How to Evict a Roommate in NYC: Notices and Holdover Process

To evict a roommate in NYC, you have to go through Housing Court. That means identifying your roommate’s legal status, serving the correct written notice, and, if they don’t leave, filing a holdover proceeding and letting a city marshal carry out any eviction the judge orders. You cannot change the locks, move their belongings out, or shut off utilities, no matter how the arrangement started. Plan for the process to take several months.

Figure Out What Kind of Roommate You Have

The procedure, the notice, and even whether you can bring a case at all depend on your roommate’s legal status. Three categories matter.

A co-tenant signed the same lease you did. Neither of you has a superior claim to the apartment, and one co-tenant cannot evict another through Housing Court. If this is your situation, your options are negotiating a voluntary departure, asking the landlord to act on lease violations, or a Civil Court proceeding. The rest of this article won’t help you.

A subtenant rents from you. You hold the lease with the landlord; the subtenant has a separate arrangement (ideally a written sublease) with you. For eviction purposes, you are their landlord and have to follow full landlord-tenant procedure.

A licensee lives in your apartment on your permission alone. No lease, no sublease, usually no rent. The friend who crashed and stayed, the partner who slowly moved in, the relative who’s been there indefinitely. Once someone has lived in the apartment for 30 consecutive days, you cannot remove them yourself, but because their right to stay comes only from your permission, the notice period is much shorter than for a subtenant.

One point of confusion worth clearing up: New York’s Real Property Law 235-F gives every tenant the right to have at least one roommate, even if the lease forbids it.¹ A roommate allowed in under that law does not gain tenancy rights. If you invited them, you can revoke your permission, and they are a licensee.

Serving a Licensee: The 10-Day Notice to Quit

If your roommate is a licensee, revoke your permission in writing with a 10-day notice to quit. The notice tells them their permission to stay has been revoked and they must leave within 10 days.² Unlike notice periods for subtenants, this one doesn’t have to line up with a rental month. You can serve it any time.³

Service has to follow RPAPL 735: hand it to them personally, deliver it to someone of suitable age and discretion at the apartment and mail a copy, or affix it to the door and mail a copy.⁴ You can do this yourself. You do not need a process server for a predicate notice.

Serving a Subtenant: Choose the Notice That Matches the Reason

For a subtenant, the notice depends on why you want them out.

Unpaid Rent

Serve a written rent demand giving at least 14 days to pay or move out.⁵ The demand has to list the specific months and amounts owed.⁶

Violating the Sublease

Unauthorized pets, unauthorized occupants, noise, other lease breaches: serve a notice to cure that gives the subtenant a window to fix the problem. Under the Good Cause Eviction Law, that cure period is 10 days from receipt.⁷ If they don’t cure, you then serve a notice of termination ending their right to remain.

Ending a Month-to-Month Sublease

If there’s no fixed term, or the term expired and the subtenant stayed on, end the arrangement with a written termination notice. The length depends on how long they’ve lived there:

Less than one year: at least 30 days.
One to two years: at least 60 days.
Two years or more: at least 90 days.

The notice has to be served before the start of the next rental period.⁸

How to Serve Any Predicate Notice

A notice that isn’t served correctly is worthless in court. RPAPL 735 gives you three options, and they apply whether you’re delivering a rent demand, a termination notice, or a 10-day notice to quit:

Hand the notice to the roommate directly.
Deliver it to a person of suitable age and discretion at the apartment, and mail a copy within one day.
Post it conspicuously on the door (or slide it under), and mail a copy within one day.⁴

You can serve these notices yourself. The stricter service rules kick in once you file in court.

Filing a Holdover Proceeding

If the notice period expires and the roommate is still there, file a holdover proceeding in the Housing Court for the borough where the apartment sits.

You’ll prepare two documents: a Petition, which sets out who you are, who the roommate is, why they no longer have a right to stay, and what notice you served; and a Notice of Petition, which tells them when and where to appear. Bring both, plus a copy of the predicate notice you already served, to the Landlord-Tenant Clerk’s Office. The clerk assigns an index number, a courtroom, and a hearing date, and you pay a filing fee.³

Now the service rules tighten. You cannot personally serve the court papers on your roommate. Anyone over 18 who isn’t a party to the case can do it, or you can hire a professional process server.⁹ For a holdover case, service must happen at least 10 days and no more than 17 days before the court date.¹⁰ For a nonpayment case, it’s at least 5 days before the hearing. The same three delivery methods apply.⁴ Whoever served the papers signs a notarized affidavit of service, which you then file with the court.³

What Happens at Court and After a Judgment

On the hearing date, both sides appear in what Housing Court calls the Resolution Part. Many cases settle here, often with the roommate agreeing to leave by a specific date in exchange for extra time. If there’s no agreement, the case moves toward trial.

If you win, the court issues a judgment of possession and a warrant of eviction. That warrant goes to a New York City Marshal or Sheriff, who then has to give the roommate at least 14 days’ written notice before physically removing them.¹¹ The removal itself can happen on or after the fifteenth day.¹²

In a nonpayment case, if the roommate pays everything owed before the marshal executes the warrant, the court has to cancel it, unless the court finds the rent was withheld in bad faith.¹¹ The judge can also grant a stay of the warrant for good cause, which can push things out further. If the roommate never shows up, you can ask for a default judgment, though the court may still make you prove your case.

What You Cannot Do

Self-help eviction in New York carries penalties steep enough to reverse the whole dispute. Only a court-issued warrant executed by a city marshal or sheriff can lawfully remove someone from your apartment. The protections below apply to anyone who has lived in the apartment for 30 consecutive days or longer, whether or not they have a lease.¹³

Do not change the locks. Do not remove the roommate’s belongings, block access to shared rooms, or take the door off its hinges. Do not shut off heat, water, or electricity to pressure them out; that counts as constructive eviction, and civil penalties run from $1,000 to $10,000 per violation, plus up to $100 per day until service is restored, capped at six months. Using threats, intimidation, or physical force to push a roommate out is a Class A misdemeanor, and that includes patterns of behavior designed to make the apartment unlivable.¹³

A roommate locked out or harassed this way can call the police, file an illegal lockout petition in Housing Court, and recover damages. The court can order you to let them back in immediately. At that point, you’ve lost every advantage you had and added criminal exposure to the underlying dispute. Serve the notice, file the papers, and let the court do the work.

1
New York State Senate. New York Code RPP 235-F
2
New York State Senate. New York Code RPA 713
3
New York State Unified Court System. Starting a Case – NYCivil
4
NYCOURTS.GOV. New York Code RPAPL 735
5
New York State Senate. New York Code RPA 711
6
New York State Unified Court System. Tenant Questions and Answers in Nonpayment Eviction Cases
7
New York State Attorney General. New York State Good Cause Eviction Law
8
New York State Senate. New York Code RPP 226-C
9
New York State Unified Court System. Service of the Notice of Petition and Petition to Start a Nonpayment or Holdover Proceeding
10
New York State Senate. New York Code RPA 733
11
New York State Senate. New York Code RPA 749
12
New York State Unified Court System. Eviction – NY Housing
13
New York State Senate. New York Code RPA 768