NYC Sidewalk, Snow and Ice Slip and Fall Claims

The first question in a New York fall case is not whether you fell or how badly you were hurt. It is who was legally responsible for that particular patch of ground.

On a New York City sidewalk, the answer is not what most people assume. It is usually not the City.

On a city sidewalk, the building next to it is usually responsible

Administrative Code § 7-210 puts a duty on the owner of property abutting a sidewalk — including the corner quadrant if it is a corner property — to maintain that sidewalk in a reasonably safe condition. An owner who fails to do so is liable for injuries proximately caused by the failure.

Critically, the statute spells out that failing to maintain the sidewalk includes the negligent failure to remove snow, ice, dirt or other material, as well as the negligent failure to repair or replace defective sidewalk flags. Winter conditions and broken concrete are treated the same way.

Two things follow that owners often get wrong.

The duty cannot be handed off. An owner can pay someone else to do the shoveling and the repairs, but cannot transfer the liability. A commercial lease that makes the tenant responsible for snow removal does not get the owner out of a claim; it only gives the owner someone to chase afterwards.

Being an absentee owner is not a defense. The section applies to every owner of property abutting a sidewalk and draws no distinction for owners out of possession.

The house exception, which matters enormously on Staten Island

Section 7-210 does not apply to one-, two- or three-family residential property that is (i) in whole or in part, owner occupied, and (ii) used exclusively for residential purposes.

Both halves of that matter, and the wording is precise in ways that decide cases.

“In whole or in part, owner occupied” means the owner only has to live in some of it. A two-family where the owner lives downstairs and rents the top floor still qualifies.
“Used exclusively for residential purposes” is strict. A ground-floor store, an office, a commercial tenant of any kind defeats the exception even in a building that is otherwise a qualifying two- or three-family house.

Given how much of this borough is exactly that kind of house, the exception comes up constantly here, and it changes who you are dealing with entirely.

Where the exception applies, the statute’s grant of immunity to the City is written so that it does not cover those sidewalks. The City’s pre-existing responsibility for them was never taken away. And § 7-210 expressly preserves every rule governing how an action against the City has to be brought, including the requirement of prior written notice of a defect — which is the subject of its own section below, and which carries a 90-day clock.

So the practical effect of falling in front of a small owner-occupied house is not that nobody is responsible. It is that you may be looking at a claim against the City, on a much shorter deadline, while standing in front of a private home.

The exempt homeowner is still not immune

An owner who falls within the exception has no statutory duty to clear the public sidewalk, and at common law is under no duty to remove snow and ice that accumulates naturally.

But an owner who does shovel, or has someone do it, and in the process makes the natural condition more hazardous can be liable for that. A path cleared badly so that meltwater refreezes into a ridge is not a natural accumulation any more. In practice these cases are usually brought against the homeowner and the City together, pleading in the alternative.

Tree wells are not sidewalk

One more wrinkle worth knowing, because tree pits are everywhere. The Court of Appeals has held that a tree well is not part of the “sidewalk” for § 7-210 purposes. A fall caused by a tree well therefore does not land on the abutting owner under that section, and points back at the City — again with the prior written notice requirement attached.

Snow and ice: the four-hour rule

Administrative Code § 16-123 gives owners, lessees, tenants and occupants four hours after the snow stops falling to clear the sidewalk and gutter.

The part almost everyone misses is that the overnight hours do not count. The time between 9:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. is excluded from the four hours. Two examples:

Snow stops at 10:00 p.m. No time accrues overnight. The four hours start running at 7:00 a.m., so the deadline is 11:00 a.m.
Snow stops at 8:00 p.m. One hour runs before 9:00 p.m. Three hours remain from 7:00 a.m., so the deadline is 10:00 a.m.

There is also an accommodation for very large frontages: in Queens and Staten Island, someone responsible for 500 linear feet or more complies by beginning within the four hours and finishing within a reasonable time.

Now the precise part, because it is widely stated wrongly. Section 16-123 does not by itself give you a claim. Its enforcement provisions are fines payable to the City. Nothing in it creates a private right of action for an injured pedestrian. The civil claim comes from § 7-210, which makes negligent failure to remove snow and ice a failure to maintain the sidewalk. The four-hour rule supplies the standard of timeliness; § 7-210 supplies the cause of action.

That distinction is not academic. It is exactly why the owner-occupied house exception matters so much: those owners still owe the shoveling duty under § 16-123 and can be fined for ignoring it, while being outside the section that creates civil liability.

Storm in progress

This is the defense’s most reliable winter argument, and it is a real rule rather than a bluff. A property owner is not liable for an icy condition arising during an ongoing storm, or for a reasonable time after it ends. Responsibility attaches at the earliest only after a reasonable period to take protective measures, and never while the storm is still going. Nobody is required to shovel into falling snow.

Two things the doctrine does not do:

It does not cover old ice. If you fell on a ridge left from a storm the week before that the new snow merely covered, the current storm does not immunize anyone for it.
It does not protect a defendant whose own clearing created or worsened the hazard.

These cases turn on certified weather records, which is one reason the exact time of your fall is worth writing down while you still remember it.

Notice: the issue that decides most of these cases

Outside the snow context, a fall case usually comes down to notice. A property owner is liable for a dangerous condition it created, or one it knew about, or one it should have known about.

That last one is constructive notice, and the standard is settled: the defect has to have been visible and apparent, and it has to have existed for long enough before the accident to permit the defendant to discover and remedy it.

Which is why the age of a defect matters as much as its size. A slab that has been cracked and lifted for two winters is a different case from a spill that happened four minutes earlier.

Against the City, you need prior written notice

Claims against the City over a street or sidewalk defect face a much harder requirement, often called the pothole law. Under Administrative Code § 7-201(c), no action can be maintained unless one of the following was true before your accident:

Written notice of the condition was actually given to the Commissioner of Transportation or an authorized recipient; or
There was a previous injury from the same condition and written notice of that was given to a city agency; or
There was written acknowledgement from the City of the condition;

— and in each case the City then failed to fix it within fifteen days. Proving that is the plaintiff’s burden, not the City’s.

There are two recognized ways around the requirement. The first is where the City itself created the hazard through an affirmative act of negligence. The second is special use, where the City derives a special benefit from the location.

Do not read the first one too generously — and this is where hopeful cases die. The affirmative negligence exception is limited to City work that immediately results in a dangerous condition. A City patch that sinks, erodes or cracks over the following two years does not qualify, because the danger developed gradually rather than existing the moment the work was finished.

The Big Apple maps

There is one more route to prior written notice that is unique to this city. For years, maps produced by the Big Apple Pothole and Sidewalk Protection Committee and filed with the Department of Transportation have been accepted by the courts as prior written notice of the defects marked on them, using coded symbols for different conditions.

Two features of how the maps work are worth knowing. The notice the City is charged with is the most recent map filed before your accident — a defect marked on an older map but dropped from the latest one does not give notice. And courts read the maps strictly, so a mismatch between the symbol on the map and the defect you actually fell on can sink the argument.

Whether a map covers your location and your date is something that has to be checked case by case rather than assumed.

Stores and supermarkets

Inside a store the question is the same — did they create it, know about it, or should they have known — but the conditions are usually transitory, and that cuts against you. A spill that may have happened moments before you walked through it will not support constructive notice.

The Court of Appeals has also held that a general awareness that a dangerous condition may be present is not legally sufficient. “The floor gets wet when it rains” does not establish notice of the puddle you slipped in.

The answer to that is the recurring condition. Where a defendant has actual knowledge of a specific, identifiable hazard that keeps coming back at a particular spot — a leaking freezer case, a chronically dripping ceiling, water tracked in at one particular entrance in wet weather — that knowledge can constitute constructive notice of each recurrence.

The difference is specificity and repetition. Vague housekeeping awareness is not enough; a known problem at a known location is.

Parking lots and private property

Parking lots produce a lot of falls and a lot of arguments about who was responsible for upkeep. The ordinary premises rules apply: potholes, broken curbs, wheel stops in walking paths, missing or burnt-out lighting, and ice in the spots where runoff collects and refreezes.

The question that usually has to be answered first is whether the property owner, a commercial tenant, a management company or a contracted maintenance company had responsibility for the area. Unlike the sidewalk rule, there is no statute here putting it on the owner regardless — so the lease and the service contracts genuinely matter, and they are things we obtain rather than things you need to know.

“It was only half an inch”

Expect the defense to argue that the defect was too small to be actionable. Expect them to produce a photograph with a tape measure in it.

There is no minimum height rule in New York. The Court of Appeals has held that there is no minimal dimension test and no rule that a defect must reach some depth to be actionable, and that granting summary judgment based exclusively on the dimensions of a defect is unacceptable. A court has to consider all the facts and circumstances.

A small height difference is actionable where its own characteristics or the surrounding circumstances magnify the danger it poses. The things that do that magnifying:

A jagged or broken edge rather than a clean lip.
Other defects nearby, so the whole area is uneven.
Poor lighting, or a defect that is genuinely hard to see.
Location — an entrance, a crossing, a busy stretch where people are naturally looking at something other than their feet.

Which is why photographs of the defect in context, taken soon after and from more than one angle, are worth more than almost anything else you can do yourself.

Being partly at fault does not end a fall case

You will hear that you should have been looking where you were going. It is the standard argument, and in New York it reduces a recovery rather than barring one.

Premises cases remain governed by pure comparative fault under CPLR 1411(a). Your percentage of the blame comes off the award and nothing more, even if most of the fault was yours.

Worth being clear about this, because it changed elsewhere. A stricter rule now applies to motor vehicle cases, where a claimant more at fault than the defendant can recover nothing. That change does not reach premises cases. Our page on comparative negligence in New York covers both rules, and the serious injury threshold that governs car accident claims has nothing to do with a fall either.

The deadline problem

Against a private owner you generally have three years from the fall to sue.

Against the City of New York, you must serve a notice of claim within 90 days, at least thirty days have to elapse before suit, and the action has to be commenced within one year and ninety days. Other public entities and authorities — the Housing Authority, transit agencies, school construction — each operate under their own statutes with their own requirements, so the owner has to be identified quickly rather than eventually.

Put that together with the sidewalk rules above and you get the trap this page exists to warn about: a fall in front of an ordinary small house can be a claim against the City on a 90-day clock. Nothing about the scene tells you that.

What to do now

Photograph the defect or the ice, from a few angles, with something in frame for scale, and take a wider shot showing the building and the address.
Note the exact address and, if you can tell, whether the building looks like a small owner-occupied house or has a commercial tenant at street level.
Write down the time of day. In a snow or ice case it decides the storm-in-progress argument.
Report it to the store, the building or the manager, and get the name of whoever you told.
Get seen by a doctor, and say that you fell and how. Records made at the time are worth far more than a description given months later.

Frequently asked questions

Who is responsible for a broken city sidewalk?

Usually the owner of the property next to it. Administrative Code § 7-210 places the duty to maintain the sidewalk on the abutting property owner, and makes that owner liable for injuries caused by failing to do so. The exception is small owner-occupied homes, described below.

I fell in front of a private house. Does that mean nobody is liable?

No. One-, two- and three-family homes that are owner occupied and used exclusively for residential purposes are outside § 7-210, but the City’s immunity is written so that it does not cover those sidewalks. That can make it a claim against the City, which carries a 90-day notice of claim deadline. The homeowner can also still be liable if their own snow clearing made the condition worse.

How long does a property owner have to shovel?

Four hours after the snow stops falling, not counting the time between 9:00 p.m. and 7:00 a.m. So if snow stops at 10:00 p.m., the deadline is 11:00 a.m. the next morning. That rule sets the timing standard; the civil claim itself comes from § 7-210.

I fell while it was still snowing. Do I have a case?

Probably not for ice from that storm. A property owner is not liable for a condition arising during an ongoing storm or for a reasonable time afterward. But if you fell on older ice that the new snow had covered, or on a hazard created by a bad clearing job, the doctrine does not protect the owner.

The defect was small. Is it too minor to sue over?

There is no minimum height in New York, and a defendant cannot win on measurements alone. A small defect is actionable where its characteristics or the surrounding circumstances magnify the danger — a jagged edge, other defects nearby, bad lighting, or a location where pedestrians are naturally distracted.

The store said they had no idea the floor was wet. Does that end it?

Not necessarily. They are liable for a condition they created, knew about, or should have known about. A general awareness that floors get wet is not enough on its own, but actual knowledge of a specific hazard that recurs at that spot can amount to notice of each recurrence.

How long do I have to bring a claim?

Generally three years against a private owner. Against the City of New York it is far shorter: a notice of claim within 90 days and suit within one year and ninety days. Other public authorities have their own rules, so identifying the owner early matters.

Talk to a Staten Island slip and fall attorney

These cases are won on things that disappear quickly — the ice melts, the flag gets replaced, the store mops up, and the question of who owned what becomes a records search rather than something you can see.

If you fell and are not sure whether there is a claim or who it would even be against, that is a question worth asking now rather than after a deadline you did not know about has run.

The Law Offices of Frank J. Dito, Jr. represents injured people in New York. Call 718.701.2776 (toll-free: 800.310.5520) or contact us for a free consultation. Consultations are free and there is no fee unless you win.

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