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New York has no dog bite statute that makes an owner pay automatically. Liability starts with the vicious propensity rule: an owner who knew, or should have known, that a dog was likely to hurt someone is strictly liable for the harm it causes. On April 17, 2025 the Court of Appeals added a second route. In Flanders v Goodfellow it overruled Bard v Jahnke and restored ordinary negligence claims against the owner of a domestic animal, so a New York victim now has two theories instead of one.
This page covers both routes, what counts as notice, local leash rules, who else can be responsible, comparative fault, a child’s case, the three year deadline and the much shorter ninety day deadline when a public entity is involved, what the dangerous dog law does for a victim, and how insurance pays, including New York’s ban on breed based underwriting.
Dog Bite Laws focuses on dog attack cases. Talk to us for free, and pay no fee unless we recover for you.
New York has no general civil dog bite statute, and no version of the strict liability bite statutes California and Wisconsin use. What it has is a rule New York courts have applied for more than two centuries: an owner who knows or should have known of a dog’s vicious propensities is liable for the harm those propensities cause. Once that knowledge is established the owner faces strict liability, and how careful the owner was stops mattering.
A vicious propensity is broader than the word sounds. The Court defines it as a propensity to do any act that might endanger the safety of other people or their property, and in 2025 restated it as any behavior reflecting a proclivity to act in a way that puts others at risk. Evidence that a dog growled, snapped or bared its teeth can raise the question, and so can the way the owner chose to restrain it and whether it was kept as a guard dog. So the claim has four parts: the defendant kept the dog, the dog had a vicious propensity, the owner knew or should have known, and that propensity is what hurt you.
You will see New York called a one bite state. That label does not fit, and the Court of Appeals has said so twice, calling the shorthand a misnomer and warning that the rule gives owners no automatic free bite. A first bite can support liability if the owner already knew from other behavior that the dog was dangerous.
This matters more than anything else on the page, because a lot of what is published about New York dog bites is out of date. From 2006 until April 17, 2025 a victim here had one route. Bard v Jahnke held that liability for harm caused by a domestic animal is determined solely by the vicious propensity rule, so there was no negligence claim against the owner at all.
On April 17, 2025 the Court of Appeals decided Flanders v Goodfellow and held, in its own words, that it was overruling Bard to the extent that it bars negligence liability for harm caused by domestic animals. The decision was unanimous. The Court called the old rule unworkable and, in some circumstances, unfair, and said shutting off negligence liability shifted the burden of care and the cost of injuries onto the people animals hurt. It was a bite case: a postal carrier delivering a package was bitten in the shoulder by a dog that got past its owner through an open door.
The rule that governs New York now is a choice. If the owner knew or should have known the animal had vicious propensities, you may seek to hold the owner strictly liable. Or you can rely on ordinary negligence and prove the owner failed to exercise due care. Both can be brought in the same case.
Flanders did not make owners automatically liable, and it did not say how it applies to bites before April 17, 2025. If you were bitten before that date, ask a lawyer how the change affects your case rather than assuming either way.
On the strict liability route this is where New York cases are won and lost. Prior acts of a similar kind the owner knew about will do it, and so will evidence the dog had been known to growl, snap or bare its teeth, with no prior bite at all. Whether the owner restrained the dog, and how, is relevant, and keeping a guard dog can support an inference the owner knew. Not enough on its own: a dog kept enclosed or chained, or one that previously barked. In the Court’s words, barking and running around are what dogs do.
The 2025 decision changed what happens when an owner says nobody ever complained. Two other postal workers swore statements describing a dog that barked, snarled and slammed into the window glass as though trying to bite through it, loudly enough that anyone home would have known. Neither had reported it, and the Court held the owners’ claimed ignorance was a credibility question for a jury.
So gather evidence in the first week:
New York has no statewide leash law. State law lets each municipality set its own rules on keeping dogs and on dogs running at large, so the rule that applied to your bite is local. New York City and Yonkers both cap a leash in public at six feet. Buffalo requires dogs to be kept from leaving the owner’s premises and held securely in leash off them. Rochester requires dogs off the owner’s premises to be leashed, unless they are on another person’s property with that person’s consent, and Syracuse requires a leash anywhere except property the owner owns or leases, or other property where permission has been obtained.
What a violation proves is narrower than it sounds. A leash violation here has never been automatic liability. It was treated as some evidence of negligence. In 2009 the Court of Appeals went further and called a leash violation irrelevant in a dog case, because negligence was no longer a basis for liability at all. That reasoning rested on Bard, and Bard’s negligence bar is gone. Since negligence is a live theory again, what a leash violation is worth in your case is something to work through with a lawyer.
Separately, the violation is useful evidence. It fixes who had control of the dog, shows it was loose where it should not have been, and usually creates a city record. Photograph the gate, fence and any broken latch before anything is repaired.
New York defines owner far more broadly than the dog license does. An owner is any person who harbors or keeps a dog, and to harbor means simply to provide food or shelter to a dog.
The clearest decision came out of an attack on a four year old boy by three dogs that escaped a rented house nearby. The dogs belonged to one housemate, and the court held cotenants can be strictly liable where they took part in the dogs’ care enough to have joined the owner in harboring them. What defeated the housemates was ordinary household conduct: they were on the lease, the dogs roamed freely, and they fed them and let them out. Harboring generally means making a dog part of your household.
There are limits. A visitor does not become a harborer because a dog is present. In 2026 an appellate court restated the outer edge: someone who neither owned, harbored nor controlled the dog, and did not allow it on their premises, is not liable.
So identify the registered owner, anyone who fed or sheltered the dog, whoever was handling it, the landlord and any business that had custody. If the dog belongs to a teenager, the route to the parents is not New York’s parental liability statute, which covers property damage only, caps recovery at five thousand dollars and reaches only children over ten and under eighteen. It is that the parent harbors the dog. More on what determines ownership of a dog.
New York does not treat provocation as an on or off switch. Under the state’s comparative fault statute, culpable conduct by the injured person, including contributory negligence and assumption of risk, does not bar recovery. It reduces the award in proportion to that conduct. So when an insurer says you provoked the dog, it is really arguing about a percentage.
Provocation does appear in New York’s dangerous dog statute, and the list is broad: a dog will not be declared dangerous if it was responding to someone committing a crime against its owner or the owner’s property, to someone tormenting, abusing or physically threatening the dog or its offspring, including in the past, or to its own pain, or if it was protecting itself or its household. That list governs the dangerous dog proceeding, and the statute’s medical costs claim is subject to it, rather than your common law claim, but the defense borrows it.
New York courts are still working out how provocation and assumption of risk operate now that a negligence track sits alongside strict liability. What has not changed is that the owner has to raise and prove you were at fault, and if you were doing something ordinary there is usually little for the defense to work with. Read more about dog bite provocation, and whether a child can provoke a dog.
New York is a pure comparative fault state. The statute says culpable conduct attributable to the claimant shall not bar recovery, and that damages are diminished in the proportion that conduct bears to all the conduct that caused the harm. There is no fifty percent cutoff and no fifty one percent cutoff, unlike Texas and Wisconsin, where crossing a threshold ends the claim outright.
As an illustration, if a jury values the harm at one hundred thousand dollars and finds the injured person twenty percent responsible, the award drops by that twenty percent. Had it found seventy percent, the claim still would not be cut off. It would be reduced by seventy percent.
Comparative fault is an affirmative defense the other side has to raise and prove, so you do not have to prove you were careful. A 2026 amendment added a narrower rule for certain motor vehicle claims under New York’s no fault law, and a dog bite is not a motor vehicle claim, so the pure rule applies. Because fault percentages come out of the victim’s own account, do not give a recorded statement to the insurer first.
Children are often bitten by dogs they know, in places they feel safe, and often on the face, head and neck. The New York City Health Department’s analysis of 2014 data found the emergency department visit rate for dog bite injuries among children seventeen and younger was 1.5 times the adult rate, 101.8 per 100,000 compared with 67.9, with children five to twelve highest at 113.7 per 100,000. Those are New York City residents, for that year. The same report found reported bites to children were likelier than bites to adults to involve a dog owned within the household and to happen in the victim’s own home, and that among children twelve and younger, thirty two percent happened while the child was playing with or near a dog.
Timing matters more in a child’s case than in an adult’s. Facial scarring changes as a child grows, scar maturation can take a year or more, and revision surgery is often staged over years and may be deferred until growth is complete, so do not settle before a surgeon has said what the final scar will look like. The emotional injury is real, and it is worth documenting. Read about emotional trauma after a dog attack.
A child’s own deadline is different and generally longer, and the ordinary ten year outer limit on that extension does not apply where the disability is infancy, outside medical, dental and podiatric malpractice cases. That is not a reason to wait: a parent’s own claim can run on the ordinary clock, and a public entity’s ninety day deadline may apply regardless of the child’s age.
A landlord is not automatically responsible for a tenant’s dog. To hold one strictly liable, the injured person has to show the landlord had notice a dog was being harbored on the premises, knew or should have known the dog had vicious propensities, and had enough control of the premises to remove or confine it. The rule began with a 1984 case in which a landlord leased to a tenant she already knew kept a dog she had seen acting ferocious. This is not the strict liability the tenant faces. Landlords must use reasonable care not to expose others to unreasonable risk.
These cases are usually lost on notice. In a 2024 case a delivery worker bitten in a housing authority building testified he had complained about the dog once before to one of the authority’s employees. That was not enough, because he could not identify the employee or produce any record of the complaint. So complain in writing and use the building’s own complaint system, so there is a reference number. A managing agent’s knowledge can be attributed to the owner.
Since April 2025 a landlord may also face an ordinary negligence claim, and one New York trial court has said so directly, though that is a trial level decision rather than settled law. There are limits the other way: a business that neither owned, harbored nor controlled the dog and did not own the place where the bite happened owes no duty at all. Veterinary clinics are one clear example of a non owner defendant, because in 2020 the Court of Appeals held a clinic can be sued in ordinary negligence without notice of a vicious propensity. Whether that reaches groomers, boarders and trainers has not been decided as far as we have found.
The ordinary New York deadline is three years from the date of the bite for a claim against a private dog owner, landlord or business. In a fatal attack the deadline is two years from the date of death, and the claim belongs to the representative of the estate rather than to family members directly.
Then there is the deadline that ruins New York cases. If a city, county, town, village, school district, fire district, public housing authority or other public corporation is involved, a sworn written notice of claim is generally due within ninety days of the bite, and the lawsuit has to be brought within one year and ninety days, not three years. A court can extend the ninety days, but only at its discretion and never past the underlying deadline, so treat it as a hard date. If the State of New York is involved, the clock is also ninety days: either the claim is filed and served then, or a written notice of intention is, which allows two years.
Other public bodies, including transit authorities, have their own notice rules, so the right one has to be confirmed for the defendant. And none of these pauses the clocks: not the animal control case, not a criminal case, and not a talk with an adjuster. Learn more about the dog bite statute of limitations.
A dog bite is often a puncture injury and a crush injury at once. Teeth drive bacteria deep into tissue while the jaw compresses everything around it, so a small looking wound can be serious underneath. Common patterns include:
The scale is easiest to see in New York City, where the Health Department has analyzed hospital data. Among city residents from 2007 to 2014 there were an average of 6,028 emergency department visits and 315 inpatient hospitalizations for dog bite injuries each year. Of the bites reported to the city in 2014 with an injury description, six percent were severe, meaning more than five stitches or staples, a bone fracture, a joint dislocation, hospitalization or surgery.
New York has no statutory cap on what a dog bite victim can recover. Instead an appellate court can adjust an award that deviates materially from reasonable compensation, which is why no honest lawyer quotes a number on the first call. A New York claim is itemized, and usually includes:
Health insurance payments are subtracted only from the economic part of the award, never from pain and suffering, and the judge does that after the verdict, so the jury hears what the care was worth. Money raised for you by friends, family or an online fundraiser is protected by statute.
Punitive damages are rare here. New York requires conduct showing spite or malice, or such conscious and deliberate disregard for others that it can be called willful or wanton, and something more than the mere commission of a tort is always required. An owner who ignored a court order to muzzle a dog already found dangerous is the kind of case where they get argued. Read more about dog bite compensation.
New York’s dangerous dog law sits in an animal control and criminal chapter, not a civil dog bite statute. Its dangerous dog sections apply everywhere in the state, New York City included, and no municipality may regulate dangerous dogs by breed.
The proceeding is fast, and a victim can start it. Anyone who witnessed an attack or a threatened attack can complain to a dog control officer or police officer, and an adult can do it for a child. That officer has to tell you that you can bring the proceeding yourself and, if there is reason to believe the dog is dangerous, has to bring it. A municipal judge hears it within five days, on clear and convincing evidence.
On a finding, spaying or neutering and microchipping are mandatory, and the court adds one or more of secure confinement, leashing by an adult in public, muzzling, behavior training at the owner’s cost, or a liability policy capped at one hundred thousand dollars. Euthanasia is discretionary, needs specific aggravating facts, and is stayed by an appeal, so nobody should promise that the dog will be put down.
Now the provision that gets misdescribed constantly. Section 123(10) makes the owner or lawful custodian of a dangerous dog strictly liable for medical costs resulting from an injury that dog causes. Medical costs, and nothing else: not pain and suffering, not scarring, not lost wages, not a parent’s own claim. Whether it applies when a dog has not already been declared dangerous by a court is an open question New York trial courts have answered both ways. Two notes on the citation: the provision is section 123(10), not 121(10), which was its number before a 2010 renumbering, and section 121 today is a night quarantine rule.
What the case is worth to you is evidence. The statute says its remedies are in addition to any common law claim, so a finding is evidence of a vicious propensity rather than proof of liability. If the dog was already found dangerous before it bit you, get that file and find out whether the owner obeyed the conditions. A violated muzzle or confinement order is powerful negligence evidence in a New York dog case.
People want a number, and we would rather explain why we do not give one than hand over a figure we cannot stand behind. We have not found a published, verifiable average settlement figure for New York bite cases, and the numbers circulating online are generally not traceable to any New York source. What drives value here is a short list:
Realistic value is anchored to comparable New York results rather than to a national average. Our New York average dog bite settlement page explains how claims are valued, and the dog bite settlement calculator shows how the pieces fit together. Neither is a prediction. Wait until a treating doctor has said what your scarring and function will look like before you settle.
In New York cases the money usually comes from the dog owner’s homeowners or renters policy, and the insurer rather than the owner pays the settlement and the defense. The Insurance Information Institute describes typical liability limits of one hundred thousand to three hundred thousand dollars, with the owner personally responsible above the limit. New York does not require a dog owner to carry insurance, except that a court finding a dog dangerous may order a policy capped at one hundred thousand dollars.
New York has a rule worth knowing, and it favors victims. Insurance Law 3421, enacted in 2021, says that for homeowners policies no insurer may refuse to issue or renew, cancel, charge or impose an increased premium or rate, or exclude, limit, restrict or reduce coverage based solely upon harboring or owning any dog of a specific breed or mixture of breeds. One exception: an insurer may act on a specific dog’s designation as dangerous under the state’s dangerous dog law, and then only on sound underwriting and actuarial principles. This is not a general ban on breed discrimination. It reaches homeowners insurance policies as the Insurance Law defines them, and says nothing about a lease or a homeowners association rule. What it means for you is that a breed based denial may itself be unlawful here, so do not accept we do not cover that breed at face value.
One number is worth knowing. In 2025 the average homeowners insurance claim for a dog related injury in New York was $92,154, the highest average of any state, and New York ranked seventh in the country by the number of such claims at 1,308, according to the Insurance Information Institute and State Farm. Those are insurance claims rather than bites, and the source’s own footnote says they include other dog related injuries such as fractures. It is a claim cost figure, not a statement about New York dogs.
Ask the owner for their insurer and policy number, even if they rent. If the bite happened in a building common area or at a business, there may be a separate commercial policy.
Take these in order. The first four protect your health, the rest your claim.
Dog Bite Laws focuses on cases involving people hurt by dogs, and we think that focus matters in New York. Many cases here turn on one question, whether the owner knew or should have known, and the answer usually sits with people nobody has interviewed: the neighbors, the delivery drivers, the mail carrier. We go after that evidence early, before a dog is rehomed and a fence is repaired.
We also know the parts of New York practice that quietly decide cases. We get the animal control file, every prior complaint about the dog and the address, the rabies record and any earlier dangerous dog order, and we check whether its conditions were obeyed. We bring both routes, and we watch the ninety day public entity deadline.
We handle the insurer, gather the records, negotiate medical liens and go to court if the offer is not fair. There are no upfront costs and no fee unless we recover for you. Learn how to file a dog bite claim, read about Michael Agruss, or get in touch with Dog Bite Laws for a free consultation.
You have to show the owner knew or should have known the dog had a vicious propensity, which the Court of Appeals defines as any behavior reflecting a proclivity to act in a way that puts others at risk. A prior bite is not required. Growling, snapping, baring teeth, lunging, being kept as a guard dog, and how the dog was restrained all count. Barking alone, or being kept enclosed, does not.
Possibly, and it is worth asking about specifically. Before April 17, 2025 New York allowed only strict liability for known vicious propensities. Flanders v Goodfellow restored ordinary negligence claims on that date, but the Court did not address how the change applies to bites that happened earlier. Do not assume either answer. Your strict liability claim is unaffected, and a lawyer can tell you what the change means for your dates.
No. In a dog bite claim New York reduces, it does not bar. Your award is cut by whatever percentage of the fault is yours, and in a dog bite claim there is no cutoff percentage that ends the case. The dog owner also has to raise and prove that you were at fault, rather than you having to prove you were careful. That is why you should not describe the incident to an adjuster before speaking with a lawyer.
The calendar. When a public corporation is involved, a sworn written notice of claim is generally due within ninety days of the bite and the lawsuit within one year and ninety days, instead of the usual three years. If the State of New York is involved, you have ninety days to file the claim or serve a notice of intention. A court can sometimes extend the ninety days, but it is discretionary. Call a lawyer in days, not weeks.
Not by itself. A dangerous dog finding can require spaying or neutering, microchipping, confinement, leashing, muzzling, training and sometimes insurance, and it is strong evidence that the dog had a vicious propensity. It is not a way to get paid. The statute's strict liability provision covers medical costs only, courts disagree about whether it needs a prior finding, and the civil penalties in that law are fines paid to the government, not to you.
Generally no. Insurance Law 3421 prohibits a homeowners insurer from refusing to issue or renew, canceling, charging more, or excluding, limiting, restricting or reducing coverage based solely on harboring or owning a dog of a specific breed or mixture of breeds. The exception is a dog actually designated dangerous under the state dangerous dog law. So do not assume a breed means there is no coverage for your claim.
No, and the Court of Appeals has rejected that shorthand twice, once calling it a misnomer and once saying the rule does not give owners an automatic free bite. A first bite can support liability if the owner already knew the dog was likely to hurt someone from other behavior. What matters is the owner's knowledge of the risk, not the count of previous bites.
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