New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani used Tax Day to unveil an annual tax on high-value properties owned by people who do not live in the city full-time, framing the measure as part of his broader effort to raise taxes on wealthy residents and property owners.
Mamdani announced on Wednesday:
When I ran for mayor, I said I was going to tax the rich. Well, today, we’re taxing the rich. I’m thrilled to announce we’ve secured a pied-à-terre tax, the first in New York’s history. This is an annual fee on luxury properties worth more than $5 million whose owners do not live full time in the city, like for this penthouse, which hedge fund CEO Ken Griffin bought for $238 million.
This pied-à-terre tax is specifically designed for the richest of the rich, those who store their wealth in New York City real estate, but who don’t actually live here. But even so, they’re able to reap the huge financial rewards owning property in, dare I say, the greatest city in the world.
Most of the time these units are sitting empty since, again, they don’t actually live here.
This is a fundamentally unfair system that hurts working New Yorkers. Now it’s coming to an end. This tax will raise at least $500 million directly for the city. It will help fund things like free child care, cleaner streets, and safer neighborhoods. As mayor, I believe everyone has a role to play in contributing to our city, and some a little bit more than others. Happy Tax Day, New York.
The new tax announcement comes after Mamdani, during his mayoral campaign and since taking office, repeatedly called for higher taxes on wealthy New Yorkers, the city’s most profitable corporations, and certain high-value property owners.
This month, Mamdani released a racial equity plan, arguing that black and brown New Yorkers had been disproportionately affected by the city’s affordability crisis. Mamdani said, “Today’s true cost of living measure confirms that the affordability crisis touches every corner of our city.” He added, “We know that these effects are not applied evenly: So often it is black and brown New Yorkers who are hit the hardest.”
Mamdani also said, “The wealth of a median white household in the city is more than $200,000, while that of a black household is less than $20,000,” adding that his administration was “reckoning with the long history of racism here and starting to act upon a framework that puts equity right at the center of it.”
Mamdani also said that he had no hesitation in asking the city’s wealthiest residents to “pay a little bit more” to help fund city services and prevent middle-class residents from leaving New York.
In February, Mamdani presented a $127 billion preliminary budget for fiscal year 2027 and said the city had reduced a $12 billion budget gap to $5.4 billion through savings, updated revenue estimates, and aid from Gov. Kathy Hochul.
He urged Albany to raise income taxes by two percent on the 33,000 New Yorkers earning more than $1 million annually and increase taxes on profitable corporations, saying the alternative would be a 9.5 percent property-tax hike affecting more than three million residential units and 100,000 commercial buildings. Mamdani described higher taxes on the wealthy and corporations as the “fairest path.”
During the 2025 campaign, Mamdani proposed shifting property-tax burdens from outer-borough homeowners to more expensive properties in what his campaign described as “richer and whiter neighborhoods.” His campaign platform promised to “shift the tax burden from overtaxed homeowners in the outer boroughs to more expensive homes in richer and whiter neighborhoods” and argued that homeowners in expensive neighborhoods “pay less than their fair share” because capped assessment levels keep taxes artificially low. The proposal said the city should raise taxes on “the most expensive Brooklyn brownstones” while lowering taxes in neighborhoods such as Jamaica and Brownsville.
During a November 2025 White House visit, conservative commentator Jack Posobiec asked Mamdani about his campaign proposal to shift “the tax burden for property taxes from what he called minority communities to white-based communities, and putting more taxes on white people.” Mamdani replied that he was focused on affordability and the cost-of-living crisis and remained interested in property-tax reform because the city’s current system was “so inequitable that it can’t even stand up in court.”
After Posobiec accused him of supporting “race-based property taxes,” Mamdani said his reference to “whiter neighborhoods” was “a description of neighborhoods, not a description of intent,” and added that his administration intended “to create a fair property tax system” so New York could become “a city that everyone can afford.”