NYC Affordability

What rent stabilization actually does

A rent-stabilized apartment isn’t rent-controlled (a much smaller, older category with its own separate rules), and it isn’t the same as “affordable housing” with an income cap. Stabilization is a regulatory status attached to the apartment itself, generally covering units in buildings with six or more units built before 1974, plus some newer buildings that received tax incentives in exchange for stabilizing their units. It changes two things a market-rate lease doesn’t have: a legal cap on how much your rent can increase at renewal, and a right to renew your lease at all — a stabilized landlord generally can’t simply decline to renew or push you out to reset the rent to market rate.

How much your rent can actually go up

The NYC Rent Guidelines Board (RGB) votes once a year on the maximum percentage increase landlords can apply at lease renewal, and that vote applies uniformly to every stabilized unit citywide — an individual landlord can’t set a higher number no matter what the local market is doing. For leases commencing October 1, 2025 through September 30, 2026, the current order (RGB Order #57) caps increases at:

Renewal term	Maximum increase
1-year lease	3%
2-year lease	4.5%

These are ceilings, not automatic increases — a landlord can renew at the same rent or lower, and often does in a slow market, but legally cannot exceed the board’s cap for that renewal period. The RGB revisits these numbers annually, so the cap for your next renewal cycle may differ from the one above; check the Rent Guidelines Board’s current order before assuming last year’s number still applies.

How to check if your apartment is actually stabilized

Building age and unit count are a starting point, not proof. The most reliable way to check is to request your apartment’s rent history directly from the NYS Division of Housing and Community Renewal (DHCR), which tracks registered rent-stabilized units and their filed rent amounts going back years. A current lease that doesn’t mention stabilization, or a landlord who tells you it isn’t stabilized, isn’t authoritative on its own — plenty of disputes over stabilization status get resolved only after a DHCR rent history request.

Succession and other protections

Rent stabilization also carries rights beyond the renewal cap: a stabilized tenant generally has a right to a lease renewal (a landlord needs a specific, legally recognized reason to decline one), a family member who’s lived with the tenant can in some circumstances have succession rights to take over the lease, and any additional fees a landlord tries to charge beyond legally permitted amounts can be challenged as key money or an illegal overcharge. None of this applies automatically to a market-rate unit, which is one reason it’s worth confirming your actual status rather than assuming based on the building.

What this doesn’t mean

Stabilization doesn’t freeze your rent, doesn’t cap it based on your income, and doesn’t guarantee it’s below market rate — some long-vacant, heavily renovated stabilized units have legal rents that are close to or even above comparable market-rate apartments nearby, especially after years of compounding legal increases. It’s a process protection and a increase cap, not an income-based subsidy — for the latter, see how AMI-based affordable housing works instead.