Mayor Zohran Mamdani and the City Council struck a handshake deal on a $126 billion city budget Tuesday morning, just hours ahead of a legally mandated deadline for the new fiscal year.

The final sticking point between the sides was the expansion of a rental assistance program that functions like a local version of Section 8, which pays rent subsidies, or vouchers, to private landlords on behalf of tenants.

Members of the City Council led by City Council Speaker Julie Menin were pushing Mamdani to put $300 million annually toward housing vouchers. Such a move would mean a sizable increase to the amount of money the city has earmarked for housing assistance. Ultimately, the sides settled on spreading the additional funding across two years: $175 million in the upcoming fiscal year and $125 million in the following year.

"We have worked together to usher in a new era of fiscal health for our city, one that is sustainable, one that is durable, and one that makes needed investments in a safer, more affordable New York," the mayor said in a joint press conference with Menin.

Menin called the agreement to expand housing vouchers “transformative,” saying the budget both protected vulnerable New Yorkers while also “demonstrating prudent fiscal responsibility.”

During the mayoral campaign, Mamdani said he would reverse the previous administration's battle against the program’s expansion. But once in office, he adopted a similar stance as previous Mayor Eric Adams, who said the spiraling costs made the program fiscally unsustainable for the city.

Rental assistance could cost the city about $2 billion in the upcoming fiscal year, according to the mayor’s executive budget. Much of the assistance is available through CityFHEPS, a program administered by the Department of Social Services. Expanding that program would have required state approval. The recently pledged money will be administered through a new program overseen by the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development.

In an unexpected reversal, the mayor said he had also canceled a planned expansion of the NYPD. The plan, which involved hiring 580 additional officers by the end of the year, drew outrage from criminal justice advocates and some elected officials who reminded Mamdani that he had promised to keep the police head count flat.

At the press conference on Tuesday, Mamdani said he and Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch had “been able to identify ways to keep the NYPD head count at the originally authorized 35,000 while also meeting all of our crime fighting needs and implementing the new programs that were announced earlier this year."

The budget deal caps a whirlwind budget process for the new mayor. At the start of his tenure, Mamdani projected the city would face a $5.4 billion budget deficit in the upcoming fiscal year.

The mayor managed to close the gap without major austerity cuts — and expand free childcare for 2-year-olds — thanks to billions in aid from the state as well as an agreement to delay payments into four municipal pensions. He also avoided raising property taxes to close the gap, though state lawmakers signed off on a pied-a-terre tax that places levies on high value non-primary residences in the city.

As part of the budget negotiations, the Mamdani administration also agreed to settle the city’s yearslong legal battle that argued that the Council did not have the right to expand the housing vouchers.

Robert Desir, an attorney at the Legal Aid Society, which joined the Council in their lawsuit, praised the settlement as “a major victory for New Yorkers in shelters and those facing eviction and homelessness.”

The final budget also expands the number of New Yorkers eligible for the city’s Fair Fares program, which gives half-priced fares to low-income transit riders. The program will now increase income eligibility to New Yorkers living at or below 200% of the federal poverty level, or around $32,000 a year for an individual. The cutoff had previously been 150% of the federal poverty level.

Menin earlier in the year called for the program to cover the entire cost of transit rides for enrollees, but the final budget expanded the income limit while continuing to provide 50% fare discounts.

Betsy Plum, the head of Riders Alliance, a transit advocacy group, hailed the expansion as “an important victory for riders.”

About 340,000 additional New Yorkers will be able to enroll in the Fare Fares program, increasing total eligibility to 1.3 million. But only 40% of those who qualify typically sign up for the program, according to the Independent Budget Office.

But the deal does not include a free fares program that had been proposed by the Council to alleviate transit costs for the poorest riders. The plan would have represented a compromise for Mamdani, who had campaigned on free buses but was unable to deliver a pilot in his first year.

The Council is expected to vote on the budget on Tuesday after the press conference.

This is a developing story and has been updated.

Correction: An earlier version of this story misstated that the city would expand housing vouchers through a program called CityFHEPS. The city is instead administering the expansion through a new program.