Falls inside buildings are the cases people most often assume are not worth a phone call. You tripped on a step. You slipped on a wet floor in a supermarket. You went down a dark staircase in your own building. It feels like something that just happened, rather than something anyone did.

Sometimes that is right. Often it is not. And in one situation — a building owned by the City, by the Housing Authority, by a public hospital or by the transit system — waiting to find out will end the case on its own, in ninety days, no matter how serious the injury was.

So that is where this page starts.

Who owns the building decides your deadline

Two people fall on identical stairs on the same block on the same afternoon. One building is a privately owned walk-up. The other is a NYCHA development. They do not have the same case, and they do not have anything close to the same amount of time.

A private building, a store, an office, a co-op

Three years from the date of the fall to start a lawsuit. No advance paperwork, no notice to anybody, no hearing you have to sit for first. If someone was killed, the wrongful death claim runs two years from the date of death rather than three years from the accident.

NYCHA, the City, a public hospital, a subway station, a public school

Ninety days to serve a formal notice of claim. Not three years. Ninety days from the date of the accident, in writing, served on the right entity. Then one year and ninety days from the accident to actually file suit — the same period whether the building belongs to the Housing Authority, the City, a public hospital, the transit system or a school district.

A death changes both halves of that. Where a fall was fatal, the case against a public entity runs two years from the date of death, and the ninety days for the notice of claim runs from the appointment of the estate’s representative rather than from the death itself. Families who assume they have already missed it usually have not.

Two details inside that trip people up constantly.

The right entity is not always the one you would guess. The Housing Authority is a separate public corporation from the City. Serving the City Comptroller does not serve NYCHA. The public hospital system is separate again. A fall in a subway station is ordinarily the Transit Authority, not the MTA generally. Serving the wrong one is not a technicality a court will fix for you.

There is a hearing before there is a lawsuit. Once the notice of claim is filed, the public entity has the right to examine you under oath, and to have a doctor examine you, before you are permitted to sue. This is called a 50-h hearing. Not showing up does not just delay things. It bars the lawsuit until you comply — while the clock keeps running underneath you. That combination is how public-entity cases quietly expire.

Courts can sometimes allow a late notice of claim, but it is permission, not a right, and it is asked for by motion. It is regularly refused — most often where the agency had no real knowledge of what happened and the condition was the kind that disappears, like water on a floor. And permission can never be granted after the deadline to sue has already passed.

If you are not certain who owns the building, that is a reason to call sooner, not later. It is a question that can be answered from public records in an afternoon, and where the answer is unclear, a notice of claim can be filed protectively. It costs nothing to have filed one you turn out not to have needed.

The real fight is whether they knew

New York does not make a building owner responsible for every injury that happens inside. To win, you generally have to show one of two things: the owner created the condition, or the owner knew about it — actually knew, or should have known because it had been there long enough that anyone doing their job would have found it and fixed it.

That second half is where most indoor cases are won or lost, and it carries a hard edge. Proof that the owner had a general awareness that a problem sometimes occurs is not enough. “That lobby floor always gets wet” and “that stairwell light is always out” do not, standing alone, prove anything about the puddle you slipped on or the bulb that was dark that night. The law wants notice of that condition, in that spot.

There is an important exception. Where a dangerous condition is genuinely recurrent — the same leak at the same landing every time it rains, the same overflow at the same entrance — an owner who knows about the pattern can be charged with notice of each recurrence. The difference between that and “general awareness” is specificity. “The building leaks” is not it. “The third floor landing floods whenever it rains and the super mops it, and here are the complaints” is.

Two things build that proof: written complaints, and the building’s own record. Prior 311 calls, letters to management, HPD violations at the address, repair records, the superintendent’s log, earlier incident reports. If you complained about the condition before you fell, say so early and tell us how — in writing, by text, to whom.

One rule in New York that favors you

Building owners and stores routinely move to have these cases thrown out before trial. When they do, in New York, the burden starts with them. To win that motion on the question of notice, the defendant has to come forward with evidence of when that specific area was last cleaned or inspected before you fell.

A manager’s affidavit saying “we sweep every hour” or “we have a policy of continuous inspection” does not do it. The courts here have said so repeatedly, including this year. Describing a general practice, with nothing about the actual inspection of the actual place, is not enough to get the case dismissed.

That matters more than it sounds. A great many stores cannot produce a person who can say when aisle six was last walked. It is one of the reasons a case that looks thin at intake is worth investigating rather than declining.

Stairs

Stairway falls are different from other indoor falls, because a staircase is a built thing that has to meet written standards. You are not limited to arguing that it was dangerous. You can often show it was wrong.

Steps that are not the same height

This is the most common defect and the most under-reported. Going down a flight of stairs, your body sets a rhythm after the first two steps and stops watching. A single step that is a half inch taller or shorter than the rest is enough to put a foot where the stair is not.

The building code requires steps in a flight to be uniform, and sets a tight tolerance on the variation allowed between the largest and smallest step in the flight — measured across the whole flight, not just between neighbors. Older buildings are held to the code in force when they were built or last altered, which is why the first thing worth doing is pulling the building’s own file: the certificate of occupancy, the alteration applications, and any violations on record for that stair.

Handrails

Missing on one side, missing entirely, ending before the bottom step, loose in the wall, or too thick to actually close a hand around. The requirements depend on the width of the stair and on the vintage of the building — an older building is sometimes allowed a rail lower than today’s code would permit, which cuts against the claim, and sometimes a rail that has been altered has to meet the current standard anyway, which cuts for it. This is not worth guessing at from a photograph, and it is worth having looked at properly.

Lighting

In an apartment building, this one is written down in two places. State law requires the owner of a multiple dwelling to light every public hall and stair, and to keep interior stairs without windows lit around the clock. The City’s housing code adds an actual number: at least one foot-candle of light, measured at floor level, in public halls and stairs, day and night.

Because there is a number, it can be measured — and it needs to be. A case built on “it was dark” and nothing more has been thrown out. A reading taken at the spot, with a meter, under comparable conditions, is a different thing entirely. That is also why the lighting should be checked and photographed before the landlord changes the bulb.

A step you could not see

A single step where you do not expect one, painted the same color as the floor around it, with no strip on the edge and nothing to mark the change in level, is a recognized hazard even when there is nothing broken about it. What makes or breaks this argument is your own account: what you could and could not see as you approached, described at the time, not reconstructed later. Say it plainly and say it early.

“It was only a small defect”

You will hear this from the other side, and you should know that New York’s highest court has rejected the idea that there is any minimum size a defect has to reach before it counts. A chip or a lip is not automatically too small to sue over. What matters is where it is and what surrounds it — and a chip on the front edge of a stair tread, exactly where a descending foot lands, is not the same as the same chip in the middle of an open floor. Of the three cases the court decided together when it said this, two involved interior staircases, and both of those injured people were allowed to proceed.

The practical consequence: measure it and photograph it with something in the frame for scale, now, before it is repaired.

Wet floors in stores

These are harder than people expect, and the single question that decides most of them is one nobody asks at the scene: where did the water come from?

If it rained or snowed that day and the water was tracked in on people’s shoes, the store is in a strong position. New York does not require a business to carpet its floors in mats or to mop continuously through a storm, and a general awareness that floors get wet when it rains does not amount to notice of the puddle you slipped in. A store facing that claim will produce certified weather records for the hour of your fall, and often that is the end of it.

But that protection is about weather, and only weather. It does not cover water from a leaking ceiling or a roof the owner never fixed. It does not cover a refrigerated case that drips, or condensation from an air conditioning unit. It does not cover a spill nobody cleaned up. It does not cover a floor an employee just mopped and left wet and unmarked — that is not a condition the store failed to notice, it is one the store made. And it does not cover water still sitting there long after the weather cleared.

Mats sit on the line. A store has no obligation to put one down. But once it does, the mat is the store’s own doing, and a mat that is soaked through, bunched, curled at the edge or sliding on the floor is judged the same way as any other condition — did they cause it, and did they know.

For an ordinary spill, there is no fixed number of minutes that makes a store responsible. What helps is anything showing the spill had been there a while: dirt in it, footprints or cart tracks through it, dried edges, a change in color. Those details vanish within minutes of the fall, which is why a few photographs taken on the floor, before anyone cleans up, are worth more than anything that happens in the following year.

The video is the case, and it is being erased right now

Almost every store, lobby and building entrance is recorded. Almost every one of those systems overwrites itself, commonly somewhere between two weeks and a month.

A written demand to preserve the footage, sent immediately and covering a wide enough window of time, is the most valuable thing that can be done in the first week of an indoor fall case — often more valuable than anything medical. If a business destroys footage after it was on notice to keep it, a court can penalize it, and New York courts have done exactly that in slip-and-fall cases. But the realistic remedy is an instruction to the jury that the missing video would have hurt the defendant, not an automatic win. It is far better to have the video.

If you did nothing else after a fall in a store or a lobby, ask for the footage in writing, and keep a copy of the request.

Who you are actually suing

Rarely one party. A fall inside a building can involve the owner, a net lessee, the commercial tenant that occupies the space, a managing agent, and the cleaning or maintenance contractor — and the contractor is the one most often overlooked, even though it is frequently the party that either created the condition or was supposed to be inspecting for it.

A landlord who has handed over possession to a tenant is not automatically on the hook. It generally takes either a lease obligation to repair, or a reserved right to re-enter and inspect combined with a significant structural defect that violates a specific written safety requirement. Which is a large part of why the code section matters: “the stairs were dangerous” does not revive a claim against an out-of-possession landlord, and “the risers were not uniform” or “the public hall was unlit” can.

For an apartment building, there are two more layers. State law requires every multiple dwelling to be kept in good repair. The City’s housing maintenance code requires the same. A violation of the City’s code is evidence of negligence rather than automatic liability — but an open HPD violation for the very condition that hurt you is close to unanswerable on the question of whether they knew.

Being partly at fault does not end an indoor case

People tell us, almost apologetically, that they were carrying groceries, or looking at a phone, or that they had used those stairs a hundred times and should have known. None of that ends the claim.

New York uses pure comparative fault for premises cases. If a jury finds you thirty percent responsible, your award is reduced by thirty percent and you collect the rest. Even someone found mostly at fault recovers something.

This is worth saying clearly right now, because it recently stopped being true of car accidents. Under a change that took effect in May 2026, an injured person in a motor vehicle case who is more at fault than the other driver recovers nothing at all. That change does not apply to falls inside buildings. A premises case is still governed by the old rule, and being partly responsible reduces the claim rather than destroying it.

How these cases get lost

  • The building turned out to be NYCHA and nobody filed the notice of claim inside ninety days.
  • Nobody sent a letter to preserve the video, and it overwrote.
  • The condition was repaired and there is no photograph of it as it was.
  • The injured person gave a recorded statement to an adjuster in the first week and described the fall in a way that was never quite corrected afterward.
  • Nobody reported it to the store or the super, so there is no record the fall happened where and when it did.
  • A gap in medical treatment made the injury look minor, or made it look unrelated.
  • The claim was pleaded as “dangerous stairs” with no code provision behind it.

Most of that list is decided in the first two weeks, by people who have not yet spoken to a lawyer and do not know any of it matters.

Frequently asked questions

I fell in a NYCHA building two months ago. Is it too late?

No, but you are inside the window and it closes at ninety days from the date of the fall. That is the deadline to serve the notice of claim, which has to happen before any lawsuit exists. Call now rather than next week. If the ninety days has already passed, there is a motion that can be made asking a court’s permission to file late, and it is worth asking about immediately, because that option itself expires.

My child was hurt on the stairs in our NYCHA building. Don’t we have until she is eighteen?

This is the most damaging misunderstanding in this area of law, and it costs families real cases. A child’s own deadline to sue is extended because of her age. The ninety-day notice of claim is not. What being a child buys you is a longer period in which to ask a court’s permission to file the notice late — permission that is discretionary, and that gets refused. Treat the ninety days as the deadline exactly as you would for an adult. One more thing worth knowing: a parent’s own claim for the child’s medical bills is not extended by the child’s age at all.

I slipped in a supermarket and there was no wet floor sign. Isn’t that automatically their fault?

Not automatically. The absence of a sign helps, but it does not replace the central question, which is whether the store caused the water or knew about it long enough to have dealt with it. The exception is where the store itself put the water there — if an employee mopped and walked away, the missing sign is not a detail, it is the case.

It was raining that day. Does that ruin it?

It makes a tracked-in-water claim difficult, and you should hear that honestly. It does not end the case if the water came from somewhere other than the weather — a leak, a cooler, an air conditioner, a mop — or if it had been sitting there long after the rain stopped. Where the water came from is the question, and it is answerable.

I never reported it. I got up, said I was fine, and went home.

Very common, and not fatal. It does make proof harder, so what exists becomes important: the time-stamped photographs on your phone, who you called afterward, who saw it, the receipt showing you were in the store, and how soon you sought treatment. Report it now, in writing, even late, and be accurate about the date.

I fell at work, inside the building. Which kind of case is this?

Possibly both. If you were working, you have a workers’ compensation claim against your employer regardless of who was careless. If the building was owned or maintained by somebody other than your employer, you may also have a separate claim against that owner. Those two run at the same time and do not cancel each other out, but the compensation carrier will have a lien on the second one, and the two need to be handled together from the start.

The landlord fixed the step the week after I fell. Does that help or hurt?

Mostly it hurts, which is the frustrating part — the evidence of what the condition looked like is gone. New York generally does not let a repair be used as an admission that the condition was defective before — though it can be used for a narrower purpose, such as showing that the party who made the repair was the one in control of that area, which is sometimes the fight. Mostly, though, this is why photographs taken in the first day or two are worth so much, and why it is worth telling us if anyone else photographed it, including the building or the police.

Talk to us

If you fell inside a building in Staten Island or Brooklyn, the two things worth doing this week are finding out who owns the building and getting a letter out to preserve the video. Both are quick. Both stop being possible after a while.

Call 718.701.2776 (toll-free: 800.310.5520) or contact us. Consultations are free. If we don’t recover money for you, we don’t get paid.

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