Your One-Stop Guide to the 2024 New York State Budget

According to the left-leaning Fiscal Policy Institute, the $237 billion in state spending was an inflation-adjusted decline of 0.4 percent from last year’s total budget.

Reserves The agreement leaves New York with $19.5 billion in principal reserves. According to a Division of Budget spokesperson, that represents about 14.5 percent of operating funds. Hochul had originally sought $500 million more in reserves.

Hochul has repeatedly touted her administration’s emphasis on maintaining reserves in case of economic downturn, calling 15 percent in reserves the “gold standard” for budgeting. In remarks earlier this month, Hochul noted that in the budget passed in 2020 – before she became governor – principal reserves were at just four percent.

Asylum seekers The final budget includes over $2.5 billion to house and support tens of thousands of migrants and asylum seekers who have come to New York in recent years. The money will be used to operate temporary shelters, place migrants in permanent housing, and provide social services like legal assistance and medical care, among other initiatives.

Housing Access Voucher A proposal to create a housing voucher for homeless or precariously housed New Yorkers was once again excluded from the state budget after appearing in both legislative budget proposals.

NYC Housing Regulations The budget includes several measures to lower barriers to new housing in New York City. Most notably, it removes a state-set cap on the size of apartment buildings in the city and creates a tax credit to help developers convert underused offices into housing. At least a quarter of the converted apartments must be affordable for low-income families.

Hochul’s proposal to allow illegal basement apartments to become legal if they are brought up to code did not make it in. In its place, the budget creates a much narrower program that will allow some areas of the city to opt in to allowing such conversions after a community engagement process.

Affordable Housing Insurance As the result of a measure advanced by Hochul, housing insurers will be prohibited from considering two factors when they decide to insure a building: whether tenants receive government housing vouchers and whether the building contains subsidized units. Insurers will also be barred from increasing the cost of insurance based on these factors.

Pro-Housing Communities The final budget includes a measure that will require towns or cities to become certified as “pro-housing communities” in order to be eligible for $650 million in state grants. There are a few ways to obtain that certification: For example, they could boost their housing stock by a set percentage or pass a resolution declaring their pro-housing intentions.

Developing Housing on State Property The budget includes $500 million over two years to fund housing development on state-owned land. Few details about this program are available, and it is likely to be years before any housing constructed using these funds opens for habitation.

Tenants' rights For years, the top priority of New York tenant advocates has been a proposal known as good cause eviction. The budget includes a measure that goes by that name, but is significantly narrower in scope.

The narrowed version included in the budget will protect some tenants from hefty rent hikes by limiting rent increases to no more than 10 percent per year during years when inflation is low. It will also guarantee that covered tenants can renew their leases each year, as long as they stay current on rent and follow the terms of their lease.

The legislation has significant exceptions. Here are some of the largest:

• It will initially apply only in New York City, with the option for other towns and cities to vote to opt in.

• Landlords who own fewer than 10 apartments — or another cutoff, as determined by localities — are exempt from its requirements.

• New buildings are excluded for 30 years.

• Coops and condos are excluded.

• Landlords can still evict tenants to take apartments off the market entirely.

Tenants rights groups have blasted the legislation as a dramatically weakened version of the original bill. Enforcing the law will be nearly impossible for tenants without lawyers, they charge, since there is no straightforward way for tenants to independently find out how many apartments their landlord owns. The law requires landlords claiming that they’re exempt from the law under this provision to provide tenants with the number and addresses of the units they own, but advocates note that landlords could simply lie.

The budget also includes a measure that will make it easier for landlords of rent-stabilized apartments to hike rents following renovations. Currently, landlords can’t recoup more than $15,000 of their expenses for renovations, paid off over fifteen years. That translates to a maximum monthly rent hike of about $89 per month.

The budget raises those amounts for vacant apartments. Landlords can now recoup $30,000 in renovation expenses, if the last tenant had lived in an apartment for less than 25 years, or $50,000, if the last tenant had lived there for longer.

Foundation aid This year, the state will increase its education spending to $36 billion total, including $24.9 billion in foundation aid.

Throughout the budget fight, Hochul pushed unsuccessfully to change the formula used for foundation aid, which determines how much state funding should go to each school district. Her proposed formula would have resulted in $454 million less in state education spending than planned, and dispensed with the Save Harmless provision, which mandates that school districts can never receive less funding than they did the prior year. Those changes didn’t make it into the budget.

But Hochul isn't giving up entirely. In her Monday speech outlining the initial budget agreement, Hochul announced that the Rockefeller Institute of Government would work with the State Education Department to study the Foundation Aid formula. “They’ll track down where the money is going to waste and how we can get every student the resources they need to learn, to thrive, to succeed,” she said.

Preserving mayoral control On the hotly contested issue known as "mayoral control," the legislature has decided to keep its trust in New York City Mayor Eric Adams, giving him continued oversight of the city’s public schools — but only for two years. (Adams and Hochul had pushed for four.)

Mayoral control went into effect in 2002, early in Michael Bloomberg’s tenure as mayor, replacing an earlier decentralized system run by local school boards. A recently published 296-page report commissioned by the State Department of Education was ambivalent as to whether it would be helpful to keep the system. “There is little evidence that any governance structure has reduced longstanding inequities in educational access and attainment among students,” the department wrote.

Learning to read The final budget directs $10 million to a trust run by the New York State United Teachers – the state’s largest union – to train educators in evidence-based reading instruction.

The budget also lays out the framework for implementing the science of reading, a method in which kids learn to sound words out so they can read new vocabulary without context clues. By January 1, 2025, the state will provide school districts with instructional best practices for teaching reading in pre-K through third grade. School districts will have until September of that year to verify that their reading instruction aligns with the state’s best practices.

Child care The final budget includes $1.8 billion in funding for the Office of Children and Family Services for child care.

This fund does not include new money for child care worker compensation, although both chambers proposed an additional $220 million to increase wages and keep child care professionals in the workforce. The proposal would have nearly doubled the state’s total workforce investment, according to the advocacy group Empire State Campaign for Child Care.

Also missing from the final budget is the legislature's plan to expand access to child care assistance for parents. Currently, some parents qualify for vouchers to help cover child care when they're at work, training, or pursuing an education, but the compensation is strictly time-limited and offers little flexibility. Late last year, Hochul vetoed a measure to loosen the time constraints — based on a questionable cost estimate — saying that “given the projected cost, this bill would be more appropriately considered in the context of the budget process.” It appears her office kept it out of the budget, too.

SUNY Downstate Hochul sparked controversy by proposing a $400 million plan to “transform” SUNY Downstate University Hospital in Brooklyn by closing its facility in East Flatbush, transferring inpatient services to nearby hospitals – and building a new outpatient clinic.

The final agreement will keep the financially struggling hospital open – at least for a year – after the legislature resisted the closure. The deal establishes an advisory board to issue recommendations about the hospital’s future, due on April 1 of next year. The agreement includes $100 million to cover short-term hospital operating costs, and $300 million for capital costs. That $300 million was originally part of Hochul’s plan to build the new outpatient clinic, but it will now be set aside until the board issues its finding.

Mental health services With mental health at the forefront of this year's budget discussions, the final legislation points billions at the issue and changes how health insurance companies reimburse for mental health and substance use disorder treatment.

The Office of Mental Health will receive nearly $3 billion in funding to pass on to localities, a roughly $300 million increase over last year. The vast majority of that will go to adult services: over $1 billion to residential community mental health programs, which can provide people with housing in addition to treatment, and another $449 million to their non-residential counterparts. The budget also sets aside $33 million of the locality funding to "improve public safety" through specialized programs for people who interact with the police and court system. A separate $423.6 million will go to children and youth services.

But the state will also cut the Office of Mental Health’s capital projects budget, which funds new construction and renovations for residential and inpatient facilities, from last year's $1.46 billion to $596 million. To cushion the blow, the state is increasing its borrowing limits for building out mental health infrastructure by roughly $500 million.

The budget also overhauled insurance companies' obligations to cover mental health and substance use treatment. For the first time, private insurers will have to pay for these services at or above minimum rates set by the state Medicaid program. New Yorkers with commercial insurance have historically struggled to find providers that accept their insurance, said Lauri Cole, Executive Director at New York State Council for Community Behavioral Healthcare. The change seeks to expand their access to treatment.

PAID COVID LEAVE New York is the only state that still has paid sick leave for Covid in effect — and the budget keeps those protections in place until July of next year. Hochul proposed sunsetting the law this July, but the Senate wanted to keep it in place for health care workers, and the Assembly wanted to preserve the full law indefinitely.

The resulting compromise is that the law will remain in place for another year. It requires large employers to provide at least 14 days of Covid sick leave yearly and medium-sized ones to provide at least five such sick days.

Prenatal leave The final budget guarantees pregnant New Yorkers 20 hours of paid prenatal leave to attend medical appointments. Though that’s less than the 40 hours that Hochul originally proposed in January, New York is now the first state in the nation with a mandatory prenatal leave program.

Medicaid The budget is expected to allocate $37 billion in state funds for Medicaid spending, according to a state Division of Budget spokesperson. The state share of Medicaid spending in last year’s budget was $31.2 billion, and Hochul had proposed in January a state share of $36.1 billion, according to the Empire Center for Public Policy.

Hochul had also proposed $1.2 billion in cuts to Medicaid programs. About $800 million of those cuts have been restored, and will go to reimbursement rate increases and support for financially distressed facilities.

Medicaid funding for hospital services will increase by up to $525 million. Up to $285 million more will go to nursing homes and $15 million to assisted living facilities. About half of those increases are likely to be state-funded.

The final agreement includes a budgetary trick meant to bring in billions of extra Medicaid dollars from the federal government. The legislature’s mid-March proposal said the plan would generate $4 billion, but the final budget does not appear to contain any revenue figure, according to Bill Hammond, a policy fellow at the Empire Center for Public Policy. “My impression is they’re leaving it unaddressed because they don’t know,” Hammond said.

Also included: Hochul’s contentious proposal to have a single company oversee a program providing home health care aids to chronically ill or disabled patients. These services are currently provided by hundreds of companies, and the program cost has been increasing rapidly. The shift will “save us $500 million every single year and allow us to start putting controls and guardrails in place,” the governor said on Monday.

Hammond said there will be a bidding process for the statewide contract for home care administration, but it won’t follow the process outlined in state competitive bidding law — and will not involve state comptroller review.

Opioid settlement funds The budget appropriates $86.2 million to local aid from the state’s opioid settlement fund, the pot of money recovered from pharmaceutical companies for their role in the opioid epidemic. The funding will be spent on a blend of responses to the overdose crisis, including housing, treatment, and harm reduction. About $26 million of the total will go straight to municipalities, which will have broad discretion over how to use the funds.

Overdose Prevention Centers Perhaps predictably, the most controversial strategy for stopping drug overdoses was dropped from the final budget.

Overdose prevention centers allow people to use illicit drugs under the supervision of medical staff. There are only two currently operating in New York, both in Manhattan. According to the organization that runs them, OnPoint NYC, the sites had reversed at least a thousand overdoses as of last August.

The Opioid Settlement Fund Advisory Board — which advises the state on how to spend money recovered from settlements with drug manufacturers and distributors over their role in the opioid epidemic — has recommended using some of the legal windfall to fund the centers twice over the past two years. Both times, Chinazo Cunningham, Hochul’s commissioner for addiction services, claimed that doing so would violate state and federal law. This year, the Senate suggested appropriating some of the opioid settlement funds for the centers anyway, but Hochul won out in the final budget.

Scheduling fentanyl analogs The final budget doesn’t include new drug criminalization measures after the legislature rejected Hochul’s proposal.

The governor’s plan, which mirrored policies passed in last year’s budget, would have added xylazine and additional fentanyl analogs to the state’s schedules of controlled substances, criminalizing their possession and sale. In an apparent change of heart from last year, both the Senate and Assembly excluded the provision from their budget proposals.

Advocates have pushed against scheduling new substances for years, arguing that it expands the war on drugs and does little to solve the underlying issues that lead to drug use.

Drug Checking Services A proposal to help people test their drugs before using them was excluded from the final budget.

The Senate’s proposal to create drug-checking services would have required the Office of Addiction Services and Supports to connect people with contracted vendors to test their drugs while giving legal immunity to providers and clients.

Proponents of the effort argue that it would not only have helped people use substances more safely, but also let officials collect data on the drug supply so they could react more quickly.

In its response to the opioid crisis, New York has struggled to keep up with changes in the drug supply. The state Department of Health found that the fentanyl analog xylazine was involved in one-fifth of all fentanyl-related deaths in New York City in 2021, but didn't release that information until a year and a half later.

The legislature will try another route: A standalone bill to create drug-checking services moved out of the Senate health committee last week and will now go before the finance committee.

Dispensaries After years of losing money to an unregulated black market, the state will arm local governments with new authority to crack down on illicit cannabis dispensaries. Cities and counties can now pass laws granting themselves broad discretion to close unregistered storefronts, seize their assets, and bring civil proceedings against the operators.

Under current law, only the state Office of Cannabis Management and Department of Taxation and Finance can investigate and shut down unregistered dispensaries.

While news reports say that anywhere from 1,500 to 2,000 illegal dispensaries have cropped up, no one has an accurate estimate, according to the Office of Cannabis Management’s director of enforcement.

What’s clear is that New York is hemorrhaging potential tax revenue from cannabis. In 2018, when legalization was first on the table, New York City’s then-comptroller, Scott Stringer, predicted that the state could reap up to $436 million in annual taxes from it, but Hochul’s financial plan projected just $70 million in non-medical cannabis revenue over this past fiscal year.

Hochul included a version of the measure in her January budget proposal, as did the Senate.

Weaning off natural gas New York’s climate law requires the state to largely phase out fossil fuels by 2050. But an older law requires utilities to supply gas to any customer who wants it — and subsidizes the gas system’s expansion.

A landmark proposal to resolve this contradiction and wean the state off gas — the NY HEAT Act — was the biggest climate item on the budget table this year. Both the governor and Senate backed it. The Assembly did not, and National Fuel, an upstate gas utility, lobbied heavily against it. It didn’t make the final budget.

Funding for clean water Since 2017, New York has spent $500 million a year upgrading its drinking water and wastewater infrastructure. This year, Hochul sought to cut that in half by stretching the spending across two years. The Senate and the Assembly, backed by a chorus of environmental advocates, roundly rebuffed the attempt, and prevailed in the final budget. New York will again spend a half-billion dollars on water infrastructure over the coming year.

Accelerating transmission for renewables New York is far behind on its mandate to build renewables, and that’s partly because there aren’t enough power lines to move new clean energy to where it’s most needed. This year, Hochul proposed to build power lines faster by moving the permitting process to the purview of the Office of Renewable Energy Siting (ORES). The legislature sought significant changes to Hochul’s proposal, adding labor protections and, most controversially, a slew of new requirements for energy projects built on farmland.

The bulk of the Assembly’s proposed labor language made it into the final budget deal. Virtually all publicly funded energy projects will now need to pay union-level wages, use US-made iron and steel, and enter into “labor peace agreements.” The farmland protections, which the Senate was pushing, did not make the final cut, nor did the chamber's proposal to expand ORES’s mandate to include battery storage. The final budget does require more public input and legislative oversight than Hochul originally proposed.

RENEWABLE ENERGY TAX CREDIT The budget does not include a proposal from the Senate to increase tax credits for residential solar and geothermal energy, a boost that had been sought by climate hawks. Under current law, homeowners can receive a tax credit of up to $5,000 for installing solar or geothermal energy equipment. The Senate’s initial budget proposal would have doubled the maximum credit and made it fully refundable, meaning people could receive it as a refund if it was larger than what they owed in taxes.

While the state dropped the expansion, the federal government announced on April 22 that New York would be receiving a $250 million grant to help low-income households install rooftop solar.

The budget did include a small boost to residential energy storage projects, making them exempt from sales taxes.

ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION FUND The final budget does not include Hochul’s plan to divert funding from the Environmental Protection Fund, a pool of money dedicated to land conservation, parks, climate, and other environmental projects. Continuing a long Albany tradition, the governor sought to allocate a portion of its cash to staffing and other costs of administering the fund. As usual, the legislature rejected the effort, on the grounds that the fund is strictly intended to pay for the one-time “capital” expenses of these projects, not administration, which is funded elsewhere in the budget. The fund will get a clean $400 million, like last year.

UTILITY BILL ASSISTANCE An Assembly proposal to infuse $200 million into energy affordability programs, administered by utilities, did not make it into the final budget. New Yorkers are still digging themselves out of a mountain of utility bill debt, which peaked during the pandemic and has barely dipped. According to filings reviewed by the Public Utility Law Project, some 1.3 million households owe the state’s major energy utilities a combined $1.7 billion, an average of more than $1,200 per household. This budget season saw a few proposals aimed at reducing that burden, including the NY HEAT Act. But the Assembly proposal was the most direct.

Lawmakers did approve a separate $50 million for a green retrofit program called EmPower+, so that participating households’ utility bills are capped at six percent of their incomes.

Reform Legislation No major criminal justice reform proposals made it into this year's budget.

The Challenging Wrongful Convictions Act, which Hochul vetoed last year and the Senate included in its budget proposal, would have made it easier for people who took plea deals to appeal their convictions, including by introducing new DNA evidence. The End Predatory Court Fees Act, also pushed by the Senate, would have banned court fees and associated penalties, namely incarcerating people for failing to pay them and garnishing unpaid fees from prison commissary accounts. And the Connecting Families Act, included in the Assembly’s proposal, would have made prison phone calls and other communications free.

Prison Closures The state’s prison population is less than half of what it was a few decades ago, and the prison system doesn’t have enough staff for all of its facilities. The budget will make it easier for New York to keep closing facilities: The governor will be able to close up to five prisons over the next year with only 90 days’ notice, a fraction of the legally mandated year-long process.

Bail and Discovery There are no changes to bail or discovery law in this year’s budget — leaving a major area of conflict from past years untouched.

Since Hochul became governor, budget negotiations have often gotten stuck on the status of New York’s 2019 criminal justice reforms. The governor has forced through legal changes to make it easier to keep people in jail, and she’s sought unsuccessfully to roll back requirements for prosecutors to share evidence with the defense in a timely manner.

Last year, Hochul declared that she was finished pushing for reform rollbacks in the budget. This year, she kept her word.

Retail theft crackdown Every year, Hochul throws the policy boot at a crime topic that’s in the news. This year, it’s retail theft.

She won seemingly every item she proposed — a policy list she virtually copy-and-pasted from her gun crime initiatives from previous years’ budgets. State budget bills will make assaulting a retail worker a felony and establish criminal penalties for knowingly fostering the sale of stolen items. They’ll also allow authorities to charge people with felony grand larceny if they’re alleged to have committed multiple thefts as part of a “common scheme or plan” — even if they weren’t against the same retailer. And Hochul will direct $40 million from the budget to local police, prosecutors, and the State Police to crack down on retail theft.

New hate crimes Hochul also managed to increase the number of offenses that can be categorized as hate crimes, automatically raising them to “violent felony” status. As a result of the elevated severity, people who are found guilty of these crimes may have years added to their sentences. The budget will add dozens of new offenses — including falsely reporting an incident, weapons possession infractions, and certain sex crimes — to the list of eligible hate crimes.

No Taxing the rich One thing that won't be in this year's budget: a new tax on the wealthy. The Senate and Assembly proposed $2 billion worth of tax hikes on ultra-high-income New Yorkers and large corporations for this year’s state budget, while Hochul repeatedly pledged that she would not approve any increased taxes. The governor won out. The budget will not raise any income or corporate taxes.

Empire AI Hochul wants to make New York the nation’s leader in artificial intelligence research. The final budget will set aside $275 million in state funds to launch Empire AI, an artificial intelligence research consortium headquartered at the University at Buffalo.

$250 million of that funding will go to capital grants. $25 million over ten years will go to State University of New York.

SHOVEL-READY SITES The final budget includes $100 million for the Focused Attraction of Shovel-Ready Tracts New York, or FAST NY, program.

Hochul created the program in 2022 to use state funds to develop shovel-ready sites, like the STAMP industrial park in Genesee County. A site is shovel-ready when the necessary infrastructure and permitting are already in place, making it easier for an interested business to set up shop. The state markets these sites to a variety of industries — including high-tech manufacturing and renewable energy — in hopes the projects will create jobs and bolster local economies.

WAGE THEFT No new provisions to tackle wage theft made it into the budget. The Hochul administration has said that the issue is a top priority, even as the Labor Department has lagged in recovering stolen wages.

Hochul’s January budget proposal included a modest reform to crack down on wage theft, and the Senate backed a more robust plan to strengthen enforcement against wage theft. They could now be considered as standalone bills during the final weeks of the legislative session.

DISABILITY BENEFITS A measure to boost disability benefits for New Yorkers temporarily unable to work was excluded from the budget, even though Hochul and both houses of the legislature proposed a version of it earlier this year.

Currently, the maximum weekly disability benefit is $170, an amount that hasn’t changed since 1989. Hochul’s proposal would have boosted it to over $1,100 by 2029. The Senate proposed a similar measure with a slightly faster timeline and more expansive benefits. The differences were not bridged during budget negotiations, and the proposal was eventually dropped.

Senator Jessica Ramos, who sponsors a standalone bill to raise disability benefits significantly, told the Albany Times-Union that getting this change done will be a “top priority” of hers for the remainder of the legislative session.

New York City Bus Service In another step intended to prepare New York City for congestion pricing, lawmakers want to ensure that its transit system is ready to welcome more passengers. To that end, they secured just over $12 million in new funding for buses, aiming to increase service and reliability on about 20 routes.

That sum is far less than the Senate and Assembly's original ask. The legislature had requested $90 million to be split evenly between expanding the MTA’s fare-free pilot — to cover a total of 15 lines over the next year — and improving service on other lines.

The final budget deal did not extend or expand the fare-free program. Later this year, riders on the five currently free lines will have to go back to paying. 

Lower speed limits in New York City Lawmakers reached a deal giving New York City the power to lower speed limits to 20 miles per hour, or 15 mph in school zones. Major thoroughfares outside Manhattan with three or more lanes in either direction will be exempt. Some advocates have raised concerns that this will leave out some of the deadliest roads in the rest of the city.

Still, the budget deal was a hard-fought win for safe streets advocates, who have been championing “Sammy’s Law” — named after a 12-year-old killed by a driver in Brooklyn — for nearly four years.