Most OATH hearings now end with no one showing up

New York City writes millions of building-related summonses that are supposed to be answered at an OATH hearing. In 2016, about one summons in four ended in default. In 2024 defaults became the majority outcome, and through early September 2026 the rate stands at 56.6 percent. The judgments owners skipped total $1.85 billion imposed, with $854 million still recorded as due.

A building-related summons in New York City comes with a hearing date at the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings. The respondent can appear, contest the charge, settle it, or admit it. There is a fifth option: do nothing. OATH then enters a default, the violation is sustained without a defense, and the penalty is imposed anyway, usually at or near the maximum.

That fifth option is now the most common one.

The trend, year by year

We hold the case record for every building-related OATH summons the city publishes: 8.3 million summonses issued by the buildings, fire, sanitation, environmental, housing and transportation agencies. Of those, 5.8 million carry a recorded hearing outcome. Grouped by hearing year, the default share of decided hearings looks like this:

*2026 through September 3.

The climb is not a pandemic artifact. The rate was already rising before 2020, kept rising through the remote-hearing years, and accelerated after: from 38.0 percent in 2022 to 45.3 percent in 2023, then past half in 2024. 2025 set the volume record on both sides at once, the most decided hearings of any year in the table and the most defaults.

What defaulting costs, on paper

A default is not a dismissal. The hearing officer enters the violation as sustained and imposes the penalty without hearing a defense, and for many charges the default penalty is the maximum the law allows. Our guide to OATH default penalties walks through the mechanics and the reopening window.

The paper consequences are large. Across all years, hearings that ended in default carry $1.85 billion in imposed penalties, and roughly $854 million of that is still recorded as due. The recent years dominate the unpaid side of that ledger: defaulted hearings from 2025 alone still carry $143 million due, and 2026 defaults already carry $159 million.

An unpaid default judgment is also not the end of the story. It can be docketed as a civil judgment, block permits, and feed the city's collection pipeline. What the table measures is the front of that pipeline: how much penalty was imposed at hearings nobody attended, and how much of it the city still lists as owed.

Who gets ignored

The no-show rate is not uniform across the agencies writing the summonses. Since the start of 2024:

Seven in ten sanitation and transportation summonses now default. Buildings summonses, which carry some of the largest penalties and the most direct permit consequences, default least. One reading of that split: respondents show up in rough proportion to what a sustained violation costs them later, not to the hearing itself.

Why this matters for the record

Every defaulted summons is a violation that was never contested. When you read a building's record on this site and see OATH entries with penalties imposed and balances due, a large and growing share of those entries were decided with only one side in the room. That cuts both ways. A default is not proof the charge was accurate, and it is also the strongest signal in the enforcement data that an owner has stopped engaging with the process entirely. Buildings whose owners default repeatedly are worth reading closely, and every building page here shows the hearing outcome on each OATH entry.

Methodology

Source dataset: OATH Hearings Division Case Status (NYC Open Data, jz4z-kudi), which we ingest hourly. Our copy is scoped to building-related enforcement: summonses issued by agencies matching buildings, fire, sanitation, environmental, housing or transportation. OATH also adjudicates taxi, vendor, health and other cases; those are outside this analysis.

A summons counts as decided when the dataset records a hearing result. 2.5 million summonses carry no recorded outcome, mostly pending or administratively routed cases, and are excluded from every rate in this post. A summons counts as a default when its recorded result contains the word "default" in any form the dataset uses ("DEFAULTED", "DEFAULT", "Default/ No Appearance").

Yearly rows group by hearing date, not violation date. Money figures sum the dataset's penalty-imposed and balance-due fields over defaulted summonses; balances reflect what the city's copy of the record lists as due on the as-of date, net of credits, and are not a collections rate. The 2026 row covers January 1 through September 3, 2026. Figures were computed on September 3, 2026 against our production copy of the record and are frozen with this post; the live totals on the rest of the site keep moving.