In 2025, New York City filed 225,004 cooling tons with the Department of Buildings — across 5,241 buildings and 96,102 equipment units. Two forces drove the volume: LL97 compliance retrofits accelerating in commercial buildings, and a wave of multifamily completions filing equipment ahead of the R-410A refrigerant ban that took effect January 1, 2026. Through March 2026, 82,042 tons have already been filed, putting the full year on pace to exceed 2025.
225,004 tons — and 2026 is already tracking higher.
The 2025 total of 225,004 cooling tons is the largest on record for New York City. Through March 2026, 82,042 tons have already been filed — a quarterly pace that, if sustained, would put the full year above 300,000 tons. The market is not returning to a lower baseline; the structural demand behind the volume — LL97 deadlines, new construction completions, the refrigerant transition — has not gone away.
By system family, ducted systems lead at 116,508 tons — 52% of the total. VRF follows at 80,538 tons (36%) and has been closing steadily. Chilled water systems, concentrated in Manhattan's largest commercial buildings, account for 24,117 tons (11%). PTAC and precision cooling together make up the remainder.
Manhattan by capacity. The Bronx by density.
Cooling capacity and equipment unit count tell different stories about where the market lives. Manhattan leads both, but its dominance in capacity — 116,806 tons, 52% of the city — reflects its concentration of large commercial systems installed in relatively few buildings. Switch to unit count and the picture inverts: the Bronx records 19,542 units across just 547 buildings, a density of 35.7 units per building, compared to Manhattan's 18.7. The Bronx numbers are driven by dense multifamily completions filing large packages of through-wall and split equipment in a single job.
The market climbed steadily to 30,000+ tons a month.
January 2025 opened at 20,133 tons. By April it had hit 31,582 — the first month above 30,000. December closed the year at 31,851. Through March 2026, the pace has held above 29,000 tons a month. The three-month rolling average has been above 20,000 tons since October 2025. The structural demand behind the volume — LL97 compliance deadlines, new construction completions, the refrigerant transition — continues to sustain it.
By unit count, combined systems dominate. By tonnage, the picture inverts.
Heating-and-AC systems account for 45,165 units — 47% of all equipment filed — reflecting the prevalence of packaged and split systems in residential and light commercial work. Standalone air conditioning adds 20,218 units (21%) and ventilation 17,967 (19%). But these counts are misleading if read as a capacity measure: unit-heavy residential equipment carries far less tonnage per unit than the commercial systems it dwarfs. By cooling ton, the market is much more concentrated in the large commercial work that shows up lower in unit rankings.
Large buildings carry the most cooling load.
With building identifiers backfilled from job applications, size is identified for 98% of 2025 cooling capacity. The 250,000–1,000,000 square foot band — large office buildings and major residential towers — carries the most load at 68,861 tons. But the under-10,000-square-foot segment also records 53,751 tons, spread across thousands of small-building jobs that each file a modest amount. Mid-size buildings are underrepresented relative to their count; they tend to use packaged equipment that files at lower unit tonnages.
Two go-to-market strategies, visible in the filings.
Mitsubishi leads the unit count at 7,920 across 1,112 buildings — a distributed footprint reflecting its dominance in split-system residential and light-commercial work. Daikin shows similar breadth at 6,337 units across 581 buildings. Against these, Amana records 7,263 units across only 52 buildings (140 units per building on average), and Ephoca records 6,411 units across 19 buildings — 337 per building. Amana and Ephoca are not broadly distributed; they appear in large multifamily jobs ordering equipment in bulk under a single filing. Unit count ranks a manufacturer by volume; buildings touched ranks it by reach. The two tell different stories about the same market.
NYS Part 494 and the end of R-410A.
NYS Part 494, effective January 1, 2026, bans the installation of new R-410A equipment and requires refrigerants below 700 GWP. By 2025, heat-pump and VRF systems — the equipment classes built for next-generation refrigerants (R-454B, R-32) — already accounted for 66% of cooling units. Through March 2026 that share holds at 64%, and VRF reached near-parity with ducted systems on a tonnage basis for the first time.
Two forces are compounding here, not one. New York City's Local Law 97 compliance timeline creates a direct incentive to move commercial buildings off fossil fuel heating — and heat pumps satisfy both the heating and cooling side of that transition. Part 494 then dictates the refrigerant inside the equipment. The December 2025 spike of 31,851 tons is consistent with contractors pulling forward installations ahead of the January 1 effective date.
The NYC HVAC market is restructuring — by scale, by equipment class, and by the regulatory pressures converging on building owners simultaneously. The permit record captures all of it, for the first time, in one consistent dataset.