New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani speaks during the annual New York State Financial Control Board meeting on August 12, 2026 in New York City.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images
New York City’s pied-à-terre tax can continue its planned rollout while it faces a legal challenge, an appellate judge ruled Thursday.
The ruling comes after Staten Island Judge Wayne Ozzi on Monday issued a temporary restraining order briefly halting the levy on second homes above a certain value. The tax has become a hallmark policy of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani.
Mamdani’s government filed a motion to seek an appeal, triggering an automatic stay. Earlier Thursday, NYC asked the appeals court to confirm that auto-pause, arguing Ozzi’s ruling “threatens to derail the City’s time-sensitive implementation of a new surcharge.”
The lawsuit was filed by three city residents challenging the legality of the rollout, not the tax policy itself. Their suit highlights the city’s distribution of a list showing information on thousands of homeowners, and mailed notices informing 17,000 people on that list that they may be subject to the new tax.
Mamdani, a democratic socialist, has drawn the ire of conservatives and the rich while otherwise remaining widely popular in the city, according to recent polls.
President Donald Trump, a Queens native who once lived in Manhattan’s Trump Tower but moved his primary residence to Florida in 2019, declared in a Truth Social post Tuesday that the surcharge on second homes “must be stopped, NOW!”
“I am looking to see if the Federal Government has any legal right to avert this disaster, before it is too late,” Trump wrote.
It is unclear whether Trump or his immediate family would be subject to the NYC tax. Attorney General Todd Blanche on Wednesday declined to say if the Department of Justice was exploring its legal options against the tax.