NYC Affordability

What common charges pay for

A condo building has bills no single owner pays directly: staff salaries, building insurance, common-area utilities, supplies, repairs, and contributions to a reserve fund for big-ticket replacements. Common charges are how owners split those bills. Hauseit, a NYC brokerage, lists exactly those items as what condo fees cover in NYC, along with some utilities such as water and gas; your own electricity and internet usually aren’t included.

What they don’t cover: anything inside your unit, and one-time special assessments when the reserve fund can’t cover a big project. Check a building’s assessment history before you assume the monthly number is the whole story.

How your share is set

New York’s Condominium Act decides the split, not the board’s mood. Every unit has a common interest, a percentage stated in the condo’s declaration. The law allows a few ways to set it: roughly in proportion to each unit’s fair value or floor area when the declaration was made, in equal shares, or by floor space adjusted for things like location and uniqueness. Once set, it’s permanent; it can’t be changed without the consent of the affected owners in an amended declaration.

Common expenses are then charged to owners according to their common interests. Your share of the budget is your percentage. The law does allow some expenses to be allocated separately if the declaration and bylaws authorize it, for example costs tied to areas only some owners use exclusively, or to commercial units.

So when the budget rises 5%, your common charges generally rise 5% too. You don’t negotiate your share; you buy it. For a new building, the offering plan lists each unit’s projected first-year common charges in Schedule A.

Why they’re not the same as co-op maintenance

A co-op’s maintenance pays for everything above, plus the building’s property taxes and, if the co-op corporation has one, the underlying mortgage. A condo has no corporation-wide tax bill. The Condominium Act treats each unit, together with its common interest, as its own tax parcel, assessed and taxed separately. You get your own property tax bill, often paid through your lender’s escrow account.

That’s why comparing a condo’s common charges to a co-op’s maintenance flatters the condo. The fair comparison is common charges plus property tax against maintenance. See co-op vs condo costs for the rest of the differences.

How lenders count them

Lenders don’t treat common charges as optional. Fannie Mae’s Selling Guide defines the monthly housing expense used in the debt-to-income ratio as principal and interest, insurance, real estate taxes, special assessments, and owners’ association dues, among other items. That’s common charges, at full value. A co-op’s maintenance goes in the same way, as the “co-op corporation fee.” The condo calculator applies that sum against a 43% DTI limit by default.

The building’s finances matter too, not just yours. In a Full Review, Fannie Mae requires lenders to confirm that the association’s budget puts at least 10% toward replacement reserves, and that no more than 15% of units are 60 or more days behind on their common charges. Cheap common charges that come from skimping on reserves can cause trouble with your loan, not just with the roof.

Worked example

Take a hypothetical building with a $2,400,000 annual budget and a unit whose declaration sets its common interest at 0.5%. That unit’s share is $2,400,000 × 0.5% = $12,000 a year, or $1,000 a month, which happens to be the site’s illustrative citywide default. If the budget passes Fannie Mae’s 10% reserve test, at least $100 of that goes to reserves each month.

Now buy that unit for $700,000 with 20% down, at a 30-year rate of 6.95% (the Freddie Mac 30-year average as of September 17, 2026), with the calculator’s other defaults: $1,250 a month in property tax (rounded from a reported citywide average) and an illustrative $75 for HO-6 insurance.

• Mortgage P&I on $560,000: $3,707
• Common charges + property tax + insurance: $1,000 + $1,250 + $75 = $2,325
• Monthly housing expense: $6,032
• Income needed at a 43% DTI: $168,332

Put the same unit in a building charging $1,500 a month and the housing expense rises to $6,532, so the income needed rises to $182,286. Every $500 a month of common charges costs you about $14,000 a year of required income at a 43% DTI, whatever the mortgage rate.

And the co-op comparison: this condo’s $1,000 in common charges isn’t cheaper than the co-op calculator’s illustrative $1,200 maintenance. Add the $1,250 tax and it’s $2,250 a month, against a co-op figure that already includes its tax.