Suffolk County Vacant Land Report

Suffolk County contains 41,840 vacant parcels out of 516,088 total — 8.1% of all property. They are not spread evenly. The most vacant town has roughly 23× the vacancy rate of the least.

Vacancy rate by town

What “vacant” means here

A parcel counts as vacant when Suffolk County’s assessment roll assigns it a property class in the 300 series — land carrying no principal structure. That includes buildable residential lots, unbuildable slivers, wetland and preserved open space, and land held by towns and the county. It is a measure of undeveloped land, not of land available to buy.

The East End rates reflect that directly: Southampton, East Hampton, Shelter Island and Southold combine large lot sizes with substantial preserved acreage, so their vacancy share runs well above the built-out western towns.

Method and coverage

Figures are computed from 516,088 canonical parcel records covering all ten Suffolk towns, built from the county assessment roll and county GIS parcel layers. Property class and acreage are present on essentially every parcel, so the vacancy counts above carry no coverage caveat.

Median lot size is suppressed where a town has too few measured parcels to report one honestly. Tax-delinquency figures are deliberately excluded from this page — parcel-level arrears are compiled for 6 of 10 towns, and a zero for an uncompiled town would read as “no unpaid taxes” rather than “not yet measured.” Those figures, with their own coverage disclosure, are in the Suffolk County tax arrears report.

To browse the underlying parcels, see the Suffolk vacant-land index.