Two Nassau County homeowners and a Brooklyn co-op owner all ask the same question: who should I hire to grieve my taxes? The answer for the Long Island pair is a 50%-of-first-year-savings contingency contract with a firm like Property Tax Reduction Consultants, Maidenbaum, or All Island. The answer in Brooklyn is, more often than not, an attorney-led Tax Commission practice working on a hybrid of flat-fee filing and percentage-on-savings. The 50% Long Island standard does not appear in NYC, and the NYC attorney-led model rarely appears upstate. Most national "how to hire" content treats New York as a single market. It isn't.
What follows is a regime-by-regime map of the New York property-tax-appeal service market, organized the way the appeal statutes organize the work: NYC under the Tax Commission, Long Island under the county-level Assessment Review Commission (Nassau) and town-level Boards of Assessment Review (Suffolk), and the rest of the state under town/city BARs with appeal into Small Claims Assessment Review (SCAR) or Supreme Court Article 7. The contracts available to a homeowner — and what is reasonable to pay — fall out of which regime the property sits in.
The five boroughs of New York City have a single appeals body for property tax: the NYC Tax Commission. It is independent of the Department of Finance, which sets the tentative assessment. The Tax Commission's job is to review applications for correction of those assessments and either uphold, reduce, or offer to settle.
The mechanics fall out of NYC's tax-class structure. Class 1 is most one-to-three-family residential property. Class 2 covers larger residential — rental buildings of four or more units, co-ops, and condominiums. Class 3 is utility property; Class 4 is commercial and industrial. The application form, the filing deadline, and the realistic fee structure all move with the class.
Miss the application deadline and there is no Tax Commission jurisdiction for that tax year. The next-available remedy is to file the following year on the next tentative roll. There is no general fee to file the application itself; what costs money is the representation, the appraisal evidence, and (if the Commission's determination is unfavorable and the owner pursues judicial review) the Article 7 petition in the New York Supreme Court that follows.
Tax Commission practice in NYC is dominated by law firms — Brodsky Amer & Gross, Marcus & Pollack, Tuchman Korngold Weiss Liebman Lindemann & Gershon, and similar practices. There is a structural reason. Class 2 and Class 4 cases regularly involve income capitalization, expense documentation that the Commission will scrutinize, and the realistic possibility of Article 7 litigation if the Commission's offer is declined. That is legal work, performed under USPAP-adjacent appraisal standards, and the fee structures reflect it: typically a hybrid of flat fees for filing and document preparation, hourly rates for litigation work, and a contingency component on any reduction achieved — varying by firm, by property class, and by case complexity.
Class 1 cases at the Tax Commission are different. The income-capitalization machinery is absent; the question is comparable-sales evidence and assessor methodology. A small subset of the same Tax Commission law firms accept Class 1 cases. More commonly, Class 1 owners either file the TC108 themselves or hire one of the Long Island grievance firms that has extended into the outer boroughs (Queens, Brooklyn, Staten Island).
What this means for a Class 1 homeowner in NYC. The Tax Commission filing itself is straightforward enough that DIY is on the table — the TC108 is short, the evidence requirements are comparable sales plus property characteristics, and the Commission's tendency is to settle Class 1 cases via written offer rather than full hearing. The break-even calculus against a contingency firm depends on the size of the expected reduction, not on the existence of an attorney market.
The contract-language questions from the savings-math guide all apply, but two NYC-specific items deserve attention:
Nassau and Suffolk operate under entirely different procedures from NYC, and their service markets reflect that. The dominant model on Long Island is a contingency contract with no upfront cost: the firm files the grievance application, optionally pursues SCAR if the grievance is denied, and collects roughly 50% of the first-year tax savings if a reduction is granted. No reduction, no fee.
The pattern is unusual nationally. Long Island contingency rates are on the high end (50% versus the 25–40% common in Texas and the rest of the country), and the standardization is striking: Property Tax Reduction Consultants publishes its 50%-of-first-year-savings fee schedule, All Island Tax Grievance publishes the same 50% rate, and Maidenbaum, ZapMyTax, Cobra Consulting Group, and Heller & Consultants are all in the same neighborhood. The structural reason is procedural: every Long Island grievance is a parcel-level case worked on a tight calendar, with firms carrying standing relationships with assessor offices and SCAR hearing officers across the towns. The volume of successful grievances per parcel per year is lower than in Texas-style annual-reassessment systems, which is part of why the per-case fee runs higher.
Nassau is a single county-wide assessment jurisdiction; the appeal body is the Assessment Review Commission, an independent agency separate from the Department of Assessment. For the 2026 tax year, the filing window opened January 2 and has been extended to March 31, 2026. There is no filing fee. Applications are submitted through ARC's online portal, AROW (Assessment Review on the Web), or on paper.
If ARC declines to reduce the assessment, the appeal route depends on property type. For one-, two-, and three-family residences used primarily as a homestead, the homeowner can file Small Claims Assessment Review (SCAR) in Supreme Court — an informal proceeding before a hearing officer. For everything else (multifamily, commercial, vacant land above SCAR's thresholds), the route is an Article 7 tax certiorari proceeding, which is a formal civil case.
Suffolk's structure is different: each of the ten towns (Babylon, Brookhaven, East Hampton, Huntington, Islip, Riverhead, Shelter Island, Smithtown, Southampton, Southold) has its own Board of Assessment Review. The grievance day for 2026 across all Suffolk towns is Tuesday, May 19, 2026 — the statutorily fixed third Tuesday in May. The filing window for the standard residential grievance application typically opens May 1 and closes on grievance day itself; some towns accept earlier filings tied to the tentative roll publication date in early May.
Like Nassau, denial at the town BAR routes residential cases to SCAR and everything else to Article 7. The service-company market that covers Suffolk is largely the same set of firms that covers Nassau — most operate Long-Island-wide rather than choosing between the two counties.
Long Island's standardization on 50% of first-year savings, with no upfront cost and no fee absent a reduction, removes some of the contract-math ambiguity that exists in jurisdictions where firms compete on headline rate. But three specifications still vary firm to firm and are worth verifying before signing:
SCAR is cheap and informal — by design. Filing SCAR yourself costs $30 in court fees and produces a hearing before a hearing officer, not a Supreme Court judge. The proceeding is informal; comparable-sales evidence carries the day. For a one-, two-, or three-family owner-occupied residence where the homeowner has time to assemble five reasonable comp sales, SCAR is the regime where service-company involvement is least defensible economically. The contingency-fee math on a small residential grievance — say, $400 of actual cash savings — produces a $200 fee on a process you could have run for $30 plus a Saturday.
Outside NYC and Long Island, New York's assessment-appeal regime is town- and city-level. Most municipalities have a Board of Assessment Review (BAR) that meets on grievance day — for many Westchester and Hudson Valley towns, the third Tuesday in June. Some cities, including White Plains, run their assessment review on different statutory calendars and should be checked individually. The application form most towns use is the New York State Office of Real Property Tax Services Form RP-524, "Complaint on Real Property Assessment."
Denial at the town/city BAR routes to SCAR for one-, two-, and three-family owner-occupied residences (the same $30 informal proceeding that Long Island residential cases use after ARC) and to Article 7 in Supreme Court for everything else.
The service-company market upstate is thinner than on Long Island. A few of the same Long Island grievance firms cover the lower Hudson Valley counties (Westchester, Rockland, Putnam, Orange). Beyond that radius, the practical options are local property-tax attorneys, generalist real-estate attorneys who handle Article 7 work as a side practice, or DIY. Contingency-fee firms that work Texas-style volumes do not generally operate upstate; the per-parcel economics are different and the volume isn't there.
Westchester is the upstate market most adjacent to Long Island's contingency-fee infrastructure, and a homeowner there will see solicitations from firms that operate in both counties. The contract terms are typically the same as the Long Island standard — 50% of first-year savings, contingency on reduction. The volume of comparable sales available in Westchester is generally good, which makes DIY SCAR a credible alternative for residential cases. For multi-unit residential or commercial cases that route to Article 7, an attorney is more likely the right answer than a grievance firm.
The cleanest decision for a New York homeowner shopping for help with a property tax appeal is to figure out the regime first and the firm second. The regime determines the realistic fee structures available, the procedural calendar, and the post-denial backstop. Anything else is downstream of that.
Editorial provenance. This guide synthesizes the New York Real Property Tax Law (RPTL Article 5 governing assessment review, Article 7 governing judicial review, Article 7 Title 1-A §§ 730–739 governing SCAR), published rules and procedures of the NYC Tax Commission, the Nassau County Assessment Review Commission, Suffolk County Real Property Tax Service Agency town-level filing calendars, the New York State Office of Real Property Tax Services (ORPTS), and publicly posted fee schedules of named service firms. Statutory citations and 2026 procedural deadlines are verified against primary sources at the date noted above. Edited by The Editorial Team. See how we source and verify this content.
The five questions from the contingency-fee math guide apply in New York with regional refinements: