When people picture a fight over a security deposit, they picture small claims court—a modest sum, a quick hearing, a tenant and a landlord each telling their side to a judge in an afternoon. For many deposit disputes, that picture is accurate, and small claims is exactly the right forum. But not every deposit is small, and not every deposit dispute belongs in small claims. When the amount at stake is substantial—thousands of dollars, or more than ten thousand—a tenant has another path, and a New York court decision shows how it can work.
In Masseroli v. Gatfield, a tenant with a $12,950 security deposit did not go to small claims. The tenant filed a civil action in Supreme Court, Westchester County, and then moved for summary judgment—a procedure that lets a court decide a claim without a full trial when the law and the undisputed facts make the answer clear. The court granted the motion as to the deposit itself, awarding the tenant the full $12,950 principal plus interest from the date the landlord's obligation came due. The tenant did not get everything asked for; the court denied the request for punitive damages and left a related damage dispute unresolved. But on the core question—the return of the deposit—the tenant won completely, and won it without ever having to sit through a trial.
The decision, Masseroli v. Gatfield, 2024 NY Slip Op 24168, was issued on June 12, 2024, by the Supreme Court, Westchester County. It is a useful case for any tenant with a large deposit, because it illustrates three things at once: that a sizable deposit dispute does not have to stay in small claims, that summary judgment can resolve the deposit claim quickly when the legal standard is met, and that recovering the deposit is a distinct question from recovering interest, punitive damages, or other relief. It also offers an honest lesson about expectations—the difference between what a tenant asks for and what a tenant actually gets.
This guide explains how the case unfolded, what summary judgment means and why it worked here, how the court separated the deposit from the other relief sought, and what all of it means for a tenant trying to recover a deposit large enough to be worth taking seriously.
The tenant had paid a security deposit of $12,950—a figure large enough to signal a substantial rental, and large enough that losing it would be a serious financial blow. The tenant vacated the apartment on March 30, 2022. Under New York law, that move-out date started a clock: the landlord had fourteen days to return the deposit or provide an itemized statement of any deductions, which meant the deadline fell on April 13, 2022.
The landlord missed it. The itemized statement did not come until April 29, 2022—more than two weeks past the deadline. Under General Obligations Law § 7-108, a landlord who fails to provide the required itemized statement within fourteen days forfeits the right to retain any portion of the deposit. The late statement meant the landlord had lost the right to keep any of the $12,950.
Rather than going to small claims court, the tenant filed a civil action in Supreme Court and moved for summary judgment. The motion asked for several things: judgment on the complaint and a money judgment for the full $12,950 plus interest from April 13, 2022; punitive damages of $25,900 (twice the deposit); and dismissal of the landlord's answer, counterclaim, and affirmative defenses.
The court granted the motion in part. It awarded the tenant summary judgment on the deposit claim—the full $12,950 principal, plus interest from April 13, 2022, at the statutory rate of nine percent per year. It dismissed certain of the landlord's affirmative defenses, including one based on breach of contract, holding that the statutory deposit protections could not be waived by the terms of the lease. The forfeiture was clear: the itemization was late, the right to retain was gone, and the deposit had to be returned.
But the court denied the rest. It declined to award punitive damages, finding that the landlord had not willfully violated the statute. And it refused to dismiss the landlord's counterclaim for property damage, because there remained genuine questions of fact about whether the damage to the apartment exceeded ordinary wear and tear. The court noted that the landlord could still pursue a separate claim for damage beyond ordinary wear and tear—but that the landlord would bear the burden of proving that damage and the cost of repairing it. A request for attorneys' fees on the counterclaim was called premature.
So the tenant recovered the full deposit with interest, promptly and without a trial, but did not obtain the punitive damages sought, and the question of the property damage was left open for the landlord to pursue separately. That mixed result is precisely what makes the case instructive.
The first lesson of Masseroli is one many tenants never consider: the forum matters, and a large deposit dispute has options a small one does not.
Small claims court exists to handle modest disputes quickly and without the expense and formality of a full civil action. It is a genuinely valuable forum—filing fees are low, the procedures are simplified, and tenants can and routinely do represent themselves successfully. For a deposit of a few hundred or a couple of thousand dollars, small claims is almost always the sensible choice, because the cost and effort of a full Supreme Court action would dwarf the amount in dispute.
But small claims courts have a dollar ceiling. In New York City, the limit for a small claims case is a set maximum, and disputes above that ceiling cannot be fully resolved there. A deposit of $12,950 is well beyond what a small claims court can award in a single case. A tenant with a deposit that large faces a choice: try to squeeze the claim into small claims by giving up the excess, split it in ways that may not be permitted, or bring the claim where it actually belongs—as a civil action in a court with the jurisdiction to award the full amount.
That is what the tenant in Masseroli did. By filing in Supreme Court rather than small claims, the tenant could seek the entire $12,950, plus interest, plus the additional relief the complaint requested, without being capped by small claims limits. The trade-off is real: a Supreme Court action is more formal, more involved, and typically calls for a lawyer, where small claims is designed for self-represented litigants. But for a deposit large enough to justify it, the more formal forum is not a burden to avoid—it is the path to recovering the full amount.
For a tenant, the practical point is to match the forum to the stakes. A small deposit dispute belongs in small claims, where it can be resolved cheaply and without a lawyer. A large one may belong in a civil action, where the full amount is recoverable and procedures like summary judgment are available. The size of your deposit should inform not just whether to fight, but where.
The second lesson is about the procedure the tenant used to win so cleanly: summary judgment. For tenants unfamiliar with how civil litigation works, this is worth understanding, because it is one of the most powerful tools available in a case where the law is clear and the key facts are not genuinely in dispute.
In an ordinary civil action, a case proceeds through pleadings, discovery, and eventually a trial, at which a judge or jury resolves disputed facts and applies the law. Trials are expensive, slow, and uncertain. Summary judgment is a mechanism for short-circuiting that process when it is not needed. A party can ask the court to decide a claim—or part of a claim—without a trial, on the ground that there is no genuine dispute about the material facts and that the party is entitled to judgment as a matter of law. If the court agrees, it enters judgment then and there, and the matter never goes to trial.
The logic is that a trial exists to resolve factual disputes. Where there is no real factual dispute to resolve—where the facts that matter are undisputed and the only question is what the law requires given those facts—a trial would be a waste of everyone's time. Summary judgment lets the court cut to the answer.
Masseroli is a clean example of why summary judgment fit the deposit claim so well. The facts that mattered were not in dispute. The tenant vacated on March 30, 2022. The landlord's deadline to provide an itemized statement was April 13, 2022. The landlord did not provide the statement until April 29, 2022. None of that was genuinely contested. And given those undisputed facts, the law supplied the answer automatically: under § 7-108, a landlord who fails to provide the itemized statement within fourteen days forfeits the right to retain any part of the deposit. There was nothing for a trial to resolve on the deposit claim. The dates were fixed, the deadline was fixed, the statement was late, and the statute dictated the consequence. Summary judgment was exactly the right tool, and the court granted it.
This is the feature of the fourteen-day rule that makes it so amenable to summary judgment. Because forfeiture turns on dates and the presence or absence of a timely itemized statement—not on the subjective question of whether the deductions were fair—the deposit claim often comes down to facts that are easy to establish and hard to dispute. When the itemization was indisputably late, there is little for a landlord to argue, and a tenant may be able to win the deposit without a trial at all. That is a powerful position, and it is one of the practical advantages of bringing a strong deposit claim as a civil action: the summary-judgment procedure is available, and a clear statutory violation is well suited to it.
One aspect of the decision deserves particular attention, because it reflects a point tenants often get wrong: the idea that whatever the lease says governs. In Masseroli, the landlord raised a defense based on the lease—a breach-of-contract theory—and the court dismissed it, holding that the statutory deposit protections could not be waived by the terms of the lease.
This matters because landlords sometimes include lease provisions that purport to change the deposit rules—language suggesting the tenant agreed to different return timelines, waived certain protections, or accepted terms more favorable to the landlord than the statute allows. Tenants, seeing their own signature on the lease, often assume they are bound by whatever it says. But the deposit protections in New York law are not default rules that a lease can rewrite. They are protections the legislature put in place for tenants, and a lease cannot contract around them. A provision in a lease that tries to waive or diminish the statutory deposit protections does not override the statute.
The court's refusal to let the lease defeat the deposit claim is a reminder that the floor of protection the law establishes is just that—a floor. A landlord cannot use the lease to drop below it. For a tenant, this means that a lease clause suggesting you gave up a deposit protection is not the last word. The statute sets the baseline, and the statute controls.
The third and perhaps most important lesson of Masseroli is the distinction among the different kinds of relief a tenant can seek—and the recognition that winning the deposit does not automatically mean winning everything else. The case cleanly separates three things that tenants often lump together: the deposit itself, interest on it, and additional damages like punitive damages.
Recovery of the deposit flowed directly from the forfeiture. The landlord's late itemization meant the right to retain was gone, so the full $12,950 principal went back to the tenant. This is the core of the claim, and it was won on summary judgment because the statutory violation was clear.
Interest is a separate component. The court awarded interest on the deposit from April 13, 2022—the date the landlord's obligation came due—at the statutory rate of nine percent per year. Interest is not a penalty; it is compensation for the time value of money the tenant was wrongly deprived of. Because the landlord should have returned the deposit by April 13 and did not, the tenant was entitled to interest running from that date. For a large deposit held for a long time, interest can add a meaningful sum on top of the principal—another reason the forum and the full claim matter when the deposit is substantial.
Punitive damages are a third, distinct matter, and here the tenant did not prevail. The tenant had asked for $25,900—twice the deposit—in punitive damages. Under the deposit statute, punitive damages of up to twice the deposit are available, but only where the landlord's violation was willful. The court found that the landlord had not willfully violated the statute, and so it denied the punitive request entirely. The tenant recovered the deposit and interest but none of the additional penalty.
This is the honest, realistic picture every tenant should carry into a deposit dispute. The violation that gets your deposit back—a late itemization—is not automatically a willful violation that doubles it. A landlord can miss the deadline, forfeit the deposit, and still not have acted willfully in the sense that supports punitive damages. The two questions are governed by different standards: forfeiture turns on the objective fact of a missed deadline, while punitive damages turn on the landlord's state of mind and require a showing of willfulness supported by the record. Winning the first does not get you the second.
The practical implication is to set expectations by the standard, not by the hope. Ask for punitive damages when the facts genuinely suggest willful misconduct—and be prepared to prove it—but do not assume the penalty comes automatically with the deposit. The tenant in Masseroli recovered everything actually owed on the deposit and interest, which was the real win, but the punitive claim failed because willfulness was not established.
Closely related, and worth stating on its own because it bears directly on how these cases get described, is the distinction between what a tenant asks a court for and what the court actually grants. In Masseroli, the tenant's motion sought the deposit, interest, $25,900 in punitive damages, dismissal of the landlord's counterclaim, and more. The court granted the deposit and interest, denied the punitive damages, and left the counterclaim standing. The amount sought and the amount awarded were not the same.
This distinction is easy to blur, and blurring it produces misleading impressions. A reader who hears only that a tenant "sought $38,850"—the deposit, doubled, plus more—would picture a far larger victory than actually occurred. The tenant recovered $12,950 plus interest. That is a complete and significant win on the deposit, but it is not the headline figure a careless summary might suggest. An accurate account has to distinguish the relief requested in the complaint and motion from the relief the court actually granted in its decision.
For a tenant, this distinction is useful in two ways. First, it sets realistic expectations about your own case. The number in your complaint is what you are asking for, not what you will necessarily get. Courts award what the law and the facts support, which may be less than the full wish list. Planning around the amount you can realistically expect to recover—often the deposit and interest, with punitive damages only if willfulness is clear—is wiser than planning around the maximum you could theoretically request.
Second, it helps you read other cases and claims accurately. When you hear about a tenant who "won" a large sum, it is worth asking whether that figure is the amount sought or the amount awarded, and whether it includes punitive damages that may or may not have survived. The real, reliable number in Masseroli is the $12,950 deposit plus nine-percent interest from April 13, 2022—a clean recovery of the deposit, not a doubled or tripled windfall.
An honest account of Masseroli has to include something that cuts against a simple "tenant wins everything" story: the landlord's counterclaim for property damage was not dismissed. The court refused to throw it out, because there remained genuine questions of fact about whether the damage to the apartment exceeded ordinary wear and tear. And the court noted that the landlord could pursue a separate claim for that damage, bearing the burden of proving both the damage and the cost of repair.
This is an important nuance, and it reflects how the fourteen-day forfeiture rule actually operates. Forfeiture of the right to retain the deposit is a consequence of the landlord's procedural failure—the late itemization. It is not a judicial finding that the apartment was undamaged or that the landlord had no legitimate grievance. The two are separate. A landlord who misses the itemization deadline forfeits the right to keep the deposit, which must be returned in full. But the landlord is not thereby barred forever from seeking compensation for genuine damage beyond ordinary wear and tear; the landlord can bring a separate claim for it, where the landlord will have to prove the damage and its cost.
So the deposit went back to the tenant because of the procedural forfeiture, but the question of whether the apartment was actually damaged remained open, to be fought on its own terms in a separate claim where the burden sits on the landlord. The tenant won the deposit cleanly and promptly on summary judgment; the damage dispute was not resolved by that victory.
For a tenant, this is worth understanding so that the win is not misread. Recovering the deposit through forfeiture does not necessarily end the matter if there is a real damage dispute. A landlord with genuine damage to point to may pursue it separately, and the tenant may still have to defend against that claim—though the landlord bears the burden of proving the damage and the repair costs, which is a meaningful protection. The forfeiture gets the deposit back; it does not automatically extinguish every dispute between the parties.
It helps to translate the case into an ordinary situation, because the mechanics of Supreme Court litigation can feel remote from a tenant's day-to-day reality.
Imagine you rented a high-end apartment and put down a large security deposit—say, something in the range of the $12,950 in this case. You moved out, leaving the apartment in reasonable condition. The fourteen-day deadline for the landlord to return your deposit or send an itemized statement came and went with nothing from the landlord. Weeks later, an itemized statement finally arrived, well past the deadline, listing charges you think are inflated. Your deposit—a significant sum—is being withheld, and small claims court cannot award an amount that large.
Masseroli shows the path. Because the deposit exceeds the small claims ceiling, you would bring a civil action in a court with jurisdiction to award the full amount. Because the landlord's itemization was indisputably late, the forfeiture rule applies, and the key facts—your move-out date, the deadline, the date the statement arrived—are not genuinely in dispute. That makes the deposit claim a strong candidate for summary judgment: you could ask the court to award the deposit without a trial, on the ground that the law dictates the result given undisputed facts. If the court agrees, you recover the full deposit plus interest from the date it should have been returned, promptly and without the expense and uncertainty of a trial.
You would also set realistic expectations. You might ask for punitive damages, but you would understand that they require proving willfulness and may well be denied, as they were in Masseroli. And if the landlord has a genuine damage claim, you would understand that recovering your deposit through forfeiture does not necessarily end that dispute—the landlord may pursue the damage separately, bearing the burden of proof. The win on the deposit is real and substantial, but it is a win on the deposit, not a guarantee against every other claim.
Because a Supreme Court action is more formal than small claims and typically calls for a lawyer, you would likely retain counsel—which, for a deposit of this size, is usually worth it. The amount at stake justifies the cost, and a lawyer can bring the summary-judgment motion that turns a clear statutory violation into a prompt judgment. This is the practical calculus behind the case: a deposit large enough to be worth a formal action, a statutory violation clear enough to win on a motion, and a tenant who matched the forum and the procedure to the strength of the claim.
Knowing the case is one thing; using it is another. Here is how a tenant with a substantial deposit can approach a dispute.
Match the forum to the size of the deposit. For a small deposit, small claims court is almost always the right choice—cheap, fast, and navigable without a lawyer. For a deposit large enough to exceed the small claims ceiling, a civil action in a court with full jurisdiction may be the better path, because it allows recovery of the entire amount plus interest and makes procedures like summary judgment available.
Establish the timeline precisely, because it is the heart of a forfeiture claim. Identify the date you vacated, which starts the fourteen-day clock, and the date the landlord's itemized statement arrived, if it arrived at all. These dates determine whether the landlord forfeited the right to retain the deposit, and they are usually easy to prove. Keep whatever fixes them—move-out records, the postmark or timestamp of the landlord's statement, communications establishing the dates.
Recognize when your claim is suited to summary judgment. Where the key facts are undisputed—the move-out date, the deadline, the late statement—and the law dictates the result, the deposit claim may be resolvable without a trial. A clear statutory violation is exactly the kind of claim summary judgment is built for, and it can produce a prompt judgment for the full deposit plus interest.
Distinguish the deposit, the interest, and any additional damages. Plan around recovering the deposit and interest as the realistic core of your claim. Treat punitive damages as a separate request that requires proving willfulness, not an automatic add-on. And distinguish, in your own thinking and in anything you say about the case, the amount you are asking for from the amount a court is likely to award.
Understand that forfeiture does not end a genuine damage dispute. Recovering your deposit because the landlord missed the deadline does not resolve whether the apartment was actually damaged. A landlord with a real damage claim may pursue it separately, bearing the burden of proving the damage and its cost. Your win on the deposit is a win on the deposit.
Get advice, especially for a large claim. A substantial deposit dispute in a civil action is not a do-it-yourself matter in the way a small claims case can be. The amount at stake usually justifies retaining a tenant attorney, who can assess the strength of the claim, bring the summary-judgment motion, and set realistic expectations about interest, punitive damages, and any counterclaim. Many tenant attorneys and legal aid organizations across New York assist with exactly these questions, and a consultation is a sensible first step.
Several intuitive but mistaken beliefs keep tenants from recovering large deposits effectively, and Masseroli speaks to each.
The first misconception is that all deposit disputes go to small claims. They do not have to. Small claims has a dollar ceiling, and a deposit above it cannot be fully recovered there. A tenant who assumes small claims is the only option may end up giving up part of a large deposit unnecessarily. The right forum depends on the amount, and for a large deposit, a civil action is often the path to the full recovery.
The second misconception is that you always have to go to trial to win. You do not. Summary judgment lets a court decide a claim without a trial when the material facts are undisputed and the law dictates the result. For a clear statutory violation—like a late itemization on fixed, provable dates—the deposit claim may be won on a motion, sparing the tenant the delay, expense, and uncertainty of a trial. Tenants who dread a drawn-out courtroom fight should know that a strong claim may never reach one.
The third misconception is that whatever the lease says controls. It does not, where the lease tries to undercut the statutory deposit protections. In Masseroli, the court dismissed a lease-based defense, holding that the protections could not be waived by lease terms. A clause suggesting you gave up a deposit right is not the last word; the statute sets a floor the lease cannot drop below.
The fourth misconception is that winning the deposit means winning everything requested. It does not. The tenant in Masseroli sought the deposit, interest, and $25,900 in punitive damages, and recovered the deposit and interest but not the punitive damages. Recovering the deposit, receiving interest, and obtaining additional damages are three distinct questions, and a tenant can win some and lose others in the same case.
The fifth misconception is that the figure in a complaint is the figure a tenant "wins." It is not. The amount sought is a request; the amount awarded is what the law and facts support. An accurate account of any deposit case distinguishes the two, and a tenant planning a claim should budget expectations around the recoverable amount—usually the deposit and interest—rather than the maximum theoretically requested.
The sixth misconception is that getting the deposit back through forfeiture proves the apartment was undamaged and ends all disputes. It does not. Forfeiture is a consequence of the landlord's procedural failure, not a finding about the condition of the unit. A landlord with a genuine damage claim may pursue it separately, bearing the burden of proving the damage and the repair cost, as the surviving counterclaim in Masseroli illustrates.
A substantial deposit changes not just where a tenant can bring a claim, but whether and how to bring it, and it is worth thinking through that calculus honestly.
The starting point is the strength of the claim. A forfeiture claim built on a late itemization is strong precisely because it turns on dates rather than judgments. If your landlord provided the itemized statement after the fourteen-day deadline, and you can prove your move-out date and the date the statement arrived, the core of your claim rests on facts that are hard to dispute and a statutory consequence that follows automatically. That is the kind of claim that can be won on summary judgment, as it was in Masseroli. A claim that instead depends on contested questions—whether the apartment was damaged, whether charges were reasonable—is harder, because those questions may require a trial to resolve. Knowing which kind of claim you have shapes everything that follows.
The next consideration is cost against recovery. A civil action in Supreme Court is more involved than a small claims case and usually calls for a lawyer. Legal fees are a real cost, and they have to be weighed against the amount you stand to recover. For a deposit of a few hundred dollars, the cost of a formal action would not make sense, which is exactly why small claims exists. For a deposit of many thousands—like the $12,950 in Masseroli—the math changes, because the amount at stake can justify the cost of counsel, and interest on a large deposit held for a long time adds to the recovery. The size of the deposit is what makes the formal path worth considering.
Interest deserves specific attention in this calculus, because tenants often forget it. The court in Masseroli awarded interest at nine percent per year from the date the landlord's obligation came due. On a large deposit wrongly withheld for an extended period, that interest can be significant—a further reason the full recovery in a court of general jurisdiction can meaningfully exceed what a capped small claims award would allow. When you weigh whether a large claim is worth pursuing, the recoverable amount is the principal plus interest, not just the deposit alone.
A tenant should also weigh the realistic ceiling on recovery. Because punitive damages require proving willfulness and are often denied—as they were in Masseroli—it is usually prudent to plan around recovering the deposit and interest rather than a doubled figure. Building a decision to litigate around the punitive multiplier, which may not materialize, risks disappointment. Building it around the deposit and interest, which a clear forfeiture claim reliably supports, is sounder.
Finally, a tenant should factor in any live counterclaim. If the landlord has a genuine damage dispute to raise, recovering the deposit through forfeiture may not be the end of the matter, and the tenant may have to defend against a separate damage claim. That does not undo the deposit recovery, and the burden of proving the damage sits on the landlord, but it is part of the full picture. A clear-eyed decision to pursue a large claim accounts for the possibility that the dispute continues on the damage question even after the deposit is won.
Taken together, these considerations point to a straightforward principle: a large deposit, a clean forfeiture claim, and the availability of summary judgment make a civil action a sensible path, and the involvement of a lawyer a reasonable investment. A small deposit, or a claim mired in contested facts, points back toward small claims or toward careful reflection on whether the fight is worth it. Masseroli sits at the favorable end of that spectrum—a large deposit, a clear violation, a prompt win—which is what makes it such a useful model.
It is worth being candid about the scope of a decision like Masseroli v. Gatfield. It is a trial-level Supreme Court decision resolving a motion in a particular case. It applies settled statutory rules to specific facts rather than announcing sweeping new law. Its value for a tenant lies in how clearly it illustrates the mechanics—a large deposit brought as a civil action, a clear forfeiture resolved on summary judgment, and a careful separation of the deposit from the other relief sought. The underlying rules come from General Obligations Law § 7-108 itself: the fourteen-day itemization requirement, the forfeiture consequence, the availability of punitive damages only for willful violations, and the principle that the statutory protections cannot be waived by a lease.
What the case does not do is promise any particular outcome in your situation. Every deposit dispute turns on its own facts—the size of the deposit, the timeline, whether the key facts are genuinely disputed, whether there is a real damage claim, and whether the landlord's conduct was willful. A case with contested facts about the timeline might not be suited to summary judgment at all. A landlord who itemized on time presents a very different situation. A court faced with different facts could reach a different result. The point of understanding the case is to understand the rules and the procedures, so you can assess your own position clearly, not to assume your facts guarantee the same recovery.
What is reliable, because it comes from the statute and not just from one decision, is the framework. In New York, a landlord who keeps part of a residential security deposit must provide an itemized statement within fourteen days of move-out, and a landlord who fails to do so forfeits the right to retain any part of the deposit. A tenant wrongly deprived of the deposit is entitled to interest. Punitive damages are available only for a willful violation that is actually established. The statutory protections cannot be waived by the lease. And forfeiture of the deposit does not by itself resolve a genuine, separate dispute about property damage. Those are the tools. Masseroli shows one tenant using them, in a forum chosen to match a deposit large enough to be worth the effort.
The most useful thing to take from this case is a pair of practical insights that apply well beyond the specific facts. The first is about forum: a deposit dispute does not have to stay in small claims. When the amount is large enough, a tenant can bring a civil action in a court with the jurisdiction to award the full deposit, plus interest, and can use summary judgment to win a clear claim without the delay and expense of a trial. The size of your deposit should shape not just whether you fight, but where and how.
The second is about expectations: winning the deposit is not the same as winning everything you asked for. Masseroli separates the deposit, the interest, and the punitive damages into three distinct questions, and the tenant won the first two and lost the third. The amount sought in a complaint is not the amount a court awards. Setting your expectations by what the law actually supports—typically the deposit and interest, with punitive damages only where willfulness is clear—keeps you grounded in the real value of your claim rather than a headline figure. And recovering the deposit through forfeiture does not necessarily end a genuine damage dispute, which a landlord may pursue separately.
A deposit is your money, and New York law gives you specific, enforceable tools to get it back when a landlord holds it improperly. For a large deposit, those tools include a forum built to handle the full amount and a procedure built to resolve a clear claim quickly. The first step is knowing that a substantial deposit dispute does not have to stay small—and that the amount you recover is the amount the law supports, not the amount you hoped for.
