How long do collection agencies stay licensed in New York City?
By Kai Greenspan, Founding Editor · Last checked: October 5, 2026
The city last updated its list on August 20, 2026.
The distribution
| Continuous license tenure | Companies | Share |
|---|---|---|
| 25 or more years | 47 | 4.7% |
| 15 to 24 years | 211 | 21.3% |
| 5 to 14 years | 430 | 43.4% |
| 1 to 4 years | 204 | 20.6% |
| under 1 year | 98 | 9.9% |
Method, and the trap it exists to avoid
Source: New York City's own license datasets, published as open data by the Department of Consumer and Worker Protection: Issued Licenses (w7w3-xahh), Historical Licenses (m4ph-grrm, 1991 to 2013) and License Revocations, Suspensions, Surrenders, and Reinstatements (rpeq-j89e), each filtered to the Debt Collection Agency category, with 5,597 records held in full. The defining trap of this data: license records do not survive renewals, so a company licensed since the 1990s can hold a visible record created last year. Reading tenure off a single record understated 54 companies in our own audit before the method was corrected. Tenure here is merged across every business record a company has ever held; where a company's pre-2014 history is corroborated by the historical dataset it counts, and where it is only suggested, it deliberately does not, so some tenures are conservative rather than guessed.
The figures are dated by the city's own last update of its issued-license records, 2026-08-20, not by the day we collected them. One limit to know: the city's dataset of revocations, suspensions and surrenders has not been updated since 2023-10-11. It is used to end a license on the day it was surrendered or revoked rather than at its printed expiration, so for a license that ended after that date the end is taken from the issued records alone.
A note on comparing this page with the Texas bond distribution: the instruments differ (a filed surety bond against an issued city license), the jurisdictions differ in scope, and the two measures are computed from different record systems. The comparison is still striking: New York City's licensed population is visibly younger, with a median of 9.2 years against Texas's 13, but treat it as two separate facts side by side, not one market measured twice.
Common questions
How long has the typical collection agency been licensed in New York City?
As of the city's list of 2026-08-20, last checked by Debt Collection Index on 2026-10-05, the median company holding a live NYC Debt Collection Agency license has been continuously licensed for 9.2 years, measured across all 990 licensed companies by Debt Collection Index. 26.1% have held a license for 15 years or more.
Why can a license record look much newer than the company’s real history?
New York City license records do not survive renewals: a company relicensing gets a new record, so the visible record of a firm licensed since the 1990s can carry a recent creation date. Debt Collection Index merges tenure across every business record a company has ever held, which corrected 54 companies that a naive single-record reading understated.
Citing this figure
Free to quote with attribution: "Debt Collection Index, NYC license continuity distribution, version 2026-09-23.2, debtcollectionindex.com/data/nyc-license-continuity/." The register-checked New York directory, with each agency's own license record linked, is at debtcollectionindex.com/new-york/.