Key Insights from New York State’s Latest Language Access Report

In December 2025, the New York State Office of Language Access (OLA) published its new Annual Report for the state fiscal year (FY) 2024-2025, in accordance with New York’s language access law.

The current language access law requires state agencies in New York to provide interpreting in any language “with respect to the provision of agency services or benefits.” The law also requires state agencies to translate “vital documents” into the 12 most-spoken languages in New York other than English. At the time of writing, those languages are: Arabic, Bangla, Chinese, French, Haitian Creole, Italian, Korean, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Urdu, and Yiddish. 

State agencies may also choose to provide “vital document” translation in four additional languages based on local and agency-specific needs. 

The new OLA report includes data collected between April 1, 2024, and March 31, 2025, from 48 state agencies, including one additional agency compared to the FY 2023-2024 report.

Interpreting

According to the report, state agencies provided interpreting services for 157 languages in FY 2024-2025, an increase from 130 languages listed in the FY 2023-2024 report. The new report also states that 583,793 individual interpreting encounters were performed across all reporting state agencies, a 13% increase from the previous year.

Over-the-phone (OTP) interpreting, referred to in the report as “telephonic interpretation,” was the most used method and accounted for 82% of individual encounters. Consecutive in-person interpreting was next with 10% of individual encounters.

Unsurprisingly, Spanish remained the most-requested language with 75.8% of individual interpreting encounters being for the English<>Spanish language pair. Chinese (Mandarin) was a distant second with 6.1%, then Russian with 3.2% of individual encounters.

At the same time, this represents a slight dip in the dominance of Spanish for interpreting compared to the previous fiscal year, when 79.8% of individual interpreting encounters involved Spanish speakers.

Additionally, the top five most-requested languages in descending order were Spanish, Chinese (Mandarin), Russian, American Sign Language (ASL), and Haitian Creole. 

Interestingly, ASL and Haitian Creole replaced Korean and Chinese (Cantonese) as the fourth and fifth most requested languages, respectively. According to the report, the number of interpreting encounters for Haitian Creole increased by over 50%, and the number of encounters for ASL more than tripled in FY 2024-2025 from the previous year.

Translation

When it comes to translation, the new report states that state agencies translated documents into 72 languages other than English in FY 2024-2025, and Spanish remained the most requested language for document translation.

Most translations performed by external contractors were from English into the 12 languages mandated by New York’s language access law. In fact, 14.7% of these document translations were from English into Spanish. The other 11 required languages ranged from 6.6% to 7.8% of total translated documents. Chinese was broken down into “traditional” and “simplified” varieties, which represented 5.6% and 2.2% of translated documents, respectively.

This means that the remaining 60 languages recorded in the report represented only about 5% of total documents translated in FY 2024-2025. In addition, 24,878 documents in total were translated from English to another language, a 40% decrease from the previous year.

Spending Increase

Despite this drop in the number of translations, the report states that overall language access costs increased by about 36%, rising to USD 14.0m from USD 10.3m in the previous year. 

What’s more, translation remained the most expensive service, costing a total of USD 3.94m. At the same time, translation only represented “a little over a quarter” of the FY 2024-2025 spend while representing over 40% of the previous year’s expenditure. 

In fact, the FY 2024-2025 report shows OTP and in-person consecutive interpreting now rivaling document translation for highest expenditure, costing state agencies USD 3.91m and USD 3.61m, respectively.

Although not expressly discussed in the FY 2024-2025 report, the year-over-year changes in cost and usage of language services are unlikely to be driven by the addition of one new agency to the report. 

The agency in question, the New York Waterfront Commission (WC), only reported one interpreting encounter during the data collection period, and a total language services expenditure of USD 375.