Nassau County Parking Tickets: Pay, Contest, or Lost Ticket

A Nassau County parking ticket is handled by the Traffic and Parking Violations Agency (TPVA), and you have two choices: pay the fine printed on the citation, or plead not guilty and ask for a hearing. Both can be done online at nc.surecourt.com, by mail, or in person at the TPVA office in Mineola. Act before the response deadline on the ticket. Late fees, collections, booting, and a registration hold all follow if you don’t.¹

How to Pay

The fastest route is the TPVA’s online portal at nc.surecourt.com. You can look up your ticket using the summons number, your license plate and state of registration, or your driver’s license number along with your last name and date of birth. The portal takes Visa, Mastercard, Discover, and American Express. A convenience fee is added at checkout, and the exact amount appears before you confirm, so you can back out if you’d rather pay another way.² Save the confirmation.

To pay by mail, check “Guilty” on the back of the ticket, sign and date it, and send it with a check or money order to the TPVA. The agency goes by the postmark date, so if the deadline is close, get it to the post office rather than dropping it in a home mailbox.

To pay in person, the TPVA office in Mineola is open weekdays from 9:00 a.m. to 11:30 a.m. and 1:00 p.m. to 3:30 p.m., with night court from 5:30 p.m. to 7:30 p.m. The phone number is 516-572-2700.¹

One thing to plan around: the TPVA does not offer payment plans for parking tickets or red light camera violations. You pay the full amount when you respond.¹

The total shown on the ticket is the base fine set by the town or village that issued it plus any New York State surcharges. Fines are not uniform across the county. Accessible parking violations are the outlier on the high side: state law sets the base fine at $50 to $75 for a first offense and $75 to $150 for a second offense, and Nassau municipalities can add local surcharges on top.³

How to Contest the Ticket

If you think the ticket is wrong, check “Not Guilty” on the back of the ticket, fill in your mailing address carefully, sign, and return it. The address you write is where the TPVA will send your hearing notice, so legibility matters.

Hearings are held before an administrative law judge. The process is less formal than a criminal trial, and you don’t need a lawyer, though you can bring one. Come with evidence: photographs of the spot showing missing, blocked, or contradictory signs; a time-stamped meter receipt; anything that undercuts what the officer wrote. The officer’s notes are part of the record, and the judge weighs your evidence against them. A not-guilty finding dismisses the ticket. A guilty finding leaves you owing the fine and any surcharges, typically on the schedule the judge sets.

If the hearing date doesn’t work, contact the TPVA before the appearance to request an adjournment. Skipping the hearing without rescheduling produces a default judgment, which treats you as guilty and makes the full amount immediately due.

What It Costs to Ignore the Ticket

The price of doing nothing climbs in stages, and each stage adds more than the last.

First come late fees and a default judgment. Once the response deadline passes, additional charges are added to the original fine, and you now owe more than the ticket said. The TPVA has stated that unanswered, unpaid violations are being sent to collections, which brings collection letters, calls, and further fees from the collection agency.¹

Next is the boot and tow program. Nassau County targets vehicles with three or more unresolved parking tickets or red light camera notices. A booted vehicle isn’t released until every outstanding fine, surcharge, and added fee is paid in full. A towed vehicle also runs up storage fees for every day it sits in the impound lot, and those secondary costs can exceed the original fines on their own.¹

Then there’s your registration. The New York State DMV can defer or suspend your vehicle registration when unpaid judgments pile up, and the hold applies to every vehicle registered in your name. You won’t be able to renew until the debt is cleared.

Red Light Camera Notices

If what arrived in the mail is a red light camera notice rather than a parking ticket pulled off your windshield, the process overlaps but the rules differ. The camera captures your plate and a notice of liability is mailed to the registered owner. Under New York law, the maximum fine is $50, and no points are added to your driving record because the ticket is issued to the vehicle, not the driver.

Red light camera notices run through the same TPVA system, so you pay or contest them at nc.surecourt.com or at the Mineola office. Payment plans aren’t available for these either, and an unpaid camera notice counts toward the three-violation threshold that triggers booting and towing.¹

If You Lost the Ticket

You can still respond without the paper. The TPVA’s online portal lets you look up your record by license plate and state, by summons number, or by driver’s license number combined with your last name and date of birth.² The ticket number itself is printed in the upper-left corner of the citation if you later find it, and it’s the quickest reference when calling the agency.⁴

1
NassauCountyNY.gov. Traffic and Parking Violations Agency (TPVA)
2
Nassau County Traffic & Parking Violations Agency. Nassau County Traffic and Parking Violations Agency Online Self Service
3
New York State Department of Motor Vehicles. Parking for People with Disabilities
4
New York State Department of Motor Vehicles. Sample Ticket Information