Who Is Liable for a Construction Accident in New York?

By Billy Cooper, Managing Partner, Billy Cooper Law Last updated: July 2026

The short answer. In New York, responsibility for a construction injury rarely rests with a single company. It is divided among the property owner, the general contractor, their agents, and the subcontractors who actually controlled the work, under three separate sections of the Labor Law. Which section fits your accident decides almost everything, including whether your own conduct can be used against you.

No construction site looks the way it did the week before. Trades rotate through. Temporary protections go up and come down. Access routes change, loads shift, and the company directing the work on Monday may not be the company directing it on Thursday.

That is the first thing I explain to people who call this office after a serious injury, because it tells you why the question they most want answered, who was responsible, is almost never the question the investigation begins with. It begins with a different one: how was this work organized, and who controlled it?

A Midtown Job Site that Emptied in a Morning

On the morning of July 7, 2026, workers inside the former Pfizer headquarters at 235 East 42nd Street found that two steel columns had buckled on the 21st floor. The building was evacuated, along with seven surrounding buildings. The Fire Department established a collapse zone. The Police Department froze a perimeter from 40th to 45th Streets between First and Third Avenues, and crews moved in to shore the compromised floors. Nobody was hurt.

The complex is being converted from offices into more than 1,600 apartments by Metro Loft and David Werner Real Estate Investments. At a briefing that day, Mayor Zohran Mamdani said: “Two structural columns have buckled, in addition to multiple cracks and sagging floors.” Buildings Commissioner Ahmed Tigani described “both buckling and floor conditions that are impaired on the 21st floor,” and said what was underway was “an investigation of what is the cause of why the undermining happened.” FDNY Chief of Department John Esposito put it more plainly: the steel beams “have started to bend and deflect from the weight.”

No agency reported a debris fall or an exterior collapse, and the building is standing. Reporting citing the Department of Buildings and the Fire Department described floors 21 through 26 beginning to cave; the officials at the podium described sagging and impaired floors. What actually happened inside those floors is one of the things the investigation exists to establish, and I am not going to characterize it ahead of the engineers.

At the briefing, officials declined to speculate on cause. The Department of Buildings directed the owner to retain a third-party engineer for a forensic evaluation, and the Department of Investigation’s separate inquiry was publicly confirmed on July 10. Metro Loft’s founder and managing principal, Nathan Berman, gave CNN the company’s own account: that the columns bent, in his words, “essentially from not having been properly reinforced or having been missed in the reinforcement process,” while roughly 18,000 square feet was being added across fifteen upper floors. That is the developer’s account of the developer’s building. No agency has adopted it. No determination of cause has been issued.

(Sources: NYC Mayor’s Office press briefing transcript, July 7, 2026; Engineering News-Record, July 7, 2026; CNN, July 8 and July 10, 2026; ABC News, July 8, 2026.)

I am being careful about who said what, and the care is the point. This is what the early stage of a serious construction investigation actually looks like: an open file, an owner with an explanation, agencies that have not endorsed it, and a building full of evidence that will not stay in place forever.

Nobody was standing on the wrong floor that morning. Had someone been, the legal questions would have started that afternoon, and the answers would have turned on records generated long before July 7.

Why an Office-to-Residential Conversion is a Different Kind of Job Site

A conversion is not new construction. Crews cut into a structure that is already standing, often decades old, while it is being modified around them. Temporary shoring carries loads the original engineers never designed for. That combination, an existing building plus active structural change, is what separates these projects from a site that starts on bare ground.

New York is in the middle of a conversion wave. The Office of the New York City Comptroller counted 44 completed, ongoing, or potential office-to-residential conversions as of the first quarter of 2025, totaling 15.2 million gross square feet and approximately 17,400 apartments (NYC Comptroller, Fiscal Note 6-2025, July 17, 2025). The City Council’s “City of Yes for Housing Opportunity,” approved in December 2024, moved the conversion eligibility date up to 1991, and the State’s 467-m tax exemption, enacted with the FY2025 budget in 2024, made the economics work.

The hazards come from working inside a building being taken apart and put back together at the same time. Selective demolition. Temporary stair towers. Freight elevators doing the work passenger elevators used to do. Overlapping trades on tight floors, and structural protections installed and removed as the work advances. Every one of those conditions has an owner, a contractor, and a paper trail.

Three Laws Decide Who is Responsible, and They Do Not Work the Same Way

Take the principle before the section numbers, because the numbers make more sense once you have it. New York decided long ago that certain construction risks stay with the people who direct and profit from the work, no matter how many companies stand between them and the worker. The Labor Law does this in three different ways, and the differences are not technicalities.

Labor Law § 240(1), the Scaffold Law

Section 240(1) is about gravity. It requires “all contractors and owners and their agents” to furnish scaffolds, hoists, ladders, braces and similar devices “so constructed, placed and operated as to give proper protection” to workers.

It does not cover everything that happens on a site. The statute reaches workers engaged in “the erection, demolition, repairing, altering, painting, cleaning or pointing of a building or structure,” and defendants litigate that list hard, because a task that falls outside it falls outside the statute. The section also exempts owners of one- and two-family dwellings who contract for but do not direct or control the work, and it carves out engineers, architects and landscape architects who do not direct or control the work for activities other than planning and design. Everyone else stays in: owners, general contractors, and those acting as their agents. That last category is how a construction manager with real authority over the work ends up in the case.

When a worker engaged in one of those covered activities falls, or is struck by an object that should have been secured, and adequate protection was not provided, liability reaches the owner and the general contractor. Whether they personally supervised the work does not matter. Neither does ordinary carelessness on the worker’s part. Under § 240(1), comparative negligence is not a defense, and the Court of Appeals has said so in as few words as the point can be made: “Section 240 (1) is, therefore, an exception to CPLR 1411, which recognizes contributory negligence as a defense in personal injury actions.” Blake v. Neighborhood Housing Services, 1 N.Y.3d 280, 287 (2003).

There is one hard limit, and it is the one defendants fight hardest for. If your own conduct was the sole proximate cause of the accident, there is no claim at all. That happens in more than one way, and the distinction is worth understanding, because the two routes look nothing alike.

The first route runs through the available safety device. In Cahill v. Triborough Bridge & Tunnel Authority, 4 N.Y.3d 35, 40 (2004), the Court set out what the defense requires: that the worker “had adequate safety devices available; that he knew both that they were available and that he was expected to use them; that he chose for no good reason not to do so; and that had he not made that choice he would not have been injured.” Every element has to be there. In Gallagher v. New York Post, 14 N.Y.3d 83, 88 (2010), the Post could not show that the injured ironworker knew where the harnesses and lifelines were or that he was expected to use them, and the Court of Appeals granted summary judgment on liability to the worker. That is how narrow the opening is meant to be.

Blake arrived at the same destination by a different road. The worker there was hurt on his own extension ladder. He conceded the ladder was steady and in working order, and the jury found that it had in fact given him proper protection. That finding ended the case: no violation of the statute, so nothing to sue on, and his own handling of the ladder was the whole of the cause. The Court took care to note, in a footnote worth reading, that he was not a “recalcitrant worker.” He simply had no statutory violation.

Comparative negligence is no defense under § 240(1). Sole proximate cause is a complete one. The gap between those two ideas decides cases, and it is why what you say in the days after an accident matters so much.

Let me also correct something repeated constantly, including by lawyers who ought to know better. “Absolute liability” does not mean a fall by itself wins the case. Blake was blunt about it. The Court noted that “the words strict or absolute liability do not appear in Labor Law § 240 (1) or any of its predecessors,” and that “[a]t no time… did the Court or the Legislature ever suggest that a defendant should be treated as an insurer after having furnished a safe workplace.” The line that matters most: “an accident alone does not establish a Labor Law § 240 (1) violation or causation.” There must be a violation of the statute, and that violation must have caused the injury.

On what the section reaches, the case to know is Runner v. New York Stock Exchange, 13 N.Y.3d 599, 603 (2009): “the single decisive question is whether plaintiff’s injuries were the direct consequence of a failure to provide adequate protection against a risk arising from a physically significant elevation differential.” Notice what that does not require. It does not require that you fell. It does not require that an object struck you. The plaintiff in Runner did neither; he was one of three men holding a rope as an 800-pound reel of wire went down a short flight of stairs, and the rope pulled his hands into a metal bar. It does require a physically significant elevation differential, and defendants will litigate the word “significant” hard.

Labor Law § 241(6)

Section 241(6) is where most people, and a striking number of law firm websites, get New York construction law wrong. It is not strict liability, and your own negligence can be held against you under it. It requires proof that someone violated a specific, concrete rule of the State Industrial Code, and it leaves the rest to a jury.

In Ross v. Curtis-Palmer Hydro-Electric Co., 81 N.Y.2d 494, 505 (1993), the Court of Appeals drew the line: “a distinction must be drawn between provisions of the Industrial Code mandating compliance with concrete specifications and those that establish general safety standards… The former give rise to a nondelegable duty, while the latter do not.” A regulation telling a contractor to work “safely” or “properly” is not enough. A regulation setting a specific guardrail at a specific height is.

And in footnote 4, which a great deal of construction content ignores, Ross stated the consequence plainly: “Contributory and comparative negligence are valid defenses to claims asserted under the latter section [§ 241(6)], while section 240 (1) claims are not subject to those defenses.”

So the section that fits your accident determines whether the other side gets to argue you caused your own injury. That is not a fine distinction. It frequently decides the outcome.

Labor Law § 200

Section 200 codifies the ordinary duty to keep a workplace reasonably safe. It reaches an owner or general contractor who actually controlled the manner in which the work was performed, or who knew of a dangerous condition on the property and left it alone. Control and notice are the hinges. Without one of them, a § 200 claim generally will not carry.

Workers’ Compensation is the Floor, Not the Ceiling

People assume that because they are collecting workers’ compensation, they have no case. That assumption is the most expensive mistake in this area of law.

Workers’ compensation is what you receive from your employer, and it is generally the most you can receive from your employer. Workers’ Compensation Law § 11 makes it the exclusive remedy against your own boss. But § 29 preserves your right to sue a third party whose wrongdoing injured you, and on a construction site the third parties are usually the ones who matter: the property owner, the general contractor, the other subcontractors, the equipment manufacturer.

You do not have to choose. You can collect compensation benefits and pursue the third-party case at the same time, subject to the compensation carrier’s lien. One practical trap worth knowing: under § 29(5), compromising that third-party case for less than the compensation provided under the Workers’ Compensation Law requires the carrier’s written approval, or a compromise order from a justice of the court where the third-party action was pending. The settlement and the lien have to be worked out together, not one after the other. I have seen a good settlement come apart because nobody thought about the lien until the release was on the table.

Compensation does not pay you for pain and suffering. A third-party Labor Law case does. Most of the injured workers who walk into this office believing they have no case believe it because the only lawyer they had spoken to was the one handling their compensation claim, and a compensation lawyer’s job stops at the employer. Nobody had looked at the rest of the job site.

What the Incident Report Will Not Tell You

The incident report is a starting point, not an answer. It is written fast, usually by someone employed by one of the companies whose conduct is about to be examined, and it records what was visible on the surface. The record that decides the case is almost always somewhere else.

Here is why. A structural change on a job site passes through several hands. An engineer designs the temporary support. A contractor installs it. A special inspector is supposed to verify that what got built matches what was drawn. A project manager signs off before the next trade moves onto the floor. Each of those steps exists to catch a problem the previous one may have missed. So a construction case is really the work of tracing that chain and finding the link where the check failed, and who had the last real chance to stop it.

The documents make that traceable, if you get to them in time.

The shoring drawing tells you what the temporary supports were engineered to carry. The change order tells you when somebody altered the sequence or the loading, and who approved it. The special inspection report tells you whether anyone actually went back and verified the work after that change, and whose name is on the line. Read against one another, those three answer the question the incident report never asks: was this a design that was wrong from the beginning, a crew that deviated from it in the field, or an inspection that existed only on paper?

Then there is the subcontract. Buried in it is an indemnity clause, negotiated before anyone broke ground, and it frequently determines which insurance company ends up paying for the answer. Workers never see that document. It is often the most consequential piece of paper on the site.

All of it has a short life. Sites get cleaned. Scaffolds come down. Equipment is repaired or returned to a rental yard. Crews finish and scatter to other projects, and a year later the one person who saw the whole thing is working in another state. That is why the Department of Buildings ordered a forensic engineering evaluation at 235 East 42nd Street within days rather than weeks.

The Deadlines are Real, and One of Them Will Surprise You

Most New York construction injury lawsuits must be filed within three years of the injury (CPLR § 214(5)).

The rules change completely when a public entity is involved, and this is where people lose cases they should have won. If the owner is a city, county, town, village, fire district, or school district, you must serve a formal notice of claim within 90 days (General Municipal Law § 50-e), and you must commence the lawsuit itself within one year and 90 days (General Municipal Law § 50-i). Not three years. One year and 90 days.

Death cases run on their own variation of that rule, and both halves of it move.

The 90-day notice period runs not from the accident but from the appointment of a representative of the decedent’s estate (GML § 50-e(1)(a)). And the suit period is not one year and 90 days at all: under GML § 50-i(1)(c), a wrongful death action against a municipality must be commenced within two years after the death. Families frequently learn the first half of that rule and not the second, or learn neither until the surrogate’s proceeding has already eaten weeks nobody budgeted for.

That is only the general municipal rule. Public authorities run on their own clocks under their own enabling statutes, and those clocks are not the same. Claims involving the MTA and New York City Transit are governed by the Public Authorities Law. The Port Authority has its own notice requirement and its own suit deadline. Claims against the State itself proceed in the Court of Claims, under the Court of Claims Act, with deadlines of its own.

Public construction is everywhere in New York: schools, transit, hospitals, housing authority buildings, road and bridge work. A worker who assumes he has three years because that is the number he saw somewhere can be time-barred before he ever picks up the phone. If any public entity touches your job site, do not guess at the deadline. Have someone identify the right one immediately.

Where a worker is killed and no public entity is involved, a wrongful death action must generally be commenced within two years of the death (EPTL § 5-4.1).

What New York’s 2026 Tort Reform Did Not Change

It did not change the rules for Labor Law claims, and that deserves saying plainly, because there has been real confusion about it.

New York’s 2026 tort reform (Chapter 58 of the Laws of 2026, signed May 26, 2026) added a rule barring recovery where a claimant is more at fault than the defendants. That rule lives in the new CPLR § 1411(b), and by its own terms it applies only to personal-injury actions “subject to article fifty-one of the insurance law,” which is to say motor-vehicle cases.

It does not apply to Labor Law claims. Chapter 58 did not amend Labor Law § 200, § 240 or § 241, and it did not touch them by implication either. Outside the motor-vehicle context, New York remains a pure comparative negligence state under CPLR § 1411(a): a worker’s share of fault reduces the recovery proportionally but does not bar it. Under § 240(1), as above, comparative fault is no defense at all.

Two things about the reform catch people out.

The first is that it is defined by the kind of case, not by the industry. A construction worker struck by a vehicle in a roadway work zone may well be in an Article 51 motor-vehicle case, and the new bar can reach that claim. It does not reach the Labor Law claim against the owner and the general contractor.

The second is timing, and it runs the opposite way from what most people assume. The new bar applies to all actions “commenced on or after” May 26, 2026. It keys to the date the lawsuit is filed, not the date of the accident. A worker hurt in a work-zone collision in 2024 who has not yet sued is inside the new rule, not outside it.

Separately, a bill to repeal the Scaffold Law (A9633) was introduced in the Assembly on January 21, 2026 and referred to the Labor Committee, where it has sat ever since. Labor Law § 240 is in force and unamended.

The Numbers Behind the Law

New York’s construction protections exist because the work is measurably more dangerous than nearly anything else people do for a living. Every figure below is from the New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health’s Deadly Skyline report (May 2026):

• 55 construction workers died on the job in New York State in 2024, down from 74 in 2023.
• 19 construction workers died in New York City in 2024, down from 30 in 2023, which was the highest total of the decade.
• Between 2015 and 2024, at least 587 construction workers died on the job across the State.
• In 2024, a New York City construction worker was more than six times as likely to be killed at work as the average city worker: 9.4 deaths per 100,000 construction workers, against 1.5 per 100,000 across all city industries.
• Of the 31 OSHA-investigated construction fatalities in New York State in 2024, 81% of the workers who died were working non-union. Across those same OSHA-inspected fatality cases, 77% of the worksites where a worker died also had OSHA violations identified during the inspection.
• OSHA conducted 3,162 inspections in New York State in 2025, down 29.1% from the 4,455 it conducted in 2019.
• The average OSHA fine in a New York construction fatality case fell to $25,295 in 2024, from $32,123 the year before. That is the lowest average fine since 2017.

Fewer inspections and lighter penalties mean the civil case is often the only place a full accounting ever happens.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I sue if I am already receiving workers’ compensation? Yes, and the two run side by side. Compensation is your remedy against your employer and nobody else. It does not touch the property owner, the general contractor, another subcontractor, or an equipment manufacturer, and on a construction site those are usually the parties with both the responsibility and the insurance. The third-party case is also the only one that pays for pain and suffering.

What is Labor Law § 240(1)? New York’s Scaffold Law. It requires owners, contractors and their agents to provide adequate protection against elevation-related hazards and holds them liable when they fail to, whether or not they supervised the work. What it does not do is make them liable for every fall. There has to be a violation of the statute, and that violation has to have caused the injury.

Does § 240(1) cover falling objects, or only falls from a height? Both, where the object required securing and the failure to secure it caused the harm. Under Runner, the question is not whether you fell or whether something hit you. It is whether your injury flowed directly from a failure to protect against a risk arising from a physically significant elevation differential.

What if I was partly at fault? Under § 240(1), ordinary comparative negligence is not a defense and will not reduce your recovery. If your own conduct was the sole proximate cause of the accident, though, the claim fails entirely. Under § 241(6) and § 200, comparative negligence is a defense, and it reduces your recovery in proportion to your share of the fault. On construction claims New York remains a pure comparative negligence state: a share of fault reduces what you recover; it does not bar you.

What if I was not wearing safety equipment? Ask first why you weren’t. In most of the files that come through this office the answer is that adequate equipment was never actually provided, and that failure is the violation. The defense is available only in narrow circumstances: proper devices were readily available, the worker knew they were there and knew he was expected to use them, and he chose for no good reason not to (Cahill v. Triborough Bridge & Tunnel Auth., 4 N.Y.3d 35 (2004)). Where an employer cannot prove the worker knew where the devices were or that he was expected to use them, the defense fails (Gallagher v. New York Post, 14 N.Y.3d 83 (2010)).

How long do I have to file? Generally three years from the injury (CPLR § 214(5)). If a municipality is involved, the deadlines are far shorter: a notice of claim within 90 days, and suit within one year and 90 days (GML §§ 50-e, 50-i). Death cases work differently again. The 90-day notice period runs from the appointment of the estate’s representative rather than from the accident, and a wrongful death action against a municipality must be brought within two years of the death (GML § 50-i(1)(c)). Where no public entity is involved, a wrongful death action is generally two years from the date of death (EPTL § 5-4.1). Public authorities and the State run on separate clocks of their own. If any public entity touches your job site, have the deadline identified immediately rather than assuming.

Are office-to-residential conversions more dangerous than other construction? No public agency has published a finding that conversions are categorically more dangerous, and I am not going to claim one. What is true is that a conversion combines active structural modification with an existing, often aging building, which introduces engineering and sequencing risk that does not arise on a site built from bare ground.

The Site Gets Cleaned. The Paperwork Does Not Clean Itself.

A serious construction injury reorganizes a family’s life overnight, and the legal questions are the last thing anyone wants to think about. They are also the ones that quietly stop being answerable while nobody is thinking about them.

The accident itself will tell you very little. The shoring drawings, the change orders, the inspection sign-offs and the subcontract will tell you almost everything, and every one of them is easier to obtain in the first month than in the second year. Getting to that record before it goes cold is most of the work, and it is the part of the job that determines what a case is worth.

If you were hurt on a construction site in White Plains, anywhere in Westchester County, or in the New York City area, take what photographs you can, write down the names of the companies on the site and the equipment involved, and then have somebody find out whether a third-party claim exists alongside your compensation case. The worker is usually the last to know that one does.

Construction accidents are what this office has concentrated on for more than 60 years. If you call, you will be able to speak with me about what happened.

Billy Cooper Law 245 Main Street, Suite 510, White Plains, NY 10601 (914) 730-5789

Billy Cooper Law recovered $2,005,000 for a construction worker who fell from a roof when required safety protection was not provided, sustaining fractures to the hip, pelvis and sacrum. Prior results do not guarantee a similar outcome. This article is general information about New York law, not legal advice about your specific situation.