Yonkers, NY — Debt Collection Agencies (Consumer Protection Code Art. XVIII)

Municipal jurisdiction. Yonkers layers a licence and a short conduct code on top of New York State law. The state analysis — SOL, revival, 23 NYCRR Part 1, the CCFA, GBL art. 29-H — lives in state/ny.md and is not restated here. New York State does not license collection agencies, so every obligation on this page is net-new.

Authority

Yonkers Consumer Protection Code, Chapter 31, Article XVIII, "Debt Collection Agencies", §§ 31-158 to 31-162.3. Adopted 10-26-2004 by G.O. No. 8-2004; amended in its entirety 12-9-2014 by G.O. No. 16-2014. Administered by the Office of Licensing, also known as the Consumer Protection Bureau (§ 31-158), whose head is the Director, styled "Consumer Protection Officer" in Article VIA of the City Charter.

What this adds over state law

Layer	Yonkers vs New York State
Licence / registration	ADDS. § 31-159 makes it unlawful to act as a debt collection agency without a City licence. NY State has no collection-agency licence at all.
Bond	N/A. No bond appears in Art. XVIII or on the City's application.
Conduct rules stricter than state	ADDS. § 31-162 imposes per-communication content duties and a 5-business-day settlement-confirmation duty; § 31-162.1 adds an unbounded cease-until-verify and a time-barred contact bar.
Disclosures	ADDS. Five mandatory items in every permitted communication (§ 31-162(A)).
Dispute / verification	ADDS. § 31-162.1(A) cease-until-verify is not bounded by any 30-day window, unlike FDCPA § 1692g.
Fees / rate caps	N/A as a rate cap. The licence fee itself is $300/year per the City's current application (see the conflict below).
SOL / revival	SAME AS STATE — do not answer from this page. CPLR 214-i and CPLR 213 govern; Yonkers adds only a disclosure precondition to contacting a consumer about expired debt.
Private right of action	UNVERIFIED. Art. XVIII provides licence revocation (§ 31-162.2) and a Class II offence (§ 31-162.3); no private action appears in the article, and whether the Consumer Protection Code creates one generally was not established.

Licence

It shall be unlawful for any person to act as a debt collection agency without first having obtained a license in accordance with the provisions of this article, and without first being in compliance with all other applicable laws, rules and regulations. — Yonkers Code § 31-159

All licenses issued pursuant to this article shall be valid for one year unless sooner suspended or revoked. The annual fee for a license or renewal thereof shall be $150. — Yonkers Code § 31-160 (text as captured 2017-05-04)

⚠ FEE CONFLICT — use $300. The City's own current application states:

$300.00 License Fee; NON-REFUNDABLE. Payable to the City of Yonkers; Certified Business Check OR Money Order … License Expires One Year following date of Issuance. — City of Yonkers, Debt Collection License Application (Consumer Protection Bureau; document dated 2025-10-28, retrieved 2026-08-21)

The code text above says $150, but the newest reachable capture of the code is 2017-05-04 — ecode360 has been Cloudflare-hard-blocked since, so a later amendment to § 31-160 would be invisible. The City's live form is the better evidence of what is payable today. Plan on $300; treat the current wording of § 31-160 as UNVERIFIED and re-check when ecode360 becomes reachable.

Non-resident applicants:

The applicant who is a nonresident of the City shall provide the name and address of a registered agent within the City or designate the Director as his or her agent upon whom process or other notification may be served. — Yonkers Code § 31-161(B)(2)

⚠ Who is caught — UNRESOLVED, and do not encode the common claim. Art. XVIII contains no geographic trigger: § 31-159 bars acting "as a debt collection agency" without a licence without saying whether the hook is an office in Yonkers, collection from a Yonkers resident, or both. A full-text read of the article turns up no residence or territorial clause at all; the only geography is § 31-161(B)(2) above, which shows out-of-City applicants are contemplated but does not say when one must apply. The widely-repeated formulation that Yonkers "binds on the residence of the consumer" is an inference, not text — it is not supported by anything in the article as captured, and it should not be relied on as a rule without counsel or a direct answer from the Consumer Protection Bureau.

Who is a "debt collection agency"

A person engaged in business, the principal purpose of which is to regularly collect or attempt to collect debts owed or due or asserted to be owed or due to another and shall also include a buyer of delinquent debt who seeks to collect such debt, either directly or through the services of another, by, including but not limited to initiating or using legal processes or other means to collect or attempt to collect such debt. — Yonkers Code § 31-158 (opening of the definition; debt buyers are expressly in scope)

The attorney carve-out has a clawback that swallows most collection practice:

Any attorney at law or law firm collecting a debt in such capacity on behalf of and in the name of a client solely through activities that may only be performed by a licensed attorney, but not any attorney at law or law firm or part thereof who regularly engages in activities traditionally performed by debt collectors, including, but not limited to, contacting a debtor through the mail or via telephone with the purpose of collecting a debt or other activities as determined by rule of the Commissioner. — Yonkers Code § 31-158, exclusion (B)

Also excluded: process servers (A); utility employees acting for a Public Service Law-regulated utility (C); persons whose collection activity is incidental to a fiduciary or escrow obligation, concerns a debt the person originated, or concerns a debt not in default when obtained (D); government officers acting officially (E); and nonprofit credit counsellors (F). Note (D)(2): first-party creditors collecting their own originated debt are outside the licence.

Required practices — every communication (§ 31-162)

In addition to any practices required under any federal, state or local law, a debt collection agency shall: A. In any permitted communication with the consumer, provide: (1) A callback number to a phone that is answered by a natural person. (2) The name of the agency. (3) The originating creditor of the debt. (4) The name of the person to call back; and (5) The amount of the debt at the time of the communication. B. Confirm, in writing, to the consumer, within five business days, any debt payment schedule or settlement agreement reached regarding the debt. — Yonkers Code § 31-162

Both duties are stricter than anything in the FDCPA, Reg F, or New York State law. (A) attaches to every permitted communication, not to the validation notice — five specific content items, including a live human on the callback number and the balance as of that communication. (B) puts a hard 5-business-day clock on written confirmation of any plan or settlement, with no carve-out for oral-only arrangements.

Prohibited practices (§ 31-162.1)

In addition to any practices prohibited under any federal, state or local law, a debt collection agency shall not: A. Attempt to collect or contact a consumer regarding a debt after such consumer requests verification for such debt until such agency furnishes such consumer written documentation identifying the creditor who originated the debt and itemizing the principal balance of the debt that remains or is alleged to remain due and all other charges that are due or alleged to be due; B. Contact a consumer about or seek to collect a debt on which the statute of limitations for initiating legal action has expired unless such agency first provides the consumer such information about the consumer's legal rights as the Commissioner prescribes by rule. — Yonkers Code § 31-162.1

(A) is the significant one: the cease-until-verify duty is triggered by a request at any time, is not bounded by the FDCPA's 30-day validation window, and specifies the documentation that ends it — originating creditor plus an itemization of principal and all other charges.

⚠ (B) has no locatable implementing rule. The prohibition is absolute until the agency gives the consumer "such information about the consumer's legal rights as the Commissioner prescribes by rule." No such Yonkers rule was located in this pass. Two consequences: the content of a compliant time-barred disclosure is undefined from official sources, and a collector cannot cure by inventing one. Treat NYC's or DFS's script as a starting point for counsel, not as Yonkers compliance. UNVERIFIED — the rule may exist and simply not be published where automated search reaches.

Enforcement

The Director may at any time revoke or suspend any license issued pursuant to this article for violation of any of the terms or conditions of such license as herein set forth, but such license shall not be revoked without notice, and the licensee shall be entitled to a hearing. — Yonkers Code § 31-162.2

A violation of this article shall constitute a Class II offense. — Yonkers Code § 31-162.3

The dollar consequence of a Class II offence sits in the City's general penalty provisions, which are outside Art. XVIII and were not retrieved — do not quote a number.

Plain English (interpretation — the quotes win)

• A Yonkers licence is a real gate, and it is the only collection-agency licence a New York agency can need besides NYC's — the State licenses no one.
• Debt buyers are in; first-party creditors collecting their own originated paper are out (§ 31-158(D)(2)); law firms are in the moment they do ordinary collector work.
• Two workflow changes no FDCPA-compliant shop has by default: a five-item script attached to every communication including a human-answered callback number and a current balance, and a 5-business-day written confirmation of every plan or settlement.
• The verification stop has no clock. A request made a year into collection still stops contact until the documentation goes out.
• Do not answer "does Yonkers apply to us?" from this page — the article has no geographic trigger, and that question needs counsel.

Traps / edge cases

1. $150 vs $300. The code says one thing and the City's live form another; the form is newer by eight years. Use $300, flag the code as unverified.
2. The code's own vocabulary is inconsistent — the definitions establish a "Director," but § 31-158(B) and § 31-162.1(B) both delegate rulemaking to "the Commissioner." Whether these are the same officer is not stated in the article. The mismatch recurring in exactly the two places that delegate rulemaking suggests the 2014 amendment-in-entirety imported language without conforming the officer title.
3. The time-barred gate reads two opposite ways, and you cannot advise either. § 31-162.1(B) bars contact about expired debt "unless such agency first provides" the prescribed rights information — and no prescribing rule was located. Read one way, the condition can never be satisfied, so all contact on time-barred debt in Yonkers is barred. Read the other, the duty is unenforceable for want of the rule it depends on. Nothing official resolves it. Do not encode either reading, and do not substitute NYC's or DFS's script and call it compliance.
4. No penalty figure exists on this page. § 31-162.3 makes a violation a Class II offence, but the offence-class schedule lives elsewhere in the Yonkers Code and was not retrieved — never quote a dollar amount for a Yonkers violation.
5. Source is an eight-year-old archive capture. Everything quoted here is the article as it stood on 2017-05-04, which post-dates the 2014 amendment-in-entirety, but a 2018–2026 amendment would not show. Re-verify before relying for enforcement code.
6. Westchester County sits on top of Yonkers — a Yonkers-licensed agency is inside both regimes (Westchester Code § 863.211 bars simulated legal process, reaching first-party creditors and collection attorneys, who are outside Art. XVIII entirely). No Westchester page exists yet.
7. Doing NYC does not get you Yonkers. The intuition that the bigger city's rules subsume the smaller one's is false here — see the comparison below.

Yonkers vs New York City — where each is stricter

Both NY municipal regimes are live, and neither subsumes the other. An agency working both must satisfy both.

Duty	Yonkers	New York City
Natural-person callback number	Stricter — required in every permitted communication (§ 31-162(A)(1))	Scoped to the validation notice contact and the limited-content-message definition, not per-communication
Originating creditor + current balance in each communication	Yonkers only (§ 31-162(A)(3), (5))	Not required per communication; that content sits in the validation notice, itemized from the "itemization reference date"
Written confirmation of a settlement or payment plan	Yonkers only, 5 business days (§ 31-162(B))	No such duty — NYC requires only that the agreement be retained in the account records
Cease-until-verify	Open-ended, released by originating-creditor documentation + itemization (§ 31-162.1(A))	Stricter — dispute at any time, 60-day verification cliff, permanent loss of the account for third-party collectors, and a Notice of Unverified Debt that binds downstream holders (see ny-nyc.md, Disputes and verification)

The 5-business-day settlement confirmation is worth singling out: on a cross-check against the whole compiled corpus — 51 states, NYC, and every locality in the internal gap survey — no other jurisdiction imposes it. It is precisely the duty a collector would assume the larger city already covered.

Related

• New York State — the layer underneath this one
• New York City — the other NY municipal regime, far larger
• FDCPA validation — § 1692g's 30-day window, which Yonkers is not bounded by
• Reg F time-barred debt
• State matrix