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Reports Due Every Year

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City Council August 2026

City Agencies Now Owe 850 Reports at Least Once a Year

A report is the Council's favorite deliverable: 1,542 of the tracker's 8,185 obligations are reporting requirements, and 850 of them recur at least annually. Each one is a standing assignment for agency staff. Whether each one still earns its cost is exactly the question New York State's regulatory reset and Stanford RegLab's 50-state research are now asking.

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Reports due at least once a year have more than doubled since 2019, from 410 to 849

Cumulative report obligations due at least once a year, from NYC local laws enacted 2014–2026. The line only goes up because a reporting requirement stays on the books until a later law repeals it.

Source: NYC Council Legistar, via the Legislation Implementation Tracker Note: 2026 runs through August. The chart plots 849 reports; the 850th has no enactment date to place it on the timeline.

Who reads them? Stanford RegLab found Maryland's legislature would need 14 weeks just to read the reports its laws require, against a 13-week session, and that 30% of California's ongoing reports may never be filed at all. New York City does keep an accounting of arrival, though not of readership: the Department of Records and Information Services publishes the reports agencies owe and the date each was last filed. Matching that list against the laws tracked here gives 1,306 recurring reports with a stated cadence, of which 396 are current. DORIS records 316 as overdue and no filing at all for 589. Josh Greenman's overdue reports dashboard runs the same analysis across all of DORIS, back past 2014.

Reports are a real cost. Each one takes staff time from the agency that writes it. Some clearly earn that cost; the point of counting them is that nobody has been checking which ones do.

What's counted: obligations the tracker classifies as reports with an annual cadence (685) or a more frequent one: quarterly (102), semiannual (55), monthly (17), or another within-year schedule (5). One report obligation without an enactment date is excluded, as are reports from laws that have already repealed themselves. Not counted: reports with an ongoing recurrence but no fixed cadence and reports due less often than yearly (biennial, every N years).

Counts are as enacted: the tracker does not net out reports later repealed, consolidated, or sunset by amendment, and pre-2014 laws are outside the data. The average of 69 new recurring reports a year is the 850 total over the 12.6 years of coverage.

Sources: Author's analysis of NYC Council Legistar law text via the NYCuriosity Legislation Implementation Tracker (data as of August 2026); Stanford RegLab, "How AI is helping states cut through decades of red tape" (July 2026); compliance figures from NYC Open Data, Government Publication - Required Reports (DORIS), matched to this tracker's laws; approach to that data from Josh Greenman's NYC overdue reports dashboard.