Did the FARE Act Raise NYC Rents? One Year of Data

Published August 2, 2026. Based on 923,847 NYC rental listings tracked January 1, 2025 – July 29, 2026.

One year ago, on June 11, 2025, the FARE Act ended the strangest ritual in New York renting: paying a five-figure fee to a broker you never hired. We published our first read on the data that same summer, and a six-month check-in in January.

This is the one-year edition, and it lands at a fitting moment: two weeks ago, a federal appeals court rejected the brokers' bid to overturn the law. The FARE Act is not an experiment anymore. It's how New York works now.

So what did it actually do? We went back through every listing we've tracked since January 2025 — 923,847 listings covering 616,238 unique apartments — and measured the year the best way we know how: same apartments, same platform, same season, before and after.

The short version

• Rents did not explode. Same-platform, same-bedroom asking rents rose 2–4% year over year. In line with a normal NYC year, not a fee apocalypse.
• But landlords who lost their fee did recoup part of it. The same apartment, re-listed a year later, went up 6.7% if it used to charge a tenant-paid fee, versus 3.7% if it was already no-fee. That ~3-point gap is the fee, partially baked into rent.
• Renters still come out well ahead. At that premium, it takes about five years of higher rent to equal one upfront broker fee. The median NYC apartment turns over in about 27 months.
• The "no-fee" label died. It went from 52% of listings to 22% — not because fees came back, but because "no fee" stopped being worth advertising once it became the law.
• The market never slowed down. The share of listings gone within two weeks is statistically unchanged from the summer before the law.
• But more listings now vanish without renting. About 31% of resolved listings are pulled with no confirmed close, up from 24% before the law — a real, persistent shift toward off-market leasing, on top of a shadow market that was always bigger than the public one.

1. The law's first day is still the loudest thing in our data

Start with the moment itself. In 19 months of tracking, covering more than 900,000 listings, the single biggest day of listing removals we have ever recorded is June 11, 2025 — the exact day the FARE Act took effect.

A typical weekday that spring saw 750–900 removals. On June 10 and 11 combined, nearly 2,900 listings came down — brokers and landlords yanking inventory rather than absorb the fee, exactly the purge we wrote about in real time a year ago. FARE week overall ran about 30% above the week before it.

Then it ended. The week after the purge, removals fell back below normal, and they have never spiked like that again. The great FARE Act inventory strike lasted about six days.

2. Rents rose like it was a normal year

The number one prediction from the law's opponents: landlords would jam the entire broker fee into monthly rent, instantly.

To test that fairly, you can't compare "the market" across two years — our own tracking expanded from one platform to thirty over this period, which would poison any naive average. So we held everything constant: same platform (StreetEasy, which we've tracked continuously since January 2025), same bedroom count, same month of the year.

Two to four percent. For context, a fully passed-through broker fee (15% of a year's rent) would show up as a 15% jump. StreetEasy's own one-year analysis, using a different method on their full dataset, attributes just 1.1% of rent growth to the FARE Act among broker-represented units. Whichever way you measure it, the fee apocalypse did not happen.

What's driving the increase that did happen is the same thing as always: New York has a 1.4% vacancy rate and not enough apartments. Rents were rising before the FARE Act — in fact, when we pulled a June 2024 baseline to extend the arc, the all-size StreetEasy median went $3,700 → $3,895 → $3,999 across the three Junes. That's +5.3% in the year before the law and +2.7% in the year after it. By this measure, asking rents grew more slowly post-FARE than pre-FARE.

3. The price of "free": what happened when fee apartments came back on the market

Here's the analysis we most wanted to run, and the one we think matters most.

Over the year, 18,470 apartments in our data were listed before the FARE Act and then re-listed in 2026 — the same unit, back on the market, roughly 13 months later. Because we saw each one both times, we know which of them used to charge a tenant-paid broker fee. That splits the market into a natural experiment:

Both groups went up — 78% of previously-fee units came back at a higher price, versus 70% of the no-fee group — that's the housing shortage. But the apartments whose landlords used to hand you the broker bill went up three percentage points more. That gap barely moves when we control for bedroom count (2.7–2.8 points for one- and two-bedrooms), tighten the outlier filters, or restrict to clean one-year gaps. StreetEasy's equivalent same-unit measure found the previously-fee group rising 6.4% per year — almost exactly what we measure independently, on a different dataset.

That three-point gap is the broker fee, getting partially priced into rent. Not all of it — a full pass-through on these units would have been closer to fifteen points — but not nothing either.

So did renters actually win? Do the math on the typical previously-fee apartment in our matched set ($3,450/month):

• Extra rent versus the no-fee group: about $104/month, or ~$1,245/year
• The upfront fee you no longer pay (15% of annual rent): about $6,210
• Break-even point: roughly five years

And here's the kicker from our own listing history: the median NYC apartment turns over after about 27 months. A typical renter moving into that apartment pays back around $2,800 of the fee through higher rent — and walks away still $3,400 ahead, without needing $6,000 extra in cash on signing day. Citywide, StreetEasy puts the average avoided fee at $5,862 per lease.

One honest caveat: fee and no-fee apartments were never identical populations. Fee listings skewed toward smaller landlords and walkups (median $3,450 in our matched pairs), no-fee toward larger buildings (median $4,100). Our bedroom-level controls say the gap is real, but treat the three points as an upper bound on pass-through, not a lab result.

4. The "no-fee" label is dead — because it won

For two decades, "no fee" was the most powerful word in a NYC listing. Watch it die in real time — 52% of listings before the law, 22% today:

Fees didn't come back — the badge stopped meaning anything. When tenant-paid fees were legal, "no fee" was a selling point worth shouting. Now that whoever hires the broker pays the broker, it's just… the law, and most listings no longer bother with the tag.

Which creates a real trap for the 2026 apartment hunter: if you filter by "no-fee" in 2026, you're not seeing the no-fee market — you're seeing the subset that still fills in an obsolete field. You'll exclude thousands of listings that cost you nothing upfront.

What to check instead: every listing must now carry an itemized disclosure of any fees you'd actually pay, signed before lease signing. The fees that are still legal: your own hired broker, a maximum $20 application fee, first month, and security deposit. "Administrative," "processing," or "technology" fees beyond that are the junk to watch for — the city's consumer protection agency has logged 1,400+ FARE Act complaints and issued about 50 summonses in year one.

5. The market never blinked: speed is identical to pre-FARE

If the FARE Act had genuinely broken the rental market — the other big prediction — you'd see it in velocity: listings lingering, price cuts spreading. We measured the same early-summer window in both years, on the same platform, with the same rules:

Statistically, nothing changed. Two in five listings still vanish inside two weeks; among confirmed rentals, median time on market still runs about two weeks. New listing supply is flat too — week-for-week, this summer is within 1% of last summer's volume.

Even the early-cut signal — the share of listings forced to drop their price within three weeks of posting — tells a small, tidy story: about 10% of new listings in the spring before the law, briefly 13–14% in the awkward adjustment autumn of 2025, and down to 8–9% this spring. Zoom out to a listing's whole life and the story doubles: about 24% of 2024 listings eventually took at least one price cut; by spring 2026 it was 12–14%. Public price-cutting roughly halved. Landlords fumbled their pricing for a season while they figured out fee-era economics — then the shortage bailed them out, and the discount died.

The uncomfortable takeaway for renters is the same one we gave at six months: the FARE Act fixed your wallet problem, not your speed problem. The apartment is cheaper to sign and exactly as hard to win. If anything, inventory is tighter than a year ago — down 10.7% citywide in May. Being early — seeing the listing the hour it posts, not the day after — is still the whole game, and our bidding-war playbook is unfortunately as relevant as ever.

6. The listings that walk away — and the market you never see

There is one place the brokers' warnings partially came true. When the law hit, industry groups predicted landlords would pull apartments off the public market rather than pay to list them. Our data says: some did, and they haven't come back.

Every listing eventually resolves one of two ways: with a confirmed close behind it, or pulled — withdrawn by the landlord, re-rented quietly, or moved somewhere we can't see. For years, about 1 in 4 ended listings were pulls. In the law's first two months that jumped to 32–33%, and it never really came back down: the first year of the law averaged 29%, and spring 2026 is still running 26–31%.

A stricter test agrees. Taking only apartments posted June 1–15 and resolved within 45 days — an identical clock every year, so slower recent data can't fake the effect — withdrawals went 24.1% (2024) → 32.4% (2025) → 30.8% (2026). The shift wasn't purge-week noise; it's the new normal.

The starkest way to say it: of every StreetEasy listing posted in 2024, 76% eventually showed a confirmed close. For listings posted in the seven months after the law took effect — each watched for at least seven months — the confirmed-close rate is 49%. In our data, a listing posted after June 11, 2025 is close to a coin flip ever to show a lease behind it. Treat the exact level gently: some of that gap can be reporting lag, and our collection widened over this period. But the direction matches the withdrawal spike above, and it matches what renters feel — some slice of the market that used to rent in public now leases in the dark, through word of mouth, building waitlists, or brokers' private channels.

Honesty requires the next sentence too: the public market was never the whole market. From our 20-year archive joined against the state's rent-stabilization rolls:

• Half of NYC's ~47,600 rent-stabilized buildings have never publicly listed a single unit — not once, on any platform we track, in two decades of data.
• The gradient is stark: in Manhattan only about 1 in 5 stabilized buildings has never listed. In Queens it's 2 in 3. In the Bronx, almost 9 in 10.
• Zoom all the way out and roughly 2 in 3 NYC rental units have no public-listing footprint at all (~805,000 units ever tracked, against ~2.2 million rental units citywide).
• Even when stabilized units do surface, only about 5% of their listings admit to being stabilized.

The FARE Act made the lit part of the market a little smaller. But the unlit part was always, quietly, the majority — which is why "check every listing site" was never quite enough, and why we join listings against official records in the first place.

7. Year one, scored

Back in July 2025 we called the FARE Act a win with an asterisk. One year of data lets us fill in the asterisk:

• Upfront cost: transformed. The five-figure signing day is over for most renters. Average fee avoided: ~$5,862. This is the law working as designed.
• Monthly rent: modestly higher on ex-fee units. About three points of fee crept into rent on the apartments that used to charge one. Partial pass-through, roughly a five-year break-even, renters net ahead.
• Market function: mostly unchanged. Six days of purge, then business as usual — same speed, same supply, same competition on what's listed.
• The shadow market: measurably bigger. The share of listings pulled without a confirmed close moved from ~24% to ~31% and stayed there. The brokers' "listings will vanish" warning was directionally right — just small next to the two-thirds of the market that was never visible to begin with.
• Legal status: settled. The Second Circuit affirmed dismissal of the brokers' core claims on July 14, 2026. REBNY says it will fight on; it has lost at every round so far.
• The next fight: supply. Every number in this report that got worse — inventory, competition, rent itself — is a shortage problem the FARE Act was never going to fix.

How we measured this

• Dataset: 923,847 NYC rental listings, 616,238 unique apartments, observed January 1, 2025 – July 29, 2026 across the sources we track (more than 20 sources as of July 2026, including StreetEasy, Zillow, Craigslist, the major brokerages, and direct-landlord portals).
• Why trend numbers use StreetEasy only: our platform coverage grew from one source to thirty during this window. Comparing "the market" across that expansion would confuse our growth with the market's. StreetEasy is the one source we tracked continuously the entire period — and the only one where we reliably observe listings leaving the market — so every before/after comparison in this report is StreetEasy-to-StreetEasy, same season, same bedroom mix. Cross-platform data appears only in scale and coverage claims.
• Same-unit analysis: we match listings to a canonical apartment (building + unit). For the 18,470 units with a listing before June 12, 2025 and another in 2026, we compare asking rents and the listing's fee status at each observation. Changes beyond ±60% are excluded as likely matching errors; tightening to ±40% moves the headline gap by 0.1 points.
• Velocity: share of listings with a recorded removal within N days, counting only listings old enough to be measured (no right-censoring), over identical Jun 1 – Jul 15 windows. One month of 2026 (April) contains a bulk data backfill with unreliable removal timestamps and is excluded from time-on-market figures, as is one bulk-import day (May 31, 2026).
• The 2024 baseline and "pulled without renting": for pre-law comparisons we pulled June–July 2024 with the same pipeline (28,629 listings). The strict withdrawal metric uses June 1–15 cohorts resolved within 45 days of listing, every year — an identical clock, so younger 2026 data can't distort it — and counts pulled with no confirmed close ÷ all resolved. A status category that only exists from February 2025 (temporarily off-market) is excluded entirely so the taxonomy change can't masquerade as a FARE effect. The monthly "how listings die" series and the whole-life measures (the 76%→49% confirmed-close rate, the ever-cut share) come from a companion set of monthly 1,000-listing samples spanning January 2024 – July 2026; 2026 cohorts too young to measure fairly are omitted from whole-life stats, and the confirmed-close comparison in particular should be read directionally — reporting lag and our own collection growth both sit inside that gap.
• The shadow-market numbers come from joining our 20-year listing archive (2.3M+ listings, ~805,000 distinct units) against the state's rent-stabilized building rolls (47,601 NYC buildings). "Never listed" means never in our data: address matching is imperfect and individual buildings can be false negatives, but the borough gradient is far too steep to be a matching artifact.
• Reproducibility: every number above is regenerable from the scripts shipped alongside this article in our codebase (scripts/analysis/fare-one-year-2026/) — the pull pipeline, each analysis step, and a README mapping every published figure to the code that produced it. Methodology available to researchers and journalists on request.
• Honest limits: these are asking rents, not signed leases; concessions (free months) are invisible here, so net-effective changes may differ. Fee status is as displayed on the listing. StreetEasy's published figures use their own larger dataset and models; where our numbers and theirs overlap, they agree within a fraction of a point.

FAQ

Did the FARE Act raise my rent? If you're renting a unit that never charged a fee: barely, if at all — those rose ~3.7% in a year, in line with the shortage-driven market. If your unit used to charge a tenant-paid fee: your asking rent likely rose ~3 points more than it otherwise would have. Either way, you avoided a fee that averaged almost $6,000.

Are broker fees really gone? Tenant-paid fees are gone unless you hire the broker. If a broker listed the apartment publicly, they represent the landlord and cannot charge you. Anyone demanding a fee to show you a listed unit — or a form saying you "hired" them just to tour it — is violating the law. Document it and file with DCWP; fines run up to $2,000 per violation.

Why do so few listings say "no-fee" now? Because the label is obsolete, not because fees returned. Since the law made no-fee the default, most listings stopped tagging it. Don't search by the no-fee filter — you'll miss most of the market. Check the required fee disclosure instead.

Did landlords really pull apartments off the market? Partially, yes. The share of listings withdrawn without a confirmed close rose from about 24% before the law to 31–32% after, and it has stayed there for a full year. Some of those units re-rent quietly off-platform. Keep perspective, though: roughly two-thirds of NYC rental units never appear on a listing site in the first place — the shadow market predates the FARE Act by decades.

Is it easier to find an apartment than before the law? No. That's the honest half of the story: affordability at signing improved dramatically, but inventory is down about 10.7% year over year and two in five listings still disappear within two weeks. Speed and preparation matter exactly as much as they did in 2025.

Will the law be overturned? The brokers' trade group has now lost at the district court and on appeal; the Second Circuit affirmed dismissal of its core constitutional claims on July 14, 2026. Nothing is impossible in litigation, but after a year in force and two court losses, the FARE Act is entrenched — and no serious political movement exists to repeal it.

When's the next report? We refresh our market data quarterly. Next up: the late-summer 2026 turnover report, historically NYC's most competitive season.

The fee is gone. The stopwatch isn't.

The FARE Act took a $6,000 problem off your signing day. It did nothing about the part where the apartment you want is gone by Friday. That second problem is what RentReboot is for: set your criteria once — budget, neighborhoods, bedrooms — and get an alert the moment a matching listing appears on any of the 20+ sources we track, including the half of the market that only ever appears on one site. Free tier, no credit card.

Set up your alerts →

Sources & methodology

• RentReboot listing dataset: 923,847 NYC rental listings, Jan 1, 2025 – Jul 29, 2026, all five boroughs.
• StreetEasy: One year after the FARE Act — rent attribution (1.1%), average avoided fee ($5,862), same-unit annualized comparison (6.4% vs 4.8%), May 2026 inventory (33,064, −10.7% YoY), DCWP complaint totals.
• The Real Deal: Appeals court rejects REBNY's FARE Act appeal (July 14, 2026).
• Crain's New York: Appeals court rejects REBNY's bid to pause FARE Act.
• DCWP: FARE Act guidance — enforcement channel for violations.
• Our previous coverage: FARE Act impact analysis (July 2025) · Six-month report (January 2026) · 20-site listing report (July 2026).