Charter of the City of New York!

Made possible by BetaNYC’s nyc-charter-laws-rules, which makes the Charter machine-readable.

Ask the Charter a question plain-language Q&A in NotebookLM →

Note: the NotebookLM notebook is updated manually, so it may lag the latest amendments — this page is the up-to-date source.

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Search: "quotes" for an exact phrase, -word to exclude, OR to match either. Each section: select text and highlight just that passage (or highlight with nothing selected for the whole section), add a note, or share it — saved privately in this browser.

About this tool. The full text of the New York City Charter, made searchable and sortable. Currency and source noted above. Compiled from the American Legal Publishing code library (codelibrary.amlegal.com) via the open BetaNYC nyc-charter-laws-rules dataset. For research and informational purposes only — not legal advice. Verify against the official code before relying on any provision.

About the "amended" dates. Amendment years and counts are parsed from the editor's notes in the source, which record changes by Local Law number and date. This dates a section's most recent recorded statutory change — it is not Charter Revision Commission attribution. Charter amendments adopted by ballot referendum are not consistently Local-Law-numbered, so this view cannot say which Charter Revision Commission produced a given change. About half of sections (388 of 770) carry a Local Law amendment note; absence of a date means no amendment is recorded in the source, not necessarily that a section is unchanged. An "eff. YYYY" tag marks a change with a future effective date that is on record but not yet in force.

Charter Revision Commission tags. The "CRC" badge and the "revision commission" filter mark sections changed by a passed ballot proposal from the 2018, 2019, 2024 or 2025 Charter Revision Commissions. This mapping is built separately from the amendment data above: section lists were taken from each commission's official "Proposed Charter Amendment Text" (enacting clauses only), independently re-extracted and checked against the source documents. Proposals that failed at the ballot (2024 Q6 MWBE/modernization; 2025 Q6 even-year elections) did not change the Charter and are not tagged. Section 1152 (the Charter's effective-date section) is touched by nearly every proposal. Sources: official CRC reports at nyc.gov/site/charter; see data/crc-map.json in the repository for the full mapping and source URLs.

Change history — a dated log of when the Charter text in this tool last changed.