BenchFile finds your building's open Local Law 84 benchmarking violation, files the overdue report, and keeps you compliant every year. It is for a New York City building owner or managing agent with a property over 25,000 square feet, which is where the city's reporting duty starts.
You type the address. Back comes a panel naming the violation number from the city's own record, the owner and floor area from the property file, what has accrued so far, and the date the next $500 notice posts. Then we file the overdue report through ENERGY STAR Portfolio Manager, request the utility data authorisation on your behalf, and file it again before 1 May every year after that.
$149 once to clear the violation that is already open, then $49 a year to keep the building filed. For a covered building with nothing outstanding, the annual line alone is $49. Stripe charges both, and neither is a quote.
Watch the BenchFile — Clear your benchmarking violation, and keep it clear demo
The $500 does not stop at one
The city's penalty is $500, issued quarterly until the report is submitted, up to $2,000 a year. It does not let one notice grow. It issues a new one, dated 1 May, then 1 August, then 1 November, then 1 February, which is why a long delinquent building carries a stack of separate violation numbers instead of one old one.
The $2,000 ceiling is counted for each building. A single tax lot can hold more than one building, and every one of them is on the hook separately.
Eleven notices in a day, four quarters running
Read out of the city's open violation table, dataset 855j-jady, on 2026-08-27. One tax lot in Queens, counting only the benchmarking notices still open against it.
| Issue date | Notices still open on that one lot | Issued that day |
|---|---|---|
| 2018-02-02 | 11 | $5,500 |
| 2017-11-02 | 11 | $5,500 |
| 2017-08-02 | 11 | $5,500 |
| 2017-05-02 | 11 | $5,500 |
| 2019-05-02 | 1 | $500 |
Same lot, same owner, one calendar date, eleven notices. By the 2019 quarters the still open count is down to one, so ten of those addresses were dealt with and one was not.
Why the check asks the city to do the counting
A page of results is not a count. Our lookup runs two queries against that table: one for the notices a person can read, capped at 25, and a separate count over every open notice matching the building. The money comes off the count. One Brooklyn address in that table carries 45 open notices, which is $22,500 and is nine pages past where a reader would have stopped.
Each notice is priced flat at $500, because it is a charge that has already been issued rather than a meter still running. The panel prints the violation numbers alongside the total, so a managing agent can lay them against the notices already on the desk and see which ones match.
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