News · September 20, 2026
No-fee apartments in NYC: what the FARE Act actually changed
The broker fee that used to cost New York renters four to eight thousand dollars up front is, for most apartments, gone. Here is what the law changed, what it left alone, and how to tell a real no-fee listing from a repackaged one.
What the FARE Act says
The Fairness in Apartment Rental Expenses Act took effect in New York City on 11 June 2025. It is one sentence of policy with a very large price tag attached: the party who hires a broker pays that broker. A landlord who engages an agent to list, photograph and show an apartment can no longer pass that agent's fee to the tenant who rents it.
Before the Act, a tenant fee of 12 to 15 percent of the annual rent was routine. On a $3,500 apartment that is roughly $5,000, payable at signing, on top of first month and a security deposit. StreetEasy's own analysis after the first six months put the average saving at lease signing at about $5,450.
What it did not change
Three things survived the Act, and each one still produces a bill.
A broker you hire, you pay. If you engage an agent to search on your behalf, that is your contract and your fee. This is legal and unchanged. What is no longer legal is being handed a fee for an agent you never hired, at the end of a viewing you found yourself.
Application and background-check fees. Capped at $20 by separate law, and still charged.
Rent. This is the part worth being clear-eyed about. Landlords who previously recovered agent costs from tenants now carry them, and some of that has moved into the asking rent. StreetEasy data from late 2025 associated the FARE Act with roughly a 1.1 percent increase in asking rents on broker-represented units — about $38 a month on a typical brokered listing. Against a $5,000 fee avoided, that is still a very large net win for a tenant on a one-year lease, but it is not nothing, and anyone telling you the Act was free is selling something.
Why “no fee” stopped being a useful filter
For twenty years “no fee” was the single most valuable word in a New York listing, because it distinguished perhaps a fifth of the market. Now it describes the default. StreetEasy removed its no-fee filter from rental listings for exactly this reason: a filter that matches almost everything filters nothing.
What that means practically is that the phrase has drifted back toward marketing. You will still see “NO FEE!!” at the top of posts, and it now tells you very little about whether the total cost of moving in is low. The numbers that still vary, and still matter, are the security deposit, whether the first month is prorated, and whether the landlord wants a guarantor or an extra month up front.
Where the genuinely fee-free listings are
There is a category the Act did not need to touch, because no broker was ever involved: an apartment advertised by the person who lives in it or owns it. A roommate filling a room, a tenant transferring a lease, a small owner-landlord with four units in Astoria — none of them hired an agent, so there was never a fee to ban.
This inventory has always existed and has always been hard to see, because nobody pays to advertise it. It is posted where it is free to post: Facebook rental and roommate groups, mostly, and it moves within hours. How those groups work is worth understanding separately, as is what renting off-market costs you in return.
What to do with this
If you are searching now: stop treating a fee as the thing to avoid, because on most brokered listings it is already gone, and start treating response time as the thing to optimise. The Act made the brokered market cheaper to enter, which means more people can afford to move, which means good apartments clear faster than they did in 2024. The constraint moved from your deposit to your inbox.
If you are being asked for a fee: ask, in writing, who engaged the agent. If the answer is the landlord, the fee is not yours to pay, and the disclosure obligations the Act imposes mean that answer should already have been in the listing.
What the Act obliges a landlord to tell you
The FARE Act is not only a ban on a charge; it is a disclosure rule. A listing has to disclose every fee a tenant will actually be asked to pay, and those fees have to appear in the lease. That is a meaningful change, because the old failure mode was not usually an illegal fee — it was a fee nobody mentioned until the day of signing, when you had already given notice on your current apartment.
So if a cost appears at signing that was in neither the listing nor the lease, that is not a negotiation you are losing. It is a disclosure that did not happen, and saying so plainly is usually enough.
The move-in arithmetic now
With the broker fee gone from most transactions, the upfront cost of a $3,000 apartment is typically first month plus a one-month security deposit — $6,000 — rather than the $10,500 it would have been with a 15 percent fee attached. Security deposits on residential leases are capped at one month's rent by the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, which is worth knowing because requests for two are still made.
Where the cost has not moved is the income test. Most landlords still want annual income of 40 times the monthly rent, or a guarantor at 80 times. That threshold, not the fee, is now the thing that excludes people from the brokered market — and it is a large part of why the room and share market matters, since rooms are rarely underwritten that way at all.
What happened to the brokers
Worth understanding, because it changes who you deal with. Landlords who now pay the fee themselves have, in many cases, stopped hiring brokers for units that are easy to rent. A management company with a full-time leasing office does not need one. So on the cheaper and more central listings you are increasingly dealing directly with a landlord or a leasing agent employed by them.
Agents remain common on harder-to-let units and on smaller landlords' buildings. If there is an agent, the sensible first question is still the same: who hired you?
We watch NYC Facebook rental groups and text you the rooms and apartments in your range. within 30 minutes of the post going up, not the next morning. Your first 10 are free.