The NYC TLC fleet report, Q3 2026: plates, fleets, tickets, and tolls from open data

Active vehicles, and who owns them

New York City's Taxi and Limousine Commission publishes a daily file of every for-hire vehicle currently licensed and in good standing: black cars, liveries, luxury limousines, and high-volume for-hire vehicles. It does not include yellow medallion taxis, which the city tracks in a separate file. Every row carries the name on the vehicle license, the base the car is affiliated with, and whether the vehicle is active.

data.cityofnewyork.us/resource/8wbx-tsch.json?$select=count(*)&$where=active='YES'. Run September 9, 2026. Result: 104,618 active vehicles.

Group those same rows by the name on the vehicle license instead of counting them, and 72,144 separate owners hold that active fleet between them, an average of 1.45 vehicles each. Most owners hold one car. We drew the line for a fleet at five or more active vehicles under a single name, and by that line, 1,108 owners clear it, holding 26,846 of the 104,618 vehicles between them, a little over a quarter of the citywide total.

data.cityofnewyork.us/resource/8wbx-tsch.json?$select=count(distinct name)&$where=active='YES'. Run September 9, 2026. Result: 72,144 distinct owners. data.cityofnewyork.us/resource/8wbx-tsch.json?$query=SELECT name, count() AS c WHERE active='YES' GROUP BY name HAVING count() >= 5 ORDER BY c DESC LIMIT 5000. Run September 9, 2026. Result: 1,108 owners holding 26,846 vehicles.

The file also lists 785 distinct base numbers. A base is not the same as an owner: TLC describes a base's cars as belonging to its franchisees or cooperative members, so one base can sit above many separate owners on the vehicle license, and an owner with several cars is not necessarily running its own base.

What OATH's hearing records show for 2026

OATH, the city's Office of Administrative Trials and Hearings, is the tribunal that hears summonses written by city enforcement agencies, TLC included. Its Hearings Division Case Status file lists one row per summons and tags each with the issuing agency, so it can be filtered down to TLC's cases alone.

data.cityofnewyork.us/resource/jz4z-kudi.json?$select=count(*)&$where=issuing_agency='TAXI_TLC' AND violation_date>='2026-01-01T00:00:00.000' AND violation_date<'2027-01-01T00:00:00.000'. Run September 9, 2026. Result: 20,460 cases. A handful of TLC rows carry violation dates decades away, plain data-entry errors; the upper bound above keeps them out of the count.

Of those 20,460 cases, 6,908 carry no decision date and 13,552 do. OATH leaves its status field blank on TLC rows, so a missing decision date is the only signal that a case is still open.

data.cityofnewyork.us/resource/jz4z-kudi.json?$select=count()&$where=issuing_agency='TAXI_TLC' AND violation_date>='2026-01-01T00:00:00.000' AND violation_date<'2027-01-01T00:00:00.000' AND decision_date IS NULL. Run September 9, 2026. Result: 6,908 open. data.cityofnewyork.us/resource/jz4z-kudi.json?$select=count()&$where=issuing_agency='TAXI_TLC' AND violation_date>='2026-01-01T00:00:00.000' AND violation_date<'2027-01-01T00:00:00.000' AND decision_date IS NOT NULL. Run September 9, 2026. Result: 13,552 decided.

OATH's own description field for the charge is blank on every TLC row too, so the closest thing to a most-cited list is the code itself, the rule section a summons names. Grouped and sorted, the ten most-cited codes in 2026 cases so far:

data.cityofnewyork.us/resource/jz4z-kudi.json?$select=charge_1_code,count()&$where=issuing_agency='TAXI_TLC' AND violation_date>='2026-01-01T00:00:00.000' AND violation_date<'2027-01-01T00:00:00.000'&$group=charge_1_code&$order=count() DESC&$limit=10. Run September 9, 2026.

A code by itself will not tell an owner what it covers. The text of each rule sits in the city's own rules and code, not in this dataset, so look a code up before assuming what it means.

The number we could not get

The Department of Finance publishes every parking summons issued in a fiscal year, which in New York City runs from July 1 to June 30. Fiscal Year 2026 covers July 2025 through this past June, and 15,691,604 summonses sit in that file citywide.

data.cityofnewyork.us/resource/9mwx-gamw.json?$select=count(*). Run September 9, 2026. Result: 15,691,604 citywide summonses.

Nothing in that file says whether a car was TLC-licensed. Its only vehicle field is a DMV plate type, passenger, commercial, omnibus, and a handful of others, a registration class rather than a TLC designation, and the file carries no base number or vehicle-license number to join against the active-vehicle file above. Even a plate-by-plate match would not settle it: plates get reissued, and a string match alone would not confirm the car was TLC-licensed on the day of that particular summons. That count does not exist in any public file. It only exists at the level of one fleet's own plates and dates.

What this snapshot does and does not show

These are citywide counts pulled on one day, not a trend line. The active-vehicle file updates daily, the OATH file changes as hearings are scheduled and decided, and the parking-violations file closes out once a fiscal year ends. Run the same queries next quarter and every number here will have moved.

None of it describes any single fleet. It is what the city publishes about the industry as a whole, on its own schedule, not what sits in one owner's own records.