Sound and the city

Noise complaints peaked in the pandemic, then eased

New York filed its most 311 noise complaints in 2020 and 2021 — about 760,000 a year — as the pandemic kept people home. The total then fell for two years to a low in 2023, before climbing back up in 2024 and 2025.

Source: New York City 311 Service Requests (dataset erm2-nwe9), filtered to complaint types beginning with "Noise" and to geocoded records. Counts are per calendar year; one Bronx address that generates a physically impossible volume is excluded as a reporting artifact. This dataset begins in 2020; earlier 311 records live in a separate archive and are left out so the definition stays consistent.

Interactive noise map ↗