How we grade carters
Each carter's A–F grade is built only from evidence about that company: enforcement actions taken against it, and its own licensing and recycling status. Both components are scored 0–100 (higher is cleaner) on fixed, published thresholds— not a curve, so a carter's grade depends only on its own record, never on how others rank. The underlying data is all public.
Changed August 2026: complaint rates no longer affect the grade
A "served-zone complaint rate" component previously carried 35% of the grade. We removed it. That figure is a zone-level 311 rate, and it confounds three things we cannot separate: how well a carter actually performs, how difficult its territory is to operate in, and how likely the people there are to call 311 at all. Zone rates span more than eightfold — Manhattan Southwest runs 1,816 complaints per 1,000 businesses against Bronx East's 220 — and they track neighborhood affluence closely. Across the city, complaint rates correlate with household income (r = +0.52) and negatively with the share of residents born abroad (r = −0.44), which is a pattern about who reports problems at least as much as one about who causes them.
The practical effect was that a carter could move up or down two full letter grades based on which territory it was awarded rather than anything it did. That contradicted our own rule that geography is context, not attribution. Six of 265 grades changed when we removed it — in both directions. Complaint rates are still published on each carter's page as context, clearly marked as excluded from the grade.
1. BIC enforcement — weight 77%
Business Integrity Commission issued violations against this carter. Starts at 100, with deductions:
- Total fines−10 (>$0) · −25 ($10k) · −40 ($50k) · −60 ($200k) · −75 ($500k+)
- Unsettled violations−5 (1+) · −15 (5+) · −25 (20+)
- Prior BIC denial on record−20
2. Recycling & standing — weight 23%
Base 50, +40 if the carter is authorized for recycling collection, +10 if its license is currently active.
Not graded: served-zone complaint rate
Commercial-waste 311 complaints per 1,000 businesses across the zones a carter is awarded. We publish it on each carter's page because it is genuinely useful context about where they operate — but it is a zone-level rate shared by the up-to-three carters in that zone, it is never attributed to one company, and for the reasons above it does not enter the grade.
From score to letter
- A85–100
- B70–84
- C55–69
- D40–54
- Fbelow 40
Sources & caveats
- BIC licensees, issued violations, and denials via NYC Open Data; fines aggregated to the violation level.
- BIC's violation data carries no carter ID, so fines are matched to a carter by exact company name. A carter's fines shown here are therefore a floor, not a complete history — violations recorded under a name variant may not be attributed, which can only make a grade more lenient, never harsher.
- 311 complaint rates are normalized by DCWP-licensed premises — an incomplete count of all commercial establishments — so per-business rates are indicative, not exact, and best read as relative.
- Zone awards from DSNY's published Commercial Waste Zones carter list.
- Complaint rates are zone-level and shared among a zone's carters; they are context, not per-carter attribution.
- Data refreshes nightly. Grades are an editorial summary of public records, not a legal judgment.