How Often a City Inspection Actually Finds Rats
New York inspectors carried out 144,314 initial rodent inspections in 2025 and found rat activity at 17.8 per cent of them, down from 23.7 per cent in 2023. Queens has the highest failure rate at 25.6 per cent and Staten Island the lowest at 6.3 per cent, an order that does not match where complaints are filed. Four in five properties inspected for rats pass.
Complaint counts tell you who called. Inspection results tell you what a trained inspector found when they got there, on a property the city selected. It is the closest thing in public data to a measurement of rodent presence rather than rodent annoyance, and almost nobody uses it.
The failure rate is falling
| Year | Initial inspections | Failed for rat activity | Failure rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2023 | 157,547 | 37,326 | 23.7% |
| 2024 | 154,636 | 35,359 | 22.9% |
| 2025 | 144,314 | 25,678 | 17.8% |
Initial inspections only, excluding compliance and follow-up visits. Failure means the inspector recorded active rat signs.
The rate has fallen for two years running, and the fall between 2024 and 2025 is the larger one, 5.1 percentage points. In absolute terms the city recorded 11,648 fewer failing inspections in 2025 than in 2023 while carrying out 13,233 fewer inspections.
Both numbers moving down together is the reason to be careful. A falling failure rate on a falling inspection count is consistent with conditions improving, and it is also consistent with the city changing which properties it targets. If inspectors visited proportionally more low-risk addresses in 2025, the rate would fall without anything changing on the ground. The dataset does not record why each property was selected, so this cannot be settled from the data alone.
What can be said is that the change is large, sustained across two years, and in the same direction as the decline in rat complaints we found in our 311 analysis, which is a partly independent signal.
What inspectors actually record
| Result, 2025 initial inspections | Count |
|---|---|
| Passed | 110,039 |
| Failed for rat activity | 19,433 |
| Failed for other reason | 8,597 |
| Failed for rat activity and other reason | 6,245 |
The distinction between the two failure categories is worth understanding. “Rat activity” means active signs: fresh droppings, burrows, runways, gnawing. “Other reason” covers conditions that support rats without evidence that any are currently there, such as accessible refuse, harbourage or structural gaps. Taken together, 34,275 inspections failed for something, 23.8 per cent of the total, but only the 25,678 involving rat activity establish presence.
That gap is the same distinction a technician makes on a first visit, and the same one a homeowner tends to collapse. Conditions that will produce a problem and a problem that already exists call for different work, which is the logic behind the exclusion-first approach in our guide to pest-proofing a property.
Boroughs in an unexpected order
| Borough | Initial inspections | Failed for rat activity | Failure rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| Queens | 7,355 | 1,883 | 25.6% |
| Bronx | 30,326 | 5,939 | 19.6% |
| Brooklyn | 57,893 | 10,058 | 17.4% |
| Manhattan | 47,603 | 7,726 | 16.2% |
| Staten Island | 1,137 | 72 | 6.3% |
Queens has the highest failure rate in the city and the second-fewest inspections. Brooklyn and Manhattan absorb 73 per cent of all inspections between them and fail at below the citywide rate. Staten Island is barely inspected at all and passes almost everything.
The most likely explanation for Queens is selection rather than severity: with only 7,355 initial inspections across a borough of 2.3 million people, inspectors are reaching a small and presumably worse-than-average subset of properties. Where the city inspects intensively, as in Brooklyn and Manhattan, the sample includes more routine addresses and the rate drops toward the average. A high failure rate on a small inspection programme is a statement about targeting as much as about rats.
That inverts the ranking from complaint data, where the Bronx and Manhattan lead. Complaints and inspections are measuring different things through different filters, and neither is a clean population estimate.
How to use this if you own or manage property
- Four in five inspected properties pass, so an inspection is not a formality with a foregone conclusion.
- Failing for conditions is a separate outcome from failing for activity, and it is the one most easily fixed before an inspector arrives: secured refuse, no accessible food, no harbourage against the building.
- An initial failure triggers a compliance cycle, and the follow-up inspections are recorded separately from the initial ones analysed here.
- Landlords face a parallel enforcement track through housing code violations, which carry their own timescales; see our analysis of how long a pest violation stays open.
- City inspection is not treatment. The inspection establishes a finding and an obligation; the work remains the owner’s, at the costs set out in our rodent removal guide.
How we did this
We used the New York City rodent inspection dataset, which records every inspection conducted by the health department’s pest control programme with its type, result, date and borough. We filtered to inspection type “Initial” to avoid double-counting compliance and follow-up visits on the same property, then grouped results by year and by borough for 2025.
We treated any result containing “Rat Activity” as a failure for activity, which includes the combined activity-and-other-reason category. The dataset does not publish why a property was selected for inspection, which is the main limit on interpreting changes in the failure rate over time. Borough comparisons are affected by the same issue, since inspection intensity varies by more than a factor of fifty between Brooklyn and Staten Island.
Frequently asked questions
How often does a city rodent inspection find rats?
In New York in 2025, 17.8 per cent of 144,314 initial inspections found active rat signs, so roughly four in five properties inspected passed. A further 8,597 inspections failed for conditions that support rats without evidence of current activity.
Is New York’s rat problem getting better?
The inspection data points that way, with the failure rate falling from 23.7 per cent in 2023 to 22.9 in 2024 and 17.8 in 2025, alongside a decline in rat complaints. The caveat is that inspection volumes fell at the same time, and the city does not publish how properties are selected, so a change in targeting could produce part of the same pattern.
Which New York borough has the worst rat problem?
By inspection failure rate, Queens at 25.6 per cent, followed by the Bronx at 19.6 and Brooklyn at 17.4. Queens receives far fewer inspections than Brooklyn or Manhattan, so its rate likely reflects a more targeted and worse-than-average sample rather than the borough as a whole. Complaint data puts the boroughs in a different order.
What does failing a rodent inspection mean?
The inspector recorded either active rat signs, such as fresh droppings, burrows or runways, or conditions supporting rats, such as accessible refuse and harbourage. The two are recorded separately. A failure starts a compliance process for the property owner, and follow-up inspections are logged as separate records.
Sources
- NYC Open Data, Rodent Inspection, initial inspections 2023 to 2025. data.cityofnewyork.us
- Analysis by The Pest Control Brief, September 2026.
