NYC Open Data
NYC Open Data is the official open data portal of the New York City government. It publishes free public data from city agencies and their partners. The program rests on the city's Open Data Law, which took effect on 7 March 2012 and made city government "open by default". In 2026 the city said the portal had more than one million visitors a year and held more than six billion rows of data.
The portal is run by the Open Data team, which manages the platform and the data pipelines behind it. It is part of the New York City Office of Technology and Innovation (OTI).
Legal basis
Local Law 11 of 2012
The Open Data Law, Local Law 11 of 2012, is codified in Title 23, Chapter 5 of the New York City Administrative Code. Its main requirements are:
- public data sets must be available through a single web portal linked to nyc.gov;
- data must follow published technical standards and be in a machine-readable format, with the public notified of updates;
- data sets must be updated as often as needed to stay accurate and useful;
- data must be available without registration, licensing, or limits on use, although third parties may be asked to name the source and version of the data and describe any changes they made; and
- the city had to prepare a compliance plan setting priorities for publishing agency data sets on the portal by 31 December 2018.
The law defines "data" as final statistical or factual information in non-narrative form that agencies regularly create or keep. It excludes images such as drawings, maps, photos, and scanned documents, but includes geographic information system data. The city gives no warranty about the completeness or accuracy of published data sets.
Later amendments
In December 2017 the city adopted Local Laws 244 and 251 of 2017, which made the Open Data Law permanent and added new annual reporting rules. Under Local Law 251, the yearly Open Data Plan must list, for each data set, its scheduled and actual publication dates, last update, URL, whether it meets data retention and geocoding standards, whether it has a data dictionary, and whether its updates are automated or could be. By 2018, the city tracked more than 2,000 data sets on the portal through an inventory updated every day.
Data
311 service requests
The most-viewed data set on the portal is the record of 311 service requests. It lists each request's complaint type, responding agency, and location, without personal details about the person who made it, and it is updated daily. By December 2025 the data set had passed 40 million rows, so it was split into one set covering 2020 to the present and another covering 2010 to 2019. In October 2026 the current set showed about 1.33 million views and 609,000 downloads.
The New York State Comptroller's office built an NYC311 Monitoring Tool on this data set, giving neighborhood-level views of monthly requests by complaint type. It found that illegal parking was by far the most common non-emergency issue reported as of 2024.
Other popular data sets
According to the city's 2021 Open Data Report, the most viewed, downloaded, or API-queried data sets in fiscal year 2021 included 311 service requests, active for-hire vehicles and drivers from the Taxi and Limousine Commission, NYPD motor vehicle collision data, the active civil service list, LinkNYC locations, Department of Buildings job filings, restaurant inspection results, and citywide payroll data. In the 2023 report, the data sets with the most community-made assets were Motor Vehicle Collisions – Crashes (390) and 311 Service Requests (318).
Recent additions
The 2024 Open Data Report highlighted new data sets on algorithmic tools used by the city (required by Local Law 35), capital projects with a tracking dashboard, the Environmental Justice NYC Flood Vulnerability map, the Department of Transportation's Citywide Mobility Survey, the Vital Parks Explorer, and public restrooms. The same year, the team merged 524 separate data sets into 34 to make information easier to find.
Reporting
The city publishes yearly Open Data progress reports and plans. Since 2022 these have been titled Progress Report and Plan, and the annual agency compliance plan comes out on 15 September each year. Each agency names an Open Data Coordinator, who is responsible for identifying data sets and getting them published on the portal.
Community engagement
Open Data Week
Open Data Week is a yearly festival organized by the NYC Office of Data Analytics within OTI, together with BetaNYC and Data Through Design. Its tenth edition in 2026 followed record attendance in 2025 and included a documentary film festival, an art exhibition lasting several weeks, a two-day data conference, and daily classes on using the portal.
Classes and resources
The portal offers free monthly online classes, how-to guides, and a Project Gallery of work built with city data.
See also
- Open data
- Open government
- Data.gov
- 3-1-1
- BetaNYC
- New York City Office of Technology and Innovation