In one sentence a reporter can quote: In 2025, 22.1% of New York City’s rodent inspections found active rat activity — the lowest share in five years — and the raw number of failed inspections fell 21% from a 2024 high, though Brooklyn still fails more inspections than any other borough.
Most rat coverage counts complaints. This report counts what inspectors actually found. New York City’s Health Department (DOHMH) has logged 2.95 million rodent inspections, and each one carries a result — Passed, Bait applied, or Failed for Rat Activity. That inspection-outcome layer is what lets us measure not how often New Yorkers report rats, but how often the city confirms them.
Key Findings (2019–2026 data)
- Across all 2.95 million DOHMH rodent inspections on record, 500,131 found active rat activity (“Failed for Rat Activity,” alone or with another reason).
- The share of inspections that found active rats fell to 22.1% in 2025 — down from 25.7% in 2024 and its lowest in five years.
- In raw terms, rat-activity failures fell from 58,621 in 2024 — the highest annual total in at least seven years — to 46,468 in 2025 (−20.7%).
- Brooklyn leads every borough — 19,160 rat-activity failures in 2025, 41% of the citywide total — more than Manhattan and the Bronx. This is a different map than evictions or mold, both of which the Bronx leads.
- Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick are the epicenter: together they account for 11,135 rat-activity failures in 2025 — nearly a quarter of the entire city’s.
- Every borough improved year-over-year, but the trend is uneven at the neighborhood level: rat activity more than doubled in Turtle Bay, Manhattan (+133%) even as it fell by half in Chelsea (−53%).
- The single most rat-cited building is 3210 Perry Avenue in Kingsbridge Heights, the Bronx — 31 failed inspections in 2024–2025.
Rat-activity inspections by year — a 2024 high, then a sharp 2025 drop
| Year | Inspections | Found active rats | Fail rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2019 | 240,031 | 32,753 | 13.6% |
| 2020 | 69,681 | 13,393 | 19.2% |
| 2021 | 101,938 | 28,395 | 27.9% |
| 2022 | 232,987 | 57,905 | 24.9% |
| 2023 | 235,630 | 56,662 | 24.0% |
| 2024 | 227,685 | 58,621 | 25.7% |
| 2025 | 210,631 | 46,468 | 22.1% |
| 2026 (partial, through mid-year) | 95,314 | 18,113 | 19.0% |
The fail rate — the share of inspections that found active rats — is the honest metric, because it controls for how many inspections the city ran in a given year. It spiked to 27.9% in 2021, when the city ran far fewer inspections, then settled into the mid-20s before falling to 22.1% in 2025, its lowest in five years. In raw terms, 2024 was the high-water mark at 58,621 confirmed rat-activity failures, and 2025 dropped 20.7% from it. 2026 is running lower still through mid-year.
Rat activity by borough (2025)
| Borough | 2025 | 2024 | YoY |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brooklyn | 19,160 | 24,390 | −21.4% |
| Manhattan | 13,218 | 16,275 | −18.8% |
| Bronx | 10,789 | 13,673 | −21.1% |
| Queens | 3,138 | 4,053 | −22.6% |
| Staten Island | 163 | 230 | −29.1% |
Brooklyn is the city’s rat capital — 41% of all confirmed rat activity in 2025, well ahead of Manhattan and the Bronx. Every borough improved versus 2024, with Staten Island (which has by far the fewest) posting the largest percentage drop off a tiny base.
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width="700" height="500" style="border:0;max-width:100%"></iframe>Rat activity by neighborhood (2025)
Zooming in, the rat map is really a Brooklyn map: Bedford-Stuyvesant and Bushwick top every other neighborhood in the city, by a wide margin.
| Neighborhood | Borough | 2025 | 2024 | YoY |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bedford-Stuyvesant | Brooklyn | 6,056 | 8,046 | −24.7% |
| Bushwick | Brooklyn | 5,079 | 6,728 | −24.5% |
| Highbridge | Bronx | 2,799 | 3,768 | −25.7% |
| Harlem | Manhattan | 2,542 | 3,458 | −26.5% |
| Crown Heights | Brooklyn | 2,296 | 2,380 | −3.5% |
| Kingsbridge Heights | Bronx | 2,121 | 2,796 | −24.1% |
| East Harlem | Manhattan | 1,912 | 2,401 | −20.4% |
| Lower East Side | Manhattan | 1,901 | 2,275 | −16.4% |
| Belmont | Bronx | 1,727 | 1,698 | +1.7% |
| Fordham | Bronx | 1,701 | 2,579 | −34.0% |
Where rat activity rose — and fell — the fastest (2024 → 2025)
Citywide rat activity fell, so most neighborhoods dropped. But the neighborhood-level swings are dramatic (among neighborhoods with ≥200 rat-activity failures in 2024):
Rose the fastest
| Neighborhood | Borough | 2024 → 2025 | YoY |
|---|---|---|---|
| Turtle Bay | Manhattan | 273 → 636 | +133.0% |
| Flatbush | Brooklyn | 611 → 757 | +23.9% |
| Riverdale | Bronx | 404 → 451 | +11.6% |
| Upper East Side | Manhattan | 871 → 955 | +9.6% |
| Belmont | Bronx | 1,698 → 1,727 | +1.7% |
Fell the fastest
| Neighborhood | Borough | 2024 → 2025 | YoY |
|---|---|---|---|
| Chelsea | Manhattan | 818 → 381 | −53.4% |
| Mott Haven | Bronx | 465 → 256 | −44.9% |
| Greenpoint | Brooklyn | 1,590 → 1,009 | −36.5% |
| Park Slope | Brooklyn | 787 → 508 | −35.5% |
| Ridgewood | Queens | 1,335 → 863 | −35.4% |
Turtle Bay, Manhattan more than doubled its confirmed rat activity in a single year — the sharpest increase in the city — while Chelsea, a few blocks west, cut its own in half.
The buildings inspectors cite most for rats
Unlike complaint counts, these are buildings where a DOHMH inspector physically confirmed active rat activity. Ranked by failed inspections in 2024–2025:
| Building | Neighborhood | Rat-activity failures (2024–25) |
|---|---|---|
| 3210 Perry Avenue | Kingsbridge Heights (Bronx) | 31 |
| 25 Metropolitan Oval | Soundview (Bronx) | 30 |
| 345 Classon Avenue | Bedford-Stuyvesant (Bklyn) | 30 |
| 9 Avenue B | St. George (Staten Island) | 27 |
| 1410 Washington Avenue | Morrisania (Bronx) | 26 |
| 1720 Bedford Avenue | Prospect Heights (Bklyn) | 26 |
| 132 Avenue D | Lower East Side | 25 |
| 350 Grand Street | Lower East Side | 23 |
| 1785 3 Avenue | East Harlem | 23 |
| 2410 8 Avenue | Harlem | 23 |
You can look up the full rat-inspection history — every dated Passed / Failed result — for any NYC building at 311tracker.com.
Methodology
Rat activity is measured from NYC DOHMH rodent inspections (NYC Open Data p937-wjvj), keyed to each
building’s BBL. An inspection is counted as finding active rat activity when its result is
“Failed for Rat Activity” or “Failed for Rat Activity and Other Reason.” This is distinct from
outdoor 311 rat sightings and from HPD indoor pest complaints — it reflects what a city inspector
confirmed on site. The fail rate is rat-activity failures divided by total inspections that year.
Borough, neighborhood, and building breakdowns are computed directly from the rodent_inspections
table in 311tracker’s database. DOHMH publishes with roughly a 10-day lag, so 2026 is partial. Cite
as: “According to 311tracker.com, [stat].”
More from the NYC Housing Data Reports collection: the NYC Evictions Report and the NYC Mold Report.
311tracker.com is a free tool tracking 311 complaints, HPD violations, evictions, and rat-inspection history for all 834,400 NYC buildings. No signup required.