Official misnumbering In 1937,
Charles Lodwick, who served from as mayor from 1694 to 1695, was inserted as the city's 21st mayor, increasing the official numbering of all subsequent mayors by one. In December 2025, another official numbering issue affecting all mayors after
John Lawrence's first term in 1673 was widely reported. Similar to American presidents, mayors are counted twice in the official numbering if they served non-consecutive terms.
Matthias Nicoll, who was the sixth mayor from 1672–73, was appointed to a non-consecutive term by governor
Edmund Andros in 1674 as the city's eighth mayor after the city was returned to English control following the
Dutch reconquest during
Third Anglo-Dutch War as part of the
Treaty of Westminster, but his second term was erroneously omitted in official records. The error appeared in official numberings from as early as an 1841 Manual of the Corporation of the City of New York. The
New York City Department of Records and Information Services located original court documents corroborating Nicoll's second term after reporting by
Gothamist the same month. The error had previously been noted by various researchers since as early as 1935. The outgoing administration of
Eric Adams declined to address the issue in its final weeks. On January 1, 2026, as
Zohran Mamdani was sworn into office his official website called him the 112th mayor. In his inauguration speech, Mamdani joked about the misnumbering, saying "I stand before you... honored to serve as either your 111th or 112th Mayor of New York City."
Mayoral terms and term limits in New York City since 1834 Direct elections to the mayoralty of the unconsolidated City of New York began in 1834 for a term of one year, extended to two years after 1849. The 1897 Charter of the consolidated City stipulated that the mayor was to be elected for a single four-year term. In 1901, the term halved to two years, with no restrictions on reelection. In 1905, the term was extended to four years once again. (Mayors
Fiorello La Guardia,
Robert F. Wagner Jr.,
Ed Koch and
Michael Bloomberg were later able to serve for twelve years each.) In 1993, the voters approved a two-term (eight-year) limit, and reconfirmed this limit when the issue was submitted to referendum in 1996. In 2008, the
New York City Council voted to change the two-term limit to three terms (without submitting the issue to the voters). However, in 2010, yet another referendum, reverting the limit to two terms, passed overwhelmingly.
Principal source: The Encyclopedia of New York City especially the entries for "charter" and "mayoralty". • Mayor Strong, elected in 1894, served an extra year because no municipal election was held in 1896, in anticipation of the consolidated City's switch to odd-year elections. • George B. McClellan Jr. was elected to one two-year term (1904–1906) and one four-year term (1906-1910). • David Dinkins was not affected by the term limit enacted in 1993 because he had served only one term by 1993 and failed to win re-election. • The
September 11 attacks on the
World Trade Center in Manhattan coincided with the primary elections for a successor to Mayor Giuliani, who was completing his second and final term of office. Many were so impressed by both the urgency of the situation and Giuliani's response that they wanted to keep him in office beyond December 31, 2001, either by removing the term limit or by extending his service for a few months. However, neither happened, the primary elections (with the same candidates) were re-run on September 25, the general election was held as scheduled on November 6, and
Michael Bloomberg took office on the regularly appointed date of January 1, 2002. • On October 2, 2008, Michael Bloomberg announced that he would ask the city council to extend the limit for mayor, council and other officers from two terms to three, and that, should such an extended limit prevail, he himself would seek re-election as mayor. On October 23, the
New York City Council voted 29–22 to extend the two-term limit to three terms. (A proposed amendment to submit the vote to a public referendum had failed earlier the same day by a vote of 22–28 with one abstention.) • In November 2010, yet another popular referendum, limiting mayoral terms to two, passed overwhelmingly.
Interrupted terms Mayors
John T. Hoffman (1866–1868, elected Governor 1868),
William Havemeyer (1845–1846, 1848–1849, and 1873–1874),
William Jay Gaynor (1910–1913),
John Francis Hylan (1918–1925),
Jimmy Walker (1926–1932), and
William O'Dwyer (1946–1950) failed to complete the final terms to which they were elected. The uncompleted mayoral terms of Hoffman, Walker, and O'Dwyer were added to the other offices elected in (respectively) 1868,
1932, and
1950. Those three elections are listed as "special" in the table below because they occurred before the next regularly scheduled
mayoral election; the "regular" mayoral elections of 1874 and 1913, on the other hand, were held on the same day that they would have happened had the mayoralty not become vacant. † Became acting mayor as the president of the board of aldermen or (in 1950) city council. (D) = (Democratic) (R) = (Republican) • Mayor Havemeyer was a Democrat who ran as a Republican against the Democratic
Tweed Ring in 1872. • Acting Mayors Coman, Vance, Kline and Collins did not seek election as mayor. • Acting Mayors McKee and Impellitteri were Democrats who lost the Democratic primary to succeed themselves, but still ran in the general election as independents. • Elected Mayor Oakey Hall won re-election, while Mayor Wickham did not seek it. Mayors Mitchel and O'Brien lost attempts at re-election, while Mayor Impellitteri did not run for a full term in the 1953 regular general election after losing the Democratic primary.
List of mayors of the City of Brooklyn (1834–1897) Brooklyn elected a
mayor from 1834 until consolidation in 1898 into the
City of Greater New York, whose own second
mayor (1902–1903),
Seth Low, had been
Mayor of
Brooklyn from 1882 to 1885. Since 1898,
Brooklyn has, in place of a separate
mayor, elected a
Borough President.
List of mayors of Long Island City (1870–1897) Long Island City, now a neighborhood within the Borough of
Queens, was incorporated as a city on May 4, 1870 and consolidated into the present
Greater New York City on January 1, 1898, along with the City of
Brooklyn and several other municipalities in the counties of
Queens and
Richmond.
Notes • George H. Hunter served as acting mayor from September 1873 to April 1874 while Henry S. DeBevoise temporarily retired from office. ==See also==