Built from the City’s own checkbook · FY2011–FY2026

The work starts.
The contract doesn’t.

Most New York City contracts only become legally payable at registration — the final stamp in a thirteen-step procurement pipeline. In the fiscal year that ended June 30, the City registered 2,350 contracts — worth $3.8B — after their start dates. The vendors, many of them nonprofits, had already been working. Some for years.

Every one of the 2,350 contracts registered late in FY26, in registration order. Line height shows how far past the start date it was registered; darker lines are larger contracts.

33.1%

of the 7,104 contracts registered in FY26 were registered late

$3.8B

in contract value registered after work had begun

40d

median wait past the start date — the mean is ≈5 months

9.6%

of recent late contracts were registered after the contract had already ended

Late = registered strictly afterthe start date — a stricter cut than the official dashboard’s, which reports a higher share. Same-day registrations are counted separately throughout. Methodology →

Why registration matters

No stamp, no payment

Registration is the moment a contract becomes legally payable. Budgets can’t be approved and invoices can’t move until it happens — however long ago the work began.

Vendors borrow to wait

Nonprofits running shelters and senior centers take bridge loans against City money they’ve already earned, paying interest on the City’s delay.

The small get squeezed out

Organizations without a capital cushion — disproportionately M/WBEs — are priced out of doing business with the City entirely.

Anatomy of a late contract

Thirteen steps. One deadline.

Before a City contract can pay a single invoice, it moves through a thirteen-step pipeline — solicitation, award, integrity review, budget checks, oversight approvals — spread across the agency, the Law Department, and the Mayor’s Office of Contract Services. Exactly one of those steps has a legally binding clock: the Comptroller must register or return a contract within 30 days of receiving it — a deadline that office reports it now beats by nearly half in practice.

The pending-queue data bears that out: contracts typically reach that final desk days before registration, after the years of delay have already happened upstream. The other twelve steps — the ones with no deadline — are where the time goes.

The procurement-to-registration pipeline, as documented in the Comptroller’s “Caught in the Slow Lane” report (January 2025). Only step 13 carries a charter-mandated deadline.

Registered 668 days lateHuman Services

$11.5M · United Community Schools Inc

Department of Education

July 1, 2023

Work begins — the contract’s official start date

April 29, 2025

Registration — 1.8 years later, the contract finally becomes payable

A nonprofit ran community-school programs inside New York City public schools for nearly two school years before the contract behind them became legally payable. For every day in between, it carried the cost of services the City had promised to fund — with no enforceable contract behind them.

The long arc · FY2011–FY2026

Lateness is falling — with a growing asterisk.

Since 2011 the share of contracts registered late has fallen from 50% to 33.1%, and the median delay for a late contract — 32 days then — peaked at 150 in FY19 before easing to 40. But over the same years, the share of contracts registered on exactly their start date nearly doubled, from 26% to 48%. Genuine improvement and start dates drifting to meet registration dates look identical on this chart; the composition below separates them.

Universe: 119,872 standard expense contracts (CT1, first registration), excluding emergency and Council-discretionary awards — the same exclusions the official dashboard applies.

Where each year’s registrations landed

FY19

FY20

FY21

FY22

FY23

FY24

FY25

FY26

early same-day ≤30d late 31–180d 181–365d >1 year

The same-day asterisk. A large block of contracts — 59% of human-services agreements, 48% of everything registered in FY26 — land on exactlytheir start date. That pattern is consistent with the official dashboard’s higher late count (77% in FY24, against 45% under the strict definition used here); counted either way, same-day registrations are not evidence of a healthy pipeline. They suggest start dates being set to whenever registration finally happens.

The July 1 pileup

One in six contracts starts on the same day.

The City’s fiscal year begins July 1 — and with it, thousands of human-services contracts: shelters, foster care, after-school programs, senior centers. Since FY23, 4,590 contracts (17% of all standard contracts the City registers) started on exactly that date. 70.5% of them were registered late — by a median of 252 days. The services start on schedule either way; nonprofits simply run them unpaid until winter.

Jan

Feb

Mar

Apr

May

Jun

Jul

Aug

Sep

Oct

Nov

Dec

Contract start dates by month, FY23–FY26 registrations. Full bar = all contracts; solid vermillion = registered late. 8,459 of these are human-services contracts, where late ones run a median 244 days behind.

The league table · FY23–FY26

Lateness has an address.

At NYC Health + Hospitals, 99% of standard contracts registered late. At Youth & Community Development, the median late contract waits 456 days. The official dashboard filters to one agency at a time; putting them side by side is what creates pressure to fix it.

rank by

#	Agency	% late	Median days late	$ registered late	Contracts
1	Borough President - Queens	100%	354	$606K	275
2	NYC Health + Hospitals	98.9%	212	$764.2M	544
3	Small Business Services (SBS)	98.5%	273	$594.5M	202
4	Law Department	95.6%	183	$127.5M	158
5	Dept. of Information Technology (OTI)	90.3%	58	$219.9M	538
6	CUNY Construction Fund	89.6%	34	$159.2M	212
7	Housing Preservation & Development (HPD)	87.8%	103	$1.2B	442
8	Office of the Comptroller	87.2%	88	$801.9M	265
9	Health & Mental Hygiene (DOHMH)	82.8%	45	$64.4M	2,155
10	Social Services (DSS / HRA)	79.7%	140	$1.2B	600
11	Mayoralty	77.7%	77	$130.0M	211
12	Board of Elections	76%	77	$104.5M	104

Agencies with at least 100 standard contract registrations since FY23. Late = registered after the contract start date. Trend line shows each agency’s yearly late share since FY19.

Who carries the float

The City’s safety net is its involuntary lender.

Set aside intergovernmental payments and office leases, and ranking vendors by dollars caught in late registration yields not consultants or construction giants but shelter operators, domestic-violence providers, and behavioral-health nonprofits. Until registration, they cover payroll and rent themselves, often with bridge loans. In FY24 alone the City held 5.69 billion dollar-years of contract value in retroactive limbo — each dollar of late contract value, multiplied by the years it waited — a financing burden pushed onto the vendors least able to carry it.

$972.5M

Common Ground Management Corp

Supportive-housing nonprofit

12/17 contracts late · avg 96 days behind

$767.8M

Urban Resource Institute

Domestic-violence shelter nonprofit

10/13 contracts late · avg 140 days behind

$747.7M

Samaritan Daytop Village Inc

Behavioral-health & shelter nonprofit

19/27 contracts late · avg 94 days behind

$599.5M

Riseboro Community Partnership Inc

Community services nonprofit

5/15 contracts late · avg 1.3 yrs behind

$514.1M

Help Social Service Corporation

Shelter operator nonprofit

17/20 contracts late · avg 58 days behind

$513.0M

Vocational Instruction Project Community Services Inc

Community services nonprofit

3/4 contracts late · avg 81 days behind

$292.1M

Westhab, Inc.

Housing & homeless services nonprofit

6/8 contracts late · avg 109 days behind

$234.0M

Services For The Underserved Inc

Behavioral-health nonprofit

5/8 contracts late · avg 41 days behind

Contract value registered after its start date, FY23–FY26, by prime vendor. Excluded from the cards: government and public-authority counterparties (MTA, NYCHA, Brooklyn Navy Yard), commercial landlords, and one construction-management firm — every underlying contract is in the explorer. 11,239 late contracts in total over the period.

The invisible backlog · snapshot July 10, 2026

$15.1B is late right now— and the dashboard doesn’t count it.

The official dashboard counts a contract only after it registers. That creates a blind spot with a name: survivorship bias. Sitting in the registration pipeline today are 325 contracts more than 30 days past their start date — worth $15.1B. Every one of them is already late by any definition — past start, past the Charter’s 30-day clock — yet none appear on the dashboard until the day they finally register. (Another 124 pending contracts sit inside the 30-day window and are excluded here.)

The median contract in this queue is 1,029 days past its start. A tenth are more than 8 years past. The record: a contract whose work began 29 years ago.

Each dot is one pending contract, placed by how far past its start date it is (log scale). Dot area shows contract value. Hover for details.

Vendor	Agency	Value	Past start	Reached Comptroller
Ipc Resiliency Partners	Department of Design and Construction	$1.4B	5 yrs	14d ago
Ipc Resiliency Partners	Department of Design and Construction	$1.4B	5 yrs	15d ago
Ipc Resiliency Partners	Department of Design and Construction	$1.4B	5 yrs	8d ago
Skanska Ecco Iii Hvr Jv	Department of Environmental Protection	$853.0M	2.0 yrs	4d ago
Skanska Ecco Iii Hvr Jv	Department of Environmental Protection	$850.9M	2.0 yrs	4d ago
Skanska Ecco Iii Hvr Jv	Department of Environmental Protection	$850.9M	2.0 yrs	4d ago
Governors Island Corporation	Department of Small Business Services	$491.8M	1.0 yrs	2d ago
American Bridge Company	Department of Transportation	$341.1M	8 yrs	25d ago

The last column is the tell: every contract in this queue reached the Comptroller’s desk — the only step with a 30-day legal limit — after its start date, most within the past few weeks (median 11 days ago). The years of delay happened upstream, in the twelve steps with no clock.

The tell

Even the contracts the City can see coming are late.

A renewal has no procurement mystery: the vendor is chosen, the terms are set, the date is known years ahead. Since FY23, 54.2% of the 1,392 contract renewals were still registered late — by a median of 132 days. Lateness here isn’t complexity. It’s process — and the Comptroller’s January 2025 report found the City’s accountability mechanisms have yet to produce meaningful change for the nonprofits doing the waiting.

Explore all 11,239 late contracts →Read the methodology