should do this month
For renters currently looking, four things matter more in the post-FARE market than they did a year ago.
Read every fee in the listing. The FARE Act requires landlords and their agents to clearly disclose all fees a tenant will be required to pay. A listing that does not specify those fees in advance — or that introduces fees only at lease signing — is itself a potential violation. Screenshot the listing before contacting the broker.
Ask: who hired you? If a broker showing you a listed apartment cannot give a clear answer — or starts by saying "the landlord" and then pivots to "I'm representing you on this one" — that pivot is the signal. The broker who lists the unit cannot legitimately claim to represent you on the same unit.
Watch for the relabel. If a broker presents you with a "tenant representation agreement" for a unit you found through a public listing, that is the relabel pattern. You are not required to sign such an agreement to rent the apartment.
Check whether the rent itself rose. If the listing was previously published at a lower rent — even days or weeks earlier — the unit may have been re-priced upward to absorb the broker fee. Many listings have screenshot histories on Google cache, archive sites, or earlier StreetEasy versions. A rent that jumped meaningfully right before your application is worth knowing about.
If you encounter any fee you believe violates FARE, the DCWP complaint portal is the formal mechanism. You can also pursue private litigation to recover fees, though the two routes cannot run in parallel for the same violation.
The longer view
The FARE Act removed one specific cost from one specific transaction. It did not remove the underlying market dynamic that produced the cost in the first place: a city with severe rental scarcity, in which any meaningful protection for tenants is inevitably absorbed somewhere in the price structure.
What the law has done — clearly, demonstrably — is shift the burden from the moment of moving in to the monthly cost of living there. For some tenants, that trade-off is favorable. A household that does not have $5,000 to $8,000 in cash for a broker fee but can absorb $50 to $150 more per month in rent is meaningfully better off. A household making the same calculation in reverse is meaningfully worse off.
The first kind of household is more common in NYC than the second. That is the political bet the law made.
Whether the bet pays off over time depends on enforcement, on whether the workarounds are squeezed out, and on whether the rent absorption stops at broker-fee equivalent or compounds into something larger. The first year is too short an interval to know for certain.
What is known is that the market did not stop functioning, the worst-case predictions did not materialize, and a meaningful number of NYC renters have moved into apartments without the upfront cost that defined the city's rental market for a generation.
That is, by any reasonable measure, a real change. It is also not the entire story.
Sources: NYC Department of Consumer and Worker Protection FARE Act compliance guidance and complaint data; THE CITY, "Broker Fee Law's First Year: Complaints, Violations and an Uphill Climb to Recoup for Tenants" (June 8, 2026) and "Goodbye to Broker Fees for NYC Tenants as New Law Takes Effect" (June 10, 2025); Crain's New York Business coverage of the Second Circuit's denial of REBNY's injunction (September 2025); The Real Deal and Bushwick Daily one-year enforcement coverage (2026); Brick Underground reporting on FARE Act complaints and summonses; StreetEasy market data on 2025 rent movements; NYC Council press releases on Local Law 119 of 2024 (Intro 360-A); Council Member Chi Ossé's official FARE Act guidance; REBNY federal litigation filings and Second Circuit appeal (July 2025).
