How much is commercial rent in NYC? Per square foot, by borough

The short answer

Commercial rent in New York is quoted in dollars per square foot per year. By the city's own records, the typical Manhattan office building collected $52.08 per square foot in 2024, and the typical office building in Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx about $31. Retail buildings in Manhattan collected a median $64.71, retail in the other boroughs $30 to $36, and industrial buildings $16 to $21 in every borough.

Borough	Office	Retail	Industrial
Manhattan	$52.08	$64.71	$19.08
Brooklyn	$31.54	$33.16	$19.04
Queens	$31.30	$36.08	$21.00
Bronx	$31.39	$33.65	$18.31
Staten Island	$26.23	$29.60	$16.01
Citywide	$39.05	$36.07	$19.39

Median gross income per square foot for 2024. Source: NYC Department of Finance, FY 2027 RPIE 2024 Income and Expense Distributions (January 2026).

These are medians of what whole buildings collected over the year, from the income statements owners file with the city. They are not asking rents. Vacant space, free rent and leases signed years ago are all in the mix, so a renovated building or a busy block will ask more, and an older building with empty floors may take less. Use them as a baseline for judging a quote, not as a quote.

How do you turn a rent quote into a monthly bill?

Multiply the rent per square foot by the square feet for the yearly rent, then divide by 12. At the 2024 medians:

• 10,000 SF of Manhattan office at $52.08: $520,800 a year, or $43,400 a month.
• The same 10,000 SF in Brooklyn at $31.54: $315,400 a year, or about $26,283 a month.
• A 1,500 SF Manhattan store at $64.71: $97,065 a year, or about $8,089 a month.
• 10,000 SF of Queens industrial space at $21.00: $210,000 a year, or $17,500 a month.

The commercial rent calculator converts either way. If you are still working out how much room you need, the office space calculator estimates it from your headcount.

One catch for offices: NYC office space is quoted in rentable square feet, which adds a share of the building's lobbies, corridors and mechanical space to the area you actually use. Two suites quoted at the same size and rent can give you different amounts of usable floor. The guide to rentable vs usable square feet shows how to check the loss factor.

Why is the range of NYC rents so wide?

The middle half of Manhattan office buildings collected between $38.22 and $74.58 per square foot. For Manhattan retail the middle half runs from $38.35 to $104.91, so a building near the top of that range collects nearly three times what one near the bottom does. Within a borough, the price of a particular space follows:

• The building. Newer and renovated buildings with modern elevators, air conditioning and lobbies ask more than older loft buildings.
• The floor and the light. High floors with open views ask more than low floors facing an air shaft.
• For a store, the block and the frontage. Foot traffic, corner exposure and the width of the window drive retail rent. Asking rents are usually quoted for the ground floor; basement and second-floor space is often priced lower.
• The condition of the space. A suite that is built out and ready to move into costs the landlord money up front, and the rent reflects it. Raw space usually comes with a lower rent or a larger allowance for your own build-out.
• The length of the lease. Landlords give more free rent and larger build-out allowances on longer leases, which lowers what the lease really costs even when the rent on paper is the same.

Rents are moving slowly. Comparing each building's own income with the year before, the typical citywide change from 2023 to 2024 was about 1% for office, 1.7% for retail and 2.4% for industrial.

What do you pay on top of base rent?

Base rent is the biggest line on the bill, not the whole bill. Budget for:

• Escalations. Most NYC office leases add your share of increases in the building's real estate taxes and operating costs above a base year. Some older leases use a porter's wage formula instead. The guide to gross vs net leases walks through each structure.
• Building costs on a net lease. Stores and outer-borough industrial space are more often leased net, so the tenant pays a share of the building's taxes, insurance and upkeep on top of base rent. For scale, the median Brooklyn retail building reported $7.15 per square foot of operating expenses for 2024, and the median Queens industrial building $3.67.
• Electricity. Usually billed apart from rent: as a fixed charge per square foot added to the rent, through a submeter, or directly by the utility.
• Commercial Rent Tax. In Manhattan south of 96th Street, tenants whose base rent is $250,000 a year or more pay the city's Commercial Rent Tax, an effective 3.9% of base rent before credits. On the 10,000 SF Manhattan office above, that is $20,311 a year. A business with total income of $5 million or less gets a small business credit that brings it down to about $8,531. The other four boroughs and Manhattan above 96th Street have no Commercial Rent Tax. The Commercial Rent Tax calculator works it out for any rent.
• Deposit and guaranty. Landlords hold a security deposit or letter of credit sized to the tenant's credit, and many ask owners of small businesses for a personal guaranty. The guide to the good guy guarantee explains the limited version common in New York.
• Build-out and moving. Unless the space is ready to use, you pay for construction, cabling and furniture, less any allowance the landlord gives. The tenant improvement allowance calculator shows what an allowance is worth over the lease.
• Brokers. On a direct lease in New York, the landlord customarily pays the brokers, including the tenant's. The guide to tenant rep brokers explains how that works.

How do you compare offers by effective rent?

Two spaces at the same asking rent can cost very different amounts once free rent and allowances are counted. A quick check: on a 10-year lease at $50 per square foot with 10 months of free rent, you pay rent for 110 of the 120 months, an average of about $45.83 per square foot over the term. The commercial rent calculator adds yearly increases and a build-out allowance to show the net effective rent of each offer, so you can line them up side by side.

Where do these rent numbers come from?

Owners of income-producing property in New York City with an actual assessed value above $40,000 file a Real Property Income and Expense statement (RPIE) with the Department of Finance every year, and Finance uses those statements to value buildings for property tax. It publishes the distribution of what owners reported, by type of building and borough. The figures here come from the edition published in January 2026 for the FY 2027 assessment roll, covering calendar year 2024: 3,414 office, 9,629 retail and 3,586 industrial filings, with outliers and partial-year filers left out. Manhattan's industrial figure rests on only 49 filings, so read it loosely.

Finance publishes these figures by borough, not by neighborhood. Leasemark's neighborhood pages show the figure for their borough next to the area's building stock, and spaces listed on Leasemark show their own asking rents. Start with office space for lease in NYC, retail space for lease or industrial space for lease.

This guide is general information, not legal, tax or financial advice.