What the NYC bedbug disclosure actually requires, the one-year history rule, and how to keep the disclosure in your lease file.
The NYC bedbug disclosure is one of the simplest required notices to get right and one of the easiest to forget. It is also one of the first things a tenant-side attorney looks for when a tenancy ends in dispute. A missing disclosure does not invalidate the lease, but it weakens your file, and in NYC Housing Court, weak files lose time.
What the law requires
Under New York City law, landlords of most residential rental units must provide a written bedbug infestation history disclosure to every new tenant before they sign a lease, and annually thereafter for the duration of the tenancy. The required form is published by HPD and titled Notice to Tenant Disclosure of Bedbug Infestation History (NYC-RA-LR1).
The disclosure covers a defined lookback window — generally the prior year — and asks the landlord to state whether the unit or the building had a bedbug infestation during that period, and if so, whether eradication measures were taken and whether the infestation was eliminated.
The form is short. The standard for completing it correctly is high. "I don't know" is not a valid response. The landlord is expected to know the infestation history of their own property, and a vague or unsigned form is treated as a missing disclosure.
Who has to provide it
The disclosure applies to nearly all residential rental units in NYC, with limited exceptions. Owner-occupied two-family homes are not always covered, and certain hotel-type units are treated differently, but the safe assumption for an independent landlord with a typical small multifamily or condo rental unit is that the disclosure is required.
If you manage multiple units, the disclosure is unit-specific. A clean history on one apartment does not satisfy the requirement on another. Each lease needs its own disclosure tied to that specific unit, and each annual notice needs to be delivered for each unit individually.
What to disclose
The form requires you to report the bedbug history for both the specific unit and the building as a whole. Three categories matter:
The first is whether an infestation occurred in the unit during the lookback period. The second is whether an infestation occurred elsewhere in the building. The third is whether eradication was attempted and whether the infestation was successfully eliminated.
Reporting an infestation is not, by itself, a legal problem. Failing to report one is. The disclosure is about transparency, not perfection. A unit with a treated and resolved infestation is not less rentable for compliance purposes than a unit with no history. A unit with an unreported infestation is a much bigger problem.
When and how to deliver it
The disclosure must be provided to the tenant before they sign the lease — not at signing, not after. The cleanest workflow is to include the disclosure in the same package as the lease and any other required notices, with a clear acknowledgment from the tenant that they received it before executing.
After signing, the landlord must provide the disclosure annually. Annual delivery is the part most landlords skip. The lease year ends, the next year begins, and the disclosure is never sent. By the time the unit turns over, three or four annual disclosures are missing from the file.
The annual disclosure does not require a new lease or any other event. It is a freestanding obligation tied to the calendar of the tenancy.
What goes wrong in practice
The most common failure is treating the disclosure as a one-time form. The lease gets signed, the disclosure goes into a folder, and nobody touches it again until the tenancy ends.
The second common failure is using a generic or homemade version of the form instead of the official HPD disclosure. Even when the content is similar, courts and tenants expect to see the standard form. A non-standard document creates an avoidable argument.
The third failure is poor proof of delivery. The disclosure was signed, but the signed copy was lost, scanned poorly, or stored separately from the lease. When the tenant later denies receiving it, the landlord cannot produce clean evidence.
How this connects to housing court
A bedbug claim rarely starts as a bedbug case. It usually surfaces inside a non-payment or holdover proceeding as a tenant defense. The tenant argues that the unit was uninhabitable, that the landlord failed to disclose a known infestation, or that the annual notice obligation was ignored. Even if the underlying claim is weak, a missing disclosure makes the defense credible enough to delay the case.
For a small landlord, that delay is expensive. Housing court delays compound. A month of delay is a month of unpaid rent, plus continued operating costs, plus legal time. The disclosure is a one-page document. Skipping it does not save time. It transfers risk into a future case you do not yet know about.
The right way to handle it
Build the disclosure into the lease package itself, not as a separate task. Use the official HPD form. Capture the tenant's signature on the disclosure with the same proof standards as the lease — timestamp, IP address, and a sealed copy bound to the lease file.
Set a calendar reminder for the annual disclosure, and deliver it through a method that produces proof of delivery. Email with read-receipt is acceptable. Certified mail is stronger. A signed acknowledgment is best.
Keep every executed disclosure with the corresponding lease. Do not store them in a separate inbox or a generic compliance folder. When the file is needed, it should be retrievable as one package: lease, disclosures, riders, signed acknowledgments, and the audit trail of how each piece was delivered.
A platform that handles NYC leasing should generate the bedbug disclosure automatically, prompt for the annual delivery, and preserve the full record alongside the lease. If yours does not, the obligation is yours to manage manually — and the consequence of missing it is yours to absorb.