TLC Summons Statistics: OATH Data, 2014–2025

In short: In 2025, about 61,900 summonses against taxi and for-hire vehicle (FHV) drivers, owners and bases were filed at OATH, the city court that hears TLC cases. That is roughly 40% fewer than in 2019. TLC inspectors wrote about 88% of recent summonses and Port Authority Police most of the rest. A traffic rule, 80-13(a)(2) (non-hazardous moving violations), is the code that appears most often.

This page is the starting point for our data section. It uses one official source: the OATH Hearings Division Case Status dataset on NYC Open Data. Below you'll find the headline numbers, what they mean for a driver holding a summons, and, just as important, what this data cannot tell you.

The headline numbers

These are counts of summonses, not findings. A summons is an accusation. Each one goes to a hearing at OATH (the Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings), where the respondent can admit, fight, or in some cases settle. See how OATH hearings work.

Summonses by year and agency

Two things stand out. First, the 2020 drop: summonses fell by about half when the pandemic emptied the streets, and they never went back to pre-2020 levels. Since 2021 the yearly total has been fairly flat, between 60,868 and 64,105. Second, the Port Authority Police share has grown. It was about 6% in 2019 and reached 16.7% in 2024 and 14.3% in 2025. We look at that shift on the Port Authority summons page.

For the longer view back to 1992 and the reasons the older years need care, see TLC summonses by year.

Who writes the summonses

The NYPD slice is tiny because this dataset only holds summonses filed at OATH under the taxi caseload. Ordinary (non-criminal) traffic tickets written in the five boroughs are handled by the state DMV's Traffic Violations Bureau, not OATH. That ticket can still matter to your TLC license through DMV points; see DMV points for TLC drivers and the Persistent Violator Program.

Which rule codes appear most

The top of the list is dominated by driving rules in chapter 80: moving violations, stop signs, red lights and parking or standing. Next come owner and vehicle rules in chapter 59A (for-hire vehicles) and 58 (medallion taxis), such as missed inspections and ignoring TLC directives. Then come unlicensed-activity codes from the NYC Administrative Code. We decode every code on the list in the most common TLC violations.

What this means if you have a summons

The numbers are big, but your case is decided on its own facts. A few practical points follow from the data:

• Check that your summons is in the record. Every row has a ticket number and a scheduled hearing date. Use our summons lookup or the steps in how to check your TLC summons status.
• Note the code and the date. The code tells you which rule TLC says you broke. The penalty, points and whether you must appear in person depend on that code. Our summons decoder explains what each field means.
• Don't miss the hearing date. OATH says that if you do not respond by the hearing date you are found in violation by default, and a higher fine may be imposed (OATH). See what happens after a missed hearing.

What this data can and cannot tell you

It can tell you:

• How many taxi/FHV summonses were filed at OATH, by violation date, year or month.
• Which agency wrote them (TLC, Port Authority Police or NYPD).
• Which rule code was listed first on each summons.
• When hearings were scheduled.

It cannot tell you:

• Outcomes. For taxi rows, the hearing result, penalty imposed, amount paid and balance are blank. So no one can compute a dismissal rate, a "win rate" or an average fine from this dataset. If you see such a figure elsewhere, ask where it came from.
• Where the violation happened. The borough field reads "NOT NYC" for nearly every taxi row, and the city/ZIP fields look like the respondent's mailing address.
• Time of day. The time inside the violation date clusters at 17:00, which looks like a default value.
• Guilt. A summons is an allegation. Some are dismissed, some are settled, some end in a default.
• Second and later charges. We count the first charge only, because the later charge columns usually repeat it.

Numbers also shift by a few hundred between downloads, because the city updates the dataset every day.

How we built these numbers

We downloaded the rows where issuing_agency is TAXI_TLC, TAXI_Port Authority or TAXI_NYPD. We dated each summons by its violation date and dropped about 42,800 rows with placeholder years (1900, 2103 and later, 3017). We counted rule codes from the first charge column only, after making upper and lower case the same. Full method notes are on the data catalog.