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Distribution of Parcels by Property Class—2020 Assessment Rolls

The New York State Department of Taxation and Finance, Office of Real Property Tax Services (ORPTS) has developed a set of real property use codes which are used by assessors to describe the use of all parcels listed on assessment rolls. The ORPTS classification system is uniformly applied to all New York State municipalities. A description of each of the specific codes is provided as an appendix to this report.

Individual codes, which are three digits, are grouped into nine general categories, referred to as broad-use categories. Broad-use categories are composed of divisions, indicated by the second digit, and subdivisions (where necessary), indicated by a third digit.

The nine categories are:

Broad-use category by description
Broad-use category Description
100 Agricultural
200 Residential
300 Vacant land
400 Commercial
500 Recreational and entertainment
600 Community services
700 Industrial
800 Public service
900 Wild, forested, conservation lands, and public parks

This report shows the number of parcels contained within each of the 304 property classification codes which were valid for use on the 2020 assessment rolls. County-level parcel count summaries for each of the nine broad-use categories are provided in a separate table.

Figure 1 shows the relative shares for each of the nine broad-use categories. Nearly 70 percent of the parcels belong to the residential class. The next most populous category is commercial property, representing 13.2 percent of all parcels, followed by vacant land property at 11.8 percent. The remaining valid categories range from a low of 0.3 percent (recreation and entertainment) to a high of 1.4 percent (public service). Properties assigned invalid classification codes represent about 0.23 percent of all codes, indicating the high level of successful adoption the classification system has achieved.

Pie chart of Distribution of Parcels by Property Class for 2020 assessment rolls, showing 69.2% of parcels belong to residential; 13.2% to commercial; 11.8% to vacant land property; 1.4% to public services; 1.3% to community services; 1.3% to agricultural; 1% to wild, forested, etc.; 0.5% to industrial; 0.3% to recreation and entertainment

Special classification for New York City and Nassau County

Two New York State assessing units, New York City and Nassau County, are governed by Article 18 of the Real Property Tax Law. This statute permits them to assess and tax four specified classes of real property differentially. These classes, and the incidence of parcels within them for the 2020 assessment rolls, are outlined below.

Number of parcels by class
Class Property description Number of parcels
Nassau County New York City
1 One, two and three-family residences,
certain residential condominiums, and
certain vacant land parcels
386,922 706,635
2 Residential property other than Class 1 6,496 288,971
3 Public utility property 2,453 4,806
4 Property not included in Classes 1, 2, or 3 29,001 115,147
Total parcels 424,872 1,115,559

Appendix: How to locate the correct property classification code

Updated: