A widespread misunderstanding of how to calculate eviction notice periods under New York law is causing landlords to lose months of rental income and, in some cases, entire eviction cases, according to New York real estate attorney Alexander Paykin, founder of Paykin Law.
The predicate notice requirements for New York eviction proceedings are among the most technically demanding in the country, and the consequences of getting them wrong are severe. Paykin explains that the most common and costly error is not a missed deadline or a wrong dollar amount but a fundamental misunderstanding of how notice periods are calculated in holdover cases. Landlords who believe they are serving legally sufficient notices routinely discover, months later, that their notices were defective from the start.
The confusion stems from the fact that holdover notice periods in New York are measured in lease periods, not calendar days. Under state law, tenants who have lived in a unit for less than a year are entitled to 30 days' notice before a holdover proceeding can begin. Tenants with one year of occupancy or a one-year lease are entitled to 60 days, and tenants with two or more years are entitled to 90 days. However, these numbers are not as straightforward as they appear.
“What it means is one, two, or three periods of your lease,” Paykin says. For example, if a lease starts on the first of the month and ends on the last day, serving a notice on the last day of July means the 30-day period would be August. But if served on August 1st, August does not count, and the next period starts on September 1st. A landlord who serves a notice on August 1st instead of July 31st has just added an entire month to the process unknowingly. A landlord who serves on August 10th, counts 90 calendar days forward, and files on November 12th has almost certainly served a defective notice that will get the case dismissed.
“I’ve regularly seen people serve their notice on the 10th, wait three months or 90 days, commence an action on the 12th, and then have it dismissed for failure of the predicate notice to give adequate time,” Paykin says.
The error is common because predicate notices are widely available online. Landlords download templates, fill in names and dates, have a friend serve them, and believe they have handled the procedural requirements. By the time they realize they have not, they have already lost months. “Lots of potential clients I’ve seen lose three months of their lives and three months of rental income on a defective notice,” Paykin says.
The typical pattern involves a landlord serving a notice they believe is correct, waiting through what they think is the required period, and then coming to an attorney to file the court petition. The attorney reviews the notice and finds it defective. The landlord must then serve a corrected notice, wait through the full notice period again, and only then can the court case begin. Three months of rental income lost before a single court date has been scheduled.
What makes this worse is what happens when the defective notice is not caught before filing. Landlords who proceed without an attorney sometimes file petitions with defective notices attached. A tenant’s attorney, Paykin says, will not necessarily raise the defect immediately. Instead, they will seek adjournments, drag the case out over months, and wait until trial to spring the issue. “The thing gets to trial, and at trial, defense counsel goes, ‘Judge, look at their attached notice. It’s defective.’ And the landlord loses a trial, and has to start the entire thing over again, having lost a year of rental income,” Paykin says. In New York City, where court calendars are heavily backlogged, that timeline is not hypothetical. “Three to four months can actually be seven or eight months,” he notes.
The predicate notice problem illustrates a broader dynamic in New York’s landlord-tenant system: procedural complexity that disproportionately disadvantages landlords who attempt to navigate it without legal representation. Tenants in New York City increasingly have access to free or low-cost legal aid, while smaller landlords, often operating on thin margins, try to manage eviction proceedings themselves to avoid legal fees. A single defective notice costs more in lost rent than most landlords would spend on legal representation for the entire proceeding, Paykin argues.
“There’s no way a landlord should be doing this themselves and not hiring a landlord-tenant attorney,” Paykin says. “At least not in New York. Our process is slow and painful.”
For the broader rental market, the prevalence of defective notices has real consequences. Landlords who cannot efficiently remove non-paying or holdover tenants face extended periods of lost income, compounding the financial pressure on already-stressed rent-stabilized portfolios. The procedural barriers to eviction are a known feature of New York’s tenant-protection framework, but avoidable landlord errors amplify those barriers significantly.
Paykin says his involvement at the notice stage rather than after the fact prevents the most costly errors. “When you come to me on the 11th, I’m going to say, ‘Well, now I can prepare the notice correctly, serve it before the end of this month. Then you’ll have to wait three more months, and then and only then will I get to even start a case in court,'” Paykin says. That timeline is frustrating, but it is the correct one, and it is far less costly than discovering a defective notice at trial.
For landlords currently managing holdover or non-payment disputes without counsel, the calculation is direct: the cost of an attorney at the predicate notice stage is a fraction of the rental income lost when a defective notice adds three months to a year to a proceeding that could have started correctly the first time.
