New York's Scaffold Law in the 2027 Budget: What Happens If Labor Law 240 Changes, and What Happens If It Doesn't

On September 10, 2026, Spectrum News reported that legislative sources were “bracing for a battle” over New York’s Scaffold Law in the next budget cycle if the governor wins re-election on November 3 and puts forward a proposal, as they expect. The governor’s office says “there is no proposal to announce on scaffolding requirements.” On October 6, 2026, Crain’s New York Business reported that administration officials “have indicated that they are looking at the law as part of an effort to bring down insurance costs.”

Nothing has been proposed or changed. This explainer takes no side; our Scaffold Law status page tracks the record.

What Labor Law § 240 requires today

Subdivision 1 requires “all contractors and owners and their agents,” other than owners of one- and two-family dwellings “who contract for but do not direct or control the work,” to furnish “scaffolding, hoists, stays, ladders, slings, hangers, blocks, pulleys, braces, irons, ropes, and other devices which shall be so constructed, placed and operated as to give proper protection to a person so employed.” The text says nothing about fault.

Blake v Neighborhood Hous. Servs. of N.Y. City, 1 NY3d 280 (2003), states the rule: liability “is contingent on a statutory violation and proximate cause,” and once both are shown, “contributory negligence cannot defeat the plaintiffs claim.” Ross, Narducci and Runner confine the statute to elevation-related hazards; the card has the whole rule.

That no-reduction rule came from the Court, in Koenig v Patrick Constr. Corp., 298 NY 313 (1948), not from the statute’s text. Consequently, a bill need not repeal § 240 to change outcomes; it can change how fault is counted.

Why the 2027 budget is where a change could come

The precedent is five months old: the 2026 auto insurance reform passed as Part EE of A10008-C, a budget bill signed as chapter 58 of the Laws of 2026 on May 26, 2026 (our account of what passed and what did not). The next round runs on a constitutional calendar.

A budget bill is not an ordinary bill. The Legislature “may not alter an appropriation bill submitted by the governor except to strike out or reduce items therein” (NY Const art VII, § 4); Pataki v New York State Assembly, 4 NY3d 75 (2004), enforced that clause and noted the Legislature is “free to refuse to act on the Governor’s proposed legislation at all, thus forcing him to negotiate.” Policy changes such as Part EE ride in the non-appropriation budget bills, which carry “programmatic provisions” (Silver v Pataki, 96 NY2d 532, 535 n 1 [2001]) and are amended in negotiation; A10008 went through A, B and C prints before Part EE became law.

Pataki also addresses the Scaffold Law. Three judges asked whether a governor could make § 240 inapplicable to state construction projects through an appropriation bill, said such provisions seem “to go beyond the legitimate purpose of an appropriation bill” and left the question “for another day.” Two concurring judges would have held that such a provision would “run afoul of the constitutional limits,” because § 240 is not “fundamentally or primarily fiscal.” Both passages concern appropriation bills, not the kind of bill Part EE was in.

So keep an eye on this budget thing, Labor Law 240. It affects everything we do here, from building a house to building a school. And this year, the change in motor vehicle cases was put into the budget bill, not as a stand-alone bill. The governor puts policy provisions into the budget bill, and the Legislature negotiates them with the rest of the budget. The governor has got to submit the budget by February 1st, 2027. So read those budget bills when they come out.

The bills already on file

Three of the bills below have been filed, in some version, every session since 2007. None was reported out of committee from 2019 through 2026, and none of the governor’s budget bills for fiscal years 2026 and 2027, in any print on the Open Legislation record, amended § 240 or § 241.

In Congress, H.R. 3548 (Representative Langworthy, 2025), which would bring comparative negligence to certain federally assisted projects, has had no committee vote.

What the reform side argues, and its sources

A December 2025 memorandum by HR&A Advisors for the Building Trades Employers’ Association states that insurance is “8–10% of total development costs” in New York City, “compared to 2–4% under a comparative negligence model”; it rests on a survey and interviews drawing on fifty-four stakeholders, and it attributes the whole gap to the liability standard. A 2013 Rockefeller Institute report by Hattery, Geddes and Kay, funded by the New York Civil Justice Institute, modeled “nearly $800 million” in public construction spending tied to at-height insurance costs and called the model “an upper bound estimate.” A 2023 RAND brief for Robin Hood, built on the Rockefeller study and other published sources, estimated 38,000 more housing units from reform.

Andrew Rein of the Citizens Budget Commission told Spectrum News that “New York is the only state in the nation where owners, contractors, and employers pay full damages even if the injured worker is at fault because they ignored training or were intoxicated.” The Department of Financial Services, in November 2022, listed the strict liability standard as one of seven factors behind rising affordable-housing premiums, without measuring its share. On safety, the Rockefeller authors reported that the sectors the statute covers “display a significantly higher worker non-fatal injury rate than unaffected sectors,” and a 2026 BTEA fact sheet cites New York City Department of Buildings data for 2019 through 2024 showing non-union workers accounted for 74 percent of reported injuries and 79 percent of fatalities, which it reads to mean training, not the Scaffold Law, drives safety.

What the worker side argues, and its sources

The New York Committee for Occupational Safety and Health’s May 2026 Deadly Skyline report counts 55 construction deaths in New York in 2024, down from 74 in 2023; 81 percent of the workers in OSHA’s 31 New York fatality investigations that year were non-union. It recommends: “Preserve the Scaffold Safety Law.” A 2013 Center for Popular Democracy and Make the Road New York report, covering OSHA-investigated fatal falls from 2003 through 2011, found the worker was “Latino and/or immigrant” in 60 percent of them, against 34 percent of the construction workforce.

Gary LaBarbera of the Building and Construction Trades Council called the law “a beacon of construction site safety and contractor accountability for more than a century.” Andrew Finkelstein, president of the New York State Trial Lawyers Association, told Spectrum News in June 2026 that “Big insurance and corporate real estate interests are playing fast and loose with the facts.” A Center for Justice & Democracy FAQ from about 2014 said “there are no independent data identifying why the insurance industry may be increasing rates.”

Each figure in these two sections is the claim of the side that commissioned or cites it.

”The only state,” and Illinois

Federal data set the national baseline: the Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 370 fatal falls, slips and trips among the 1,032 construction and extraction workers who died in 2024. Reform advocates and news coverage describe New York as the only state that still applies absolute liability to gravity-related construction injuries. On the other side, Joanne Doroshow of the Center for Justice & Democracy told the Washington Post in 2017 that New York may be the only holdout, and said that may speak more to rollbacks in Illinois and elsewhere that builders and insurers lobbied for. Other states keep scaffold statutes; what is described as unique is the absence of comparative fault. Illinois repealed its Structural Work Act by Public Act 89-2, effective February 14, 1995. What followed in Illinois is disputed, each side citing its own figures.

Three ways the 2027 budget could end for the Scaffold Law

Take an invented example. A roofer on a school renovation in Levittown climbs an extension ladder that no one tied off; it slides, and the roofer falls about fifteen feet. The defense argues the roofer was told to wait for a co-worker to foot the ladder. Today, a violation that was a proximate cause means no reduction; no violation, with the roofer’s conduct the sole proximate cause, means no § 240 recovery.

If the budget adopts comparative negligence

Under a CPLR 1411 model, the case still begins with a violation and proximate cause; the jury then assigns a percentage to any fault it finds in the roofer’s conduct, and the award is “diminished in the proportion which the culpable conduct attributable to the claimant” bears to the total. A9128 goes further: in Nassau and Suffolk the § 240 standard “shall not apply,” and Article 14-A comparative negligence decides liability. One model keeps the duty and reduces the award; the other replaces the duty.

If it codifies sole proximate cause or makes a narrower change

A6007 applies where safety devices “have been made available.” It would compare fault only where the worker “failed to follow safety instruction or safe work practices in accordance with training provided,” did not use “provided safety equipment or devices,” committed a criminal act, or was impaired, and would bar liability where that conduct is the “sole proximate cause.” In the Levittown fall, the question would be whether the instruction to wait came from training. The exemption bills instead change who owes the duty.

If nothing passes

The roofer’s case is tried under Blake. The bills on file expire with the session; three have been refiled in some version every session since 2007.

Whether a change would reach a case already filed

The bill’s last section decides. Part EE applied to “actions and proceedings commenced on or after” May 26, 2026, so the filing date controlled. A6007 would apply to “causes of actions accruing on or after” its effective date, so the accident date would control. A9633 and A9128 say only that they “take effect immediately”; where a statute is silent on pending claims, courts decide; in Illinois, Atkins v Deere & Co., 177 Ill 2d 222 (1997), relying on the repealing act’s preamble, held the 1995 repeal reached only claims that accrued after it.

For the Levittown roofer, the accident date and the filing date could decide which rule applies. Consequently, both are facts worth having on paper now.

So if you were injured on a job, nothing has changed today. Labor Law 240 still reads the same as yesterday. And any changes that are made will state in their last section when they go into effect. So the motor vehicle change, for instance, applies to actions commenced on or after May 26th, 2026, which is the day it was signed. So the date a lawsuit is commenced or filed may be important. And that’s something you should ask your lawyer about in terms of your particular case.

If you are deciding whether you have a claim, bring these to the first call:

• The date of the fall and the address of the job site
• The names of the owner, the general contractor and your employer, if you know them
• The workers’ compensation claim number, if a claim was filed
• Photographs of the ladder, scaffold or opening, and the names of anyone who saw it

Our construction accident practice page, the scaffold accident page and our Mann v Mezuyon analysis explain these claims under current law.

Sources

• Labor Law § 240, § 241, § 200; CPLR 1411; Workers’ Compensation Law §§ 10 and 11
• NY Constitution art VII, art IV § 1, art XIII § 4; State Finance Law § 3; Election Law § 8-100
• A10008-C, Part EE (chapter 58 of the Laws of 2026)
• Bills: A9633, A9128, A6007, S3418, A2303, S7997, S8200; H.R. 3548 (119th Congress)
• Blake v Neighborhood Hous. Servs. of N.Y. City, 1 NY3d 280 (2003); Ross v Curtis-Palmer Hydro-Elec. Co., 81 NY2d 494 (1993); Narducci v Manhasset Bay Assoc., 96 NY2d 259 (2001); Runner v New York Stock Exch., Inc., 13 NY3d 599 (2009); Pataki v New York State Assembly, 4 NY3d 75 (2004); Silver v Pataki, 96 NY2d 532 (2001); Koenig v Patrick Constr. Corp., 298 NY 313 (1948); Mann v Mezuyon, LLC, 2026 NY Slip Op 03257; Atkins v Deere & Co., 177 Ill 2d 222 (1997)
• Spectrum News, “New York’s Scaffold Law spiking construction insurance by as much as 500%” (June 15, 2026), “Albany bracing for battle over scaffold law” (September 10, 2026) and “Scaffold Law reform is on the affordable housing agenda” (September 16, 2026); Crain’s New York Business, “After years as a political lightning rod, Scaffold Law reform gains traction” (October 6, 2026)
• Reform side: BTEA / HR&A Advisors, Scaffold Law Economic Impact (December 2025); Hattery, Geddes and Kay, The Costs of Labor Law 240 on New York’s Economy and Public Infrastructure (Rockefeller Institute, 2013); RAND RR-A2775-1 (2023); NYS Department of Financial Services, Affordable Housing and Insurance (November 22, 2022)
• Worker side: NYCOSH, Deadly Skyline (May 2026); Center for Popular Democracy and Make the Road New York, Fatal Inequality (October 2013); Gary LaBarbera, Times Union (October 16, 2025); Center for Justice & Democracy, FAQ: The Importance of New York’s Scaffold Law (c. 2014); BLS, Census of Fatal Occupational Injuries, 2024