DOB's FISP Recommendations Report: What's Proposed, What's Law, and What Isn't Decided Yet

A study came out in December. None of it is law yet.

If you sit on a co-op or condo board, or manage a building taller than six stories in New York City, you’ve probably heard some version of “the facade inspection cycle is changing” sometime in the last year. Some of that is true. Most of what’s circulating right now is a set of recommendations from a consultant’s study — not rules DOB has adopted, and not anything that changes your building’s current filing deadline.

Here’s the difference, recommendation by recommendation, and what’s actually law versus what’s still a proposal sitting in front of the Department of Buildings.

What the law actually did: Local Law 49 of 2025

Local Law 49 of 2025 passed the City Council on March 26, 2025, was signed by the Mayor on April 17, 2025, and took effect October 1, 2026. It did two things, and only two things:

1. It ordered a study. Section 1 of the law required DOB to study the inspection interval set out in Article 302 of Title 28 of the Administrative Code and deliver recommendations to the Speaker of the City Council by December 31, 2025.
2. It amended the interval itself. Local Law 49 rewrote Admin Code Section 28-302.2 so that critical examinations of a building’s exterior walls happen “at periodic intervals as set forth by rule of the commissioner, provided such periodic intervals are between 6 to 12 years” — replacing the flat five-year cycle that had governed the Facade Inspection and Safety Program (FISP, created by Local Law 11) since 1998. It also moved a new building’s first required exam from the fifth year after its exterior walls go up to the eighth year, measured from the TCO or CO date.

Both changes took effect October 1, 2026. For a visual walkthrough, see our briefing slides: Your façade clock and your sidewalk shed.

What Local Law 49 did not do is pick a number. It set a range — 6 to 12 years — and left it to DOB to set the actual interval “by rule,” which under the City Administrative Procedure Act means formal notice-and-comment rulemaking: a published proposed rule, a public comment period, and typically a public hearing, before anything takes legal effect. As of this writing, DOB has not published a proposed rule setting that interval. Until it does, the five-year cycle structure under 1 RCNY 103-04 continues to govern how buildings are grouped into FISP’s filing sub-cycles, and Cycle 10 — running February 21, 2025 through February 20, 2030 — proceeds on its published schedule.

The study DOB was required to deliver

DOB’s consultant, Thornton Tomasetti, completed the FISP Recommendations Report: A Review of the New York City Façade Inspection & Safety Program and published it on December 10, 2025 — satisfying Local Law 49’s December 31, 2025 deadline. The report itself states plainly that its recommendations “have been developed independently of Local Law 49 of 2025” and that implementing any of them is a separate step DOB has to take through rulemaking.

The report draws on interviews with 26 Qualified Exterior Wall Inspectors (QEWIs), a survey that reached 245 of the city’s 484 registered QEWIs, a review of facade inspection programs in other U.S. cities and abroad, and an analysis of historical FISP filing data across the roughly 17,000 buildings currently in the program. Based on that research, it makes eleven recommendations. Seven of them are the ones most relevant to a building owner or board right now:

Recommendation	What it would do	Status
Six-year baseline	Move the standard inspection cycle from every 5 years to every 6 years for all covered buildings	Recommended — not adopted
New buildings at 6 years	Set a new building’s first filing at 6 years after its first TCO or CO	Recommended — current law already sets this at 8 years
Abbreviated Filing	Newer, well-maintained buildings under 40 years old with a Safe history could do a visual-only exam every 3 years and a full hands-on exam only every other cycle (every 12 years), with drone use for taller buildings	Recommended — not adopted
Reduced Hands-On	Increase the required drop spacing for suspended-scaffold hands-on inspection from 60 feet to 100 feet, for buildings of 20 stories or fewer with plain, unornamented facades	Recommended — not adopted
Severity-based UNSAFE/SWARMP definitions	Redefine “Unsafe” around the severity of the hazard rather than the repair time frame, and separate hazardous conditions from “Administrative Unsafe” conditions (a SWARMP item that was never corrected, now auto-reclassified) so fewer buildings are forced into an immediate sidewalk shed	Recommended — not adopted
Enhanced Inspection	Add a visual-only check at the midpoint of the cycle for buildings with facade materials or maintenance histories that show faster deterioration	Recommended — not adopted
Drone pilot program	Run a real-world pilot testing whether drone imagery, combined with computer-vision analysis tools, can further reduce hands-on inspection requirements beyond the Abbreviated Filing exemption	Recommended study — not adopted

Source: FISP Recommendations Report, Executive Summary and Section 8, December 10, 2025.

The other four recommendations in the report are more administrative: a legal mechanism for neighbor property-access agreements (which the report itself notes is outside DOB’s authority and would require separate legislation), a better DOB help-desk ticketing system for QEWI questions, clearer “failure-to-maintain” violation notices, and a published QEWI best-practices guide.

Why “proposed” is the operative word on every line of that table

Every single item above is a recommendation to DOB, not a change by DOB. The report is explicit that none of its proposals take effect on their own. To become enforceable, each one has to go through the same City Administrative Procedure Act process as any other agency rule: DOB has to draft and publish a proposed rule in the City Record, hold a public comment period, generally hold a public hearing, and then formally adopt the rule before it governs anyone’s filing.

As of this writing, DOB has not published a proposed rule implementing the six-year baseline, the Abbreviated Filing program, the Reduced Hands-On option, the revised severity-based definitions, the Enhanced Inspection option, or the drone pilot. The current FISP rule, 1 RCNY 103-04, still reflects the five-year cycle structure. The only piece of this that’s already binding is what Local Law 49 itself changed directly: the 6-to-12-year range (with the specific interval still undetermined) and the new-building first-filing shift to year eight.

That gap matters for planning. A board that assumes “we’re now on a twelve-year cycle” or “Unsafe findings won’t require a shed anymore” is reading the recommendations report as if it were already the rule. Until DOB proposes and adopts a rule, neither of those things is true for any building.

What doesn’t change no matter what DOB eventually adopts

Even if DOB eventually implements some version of the six-year baseline or the severity-based Unsafe/SWARMP redefinition, a few things aren’t on the table in any version of this report:

• A longer interval between inspections is not a longer window to fix a known problem. A SWARMP finding still carries whatever repair time frame your QEWI assigns in the report — as we cover in how to read your FISP report — and an uncorrected SWARMP condition still becomes Unsafe at the next filing, however far out that next filing lands.
• An Unsafe finding still means public protection goes up and the repair clock starts immediately. Nothing in the report proposes removing that requirement for conditions that are genuinely hazardous; the recommendation is to stop applying “Unsafe” automatically to conditions that aren’t.
• If you’re in an active Cycle 10 sub-cycle, your filing window hasn’t moved. Cycle 10 runs through February 20, 2030 on the sub-cycle schedule described in our Cycle 10 guide. Any interval DOB eventually adopts by rule would apply going forward, not retroactively rewrite your current cycle.

What to do with this in the meantime

For a board or managing agent, the useful move right now isn’t to react to the recommendations report — it’s to keep two things straight. First, track your building’s actual Cycle 10 sub-cycle deadline; that hasn’t changed and isn’t waiting on any rulemaking. Second, watch rules.cityofnewyork.us for an actual DOB proposed rule implementing any part of Local Law 49’s 6-to-12-year range or the consultant’s recommendations — that’s the point at which any of this becomes something you need to plan around, and it will come with its own public comment period before it’s final.

Whatever interval DOB eventually sets, the underlying work doesn’t go away: facades still deteriorate, SWARMP conditions still need to be corrected on schedule, and Unsafe conditions still need a shed up and a repair completed. Altius CM handles the full range of that work — facade repair and restoration, parapet repair, sealant and caulk replacement, shed and scaffold sequencing, and drone facade surveys to document conditions between formal filings — described in more detail on our facade repair and FISP inspection support pages, our services page, and in our scope-of-work breakdown.

This is general information, not legal advice. If you have questions about how Local Law 49 or any future DOB rule applies to a specific building or an active FISP filing, talk to your QEWI or counsel. If you need help scoping, budgeting, or sequencing the actual repair work behind a SWARMP or Unsafe finding, contact us.