New York Calls It “Universal Access.” Fewer Than Half of Tenants Get a Lawyer.
Summary
New York City spent $217 million in fiscal 2025 guaranteeing free lawyers to tenants facing eviction. Only 44% of tenants who showed up in Housing Court that year actually had one — and in the Bronx, the city's highest-eviction borough, the rate was 28%.
The budget grew. The odds didn't.
The NYC Office of Civil Justice's FY25 Annual Report puts Mayoral funding for tenant legal services — the Anti-Eviction, Anti-Harassment, and Brief Legal contracts that fund Right to Counsel — at $217,284,193 for the year. Legal-aid providers say that isn't enough. The NYC Comptroller's audit, published in May 2025, cites advocates calling for $350 million a year to fully staff the mandate — 61% more than the city actually spent.
View data as table
| FY25 actual budget | $217.3M | OCJ FY25 Annual Report |
|---|---|---|
| Advocates' funding ask | $350M/yr | NYC Comptroller, May 2025 |
The gap shows up on the ground as caseload. A 2023 New York State Office of Court Administration report recommended a maximum of 48 eviction cases a year for a full-time Right to Counsel attorney. Providers reported actual caseloads of 50 to 80 cases, according to the Comptroller's audit — while paying staff attorneys $74,000 to $90,000 a year, against a citywide average lawyer salary of $193,000 (Bureau of Labor Statistics, May 2023). Annual attrition at Right to Counsel legal organizations has run 20% to 55%. The program loses lawyers faster than it can train them, in a job it already overloads.
Universal, unless you're in the Bronx
OCJ's own headline metric is the full representation rate: the share of tenants who appeared in Housing Court with a lawyer, from any source — city-funded or not. It's the number the law was written to push toward 100%. In the fourth quarter of FY25, it was 44% citywide, per OCJ's Figure 22 and 23 — up from 30% when the law took effect in FY18, but down sharply from a 71% peak in FY21, when the pandemic eviction moratorium had shrunk the court's caseload to a fraction of normal. Representation rose when there was almost nothing to represent; now that eviction courts are back to full volume, the rate has fallen back under 50%.
View data as table
| Bronx | 28% | of tenants who appeared, Q4 FY25 |
|---|---|---|
| Brooklyn | 51% | |
| Manhattan | 52% | |
| Queens | 59% | |
| Staten Island | 61% | |
| NYC citywide | 44% | up from 30% in FY18 Q4; down from 71% in FY21 Q4 |
The Bronx is both the borough with the highest eviction-filing rate in the city — the Comptroller found the ten highest-eviction ZIP codes citywide are all there — and the borough where a tenant is least likely to have a lawyer. Staten Island tenants get counsel more than twice as often. The law made no such distinction; the funding, in effect, has.
The system's scale
View data as table
| Eviction petitions filed | 114,390 | FY25, citywide |
|---|---|---|
| Warrants of eviction issued | 59,757 | FY25, citywide |
| Households given full representation | 22,738 | FY25, OCJ-administered programs |
Landlords filed 114,390 residential eviction petitions in New York City Housing Court in FY25. The court issued 59,757 warrants of eviction. OCJ-administered programs gave 22,738 households a lawyer for the fight — a fifth of the petitions filed. Every household outside that number went into a courtroom against a represented landlord with, at best, a walk-in advice session instead of an attorney of their own.
The takeaway
- The law promises universal access; the data shows less than half. Eight years after Local Law 136, the full representation rate for tenants who show up in Housing Court is 44% citywide — the program's best quarter to date, and still a minority.
- Money and geography move together. The Bronx files more eviction cases than any other borough and represents the smallest share of the tenants in them, at 28%. The right to counsel is not, in practice, universal within the five boroughs either.
- The system runs on overloaded, underpaid staff. Recommended maximum caseload is 48 cases a year; reported actual caseloads run as high as 80, at salaries $100,000 below the citywide lawyer average — a structure that burns through attorneys as fast as it can hire them.
Figures span several fiscal-year and quarterly snapshots reported by NYC's Office of Civil Justice and the NYC Comptroller; each chart's subtitle states the exact period. "Full representation" counts any attorney of record, not only city-funded Right to Counsel providers.
Sources
- NYC Office of Civil Justice (Human Resources Administration), FY25 Annual Report — the FY25 tenant legal services budget ($217,284,193), enrollment and full-representation totals, borough-level representation rates (Figures 22–23), and eviction petition and warrant volumes (Figures 3, 27, 29). nyc.gov
- Office of the New York City Comptroller, Evictions Up, Representation Down: How New York City Is Undermining the Right to Counsel (May 2, 2025) — the $350 million annual funding ask, attorney caseload and attrition data, and staff attorney salary comparison. comptroller.nyc.gov
- Civil Right to Counsel National Coalition — background and legislative history on NYC's Local Law 136 (2017), the Universal Access to Counsel law. civilrighttocounsel.org
Comments
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In 2017, New York City passed Local Law 136, the first law in the country guaranteeing free legal representation to income-eligible tenants facing eviction. It has a marketing name: Universal Access to Counsel. Universal is not what fiscal 2025 delivered. Of the tenants who actually showed up in Housing Court that year, fewer than half had a lawyer — and the city spent $217 million finding out.