New York Michelin Keys: 9 Gained, 4 Lost in 2026

New York had more Michelin Key movement than any other market in this series: five hotels gained a Key, four moved up a tier, and four lost their Key altogether. The state ends the year at 42 Key hotels against 41 — a net gain of one.

That flat net number hides the busiest year of churn in the country. New York took four of the seven American promotions from One Key to Two, more than the rest of the United States combined, and simultaneously lost more Key hotels than any market examined here.

Chart: hotels that gained or lost MICHELIN Key standing in the 2026 selection. Source: MICHELIN Guide 2026 Key selection, released 18 September 2026, compared against the 2025 selection. Every hotel counted here was read from the Guide's own listings; every loss was re-checked on the hotel's own Guide page.

The scoreboard

Movement	Hotels
New Keys awarded	5
Upgraded a tier	4
Dropped a tier	0
Key removed	4
Key hotels, 2025 → 2026	41 → 42

What gained

Hotel	Where	2025	2026	Change
Waldorf Astoria New York	New York City	no Key	Two Keys	New Key
Canoe Place Inn & Cottages	The Hamptons / Montauk	no Key	One Key	New Key
Faena New York	New York City	no Key	One Key	New Key
Faraway Sag Harbor	The Hamptons / Montauk	no Key	One Key	New Key
W New York - Union Square	New York City	no Key	One Key	New Key
The Lowell	New York City	One Key	Two Keys	Upgraded
The Ritz-Carlton New York, NoMad	New York City	One Key	Two Keys	Upgraded
The Surrey, A Corinthia Hotel	New York City	One Key	Two Keys	Upgraded
Wildflower Farms, Auberge Collection	Catskills & Hudson Valley	One Key	Two Keys	Upgraded

What lost ground

Hotel	Where	2025	2026	Change
Ace Hotel Brooklyn	Brooklyn	One Key	no Key	Key removed
Eastwind - Hotel & Bar	Catskills & Hudson Valley	One Key	no Key	Key removed
INNESS	Catskills & Hudson Valley	One Key	no Key	Key removed
Nine Orchard	New York City	Two Keys	no Key	Key removed

The upgrades are the real result

Promotions are the scarcer currency. The Guide added 65 American hotels to the Key list, but only seven already-listed hotels moved up a tier — and four of those seven are in New York: the Ritz-Carlton NoMad, The Lowell, The Surrey and Wildflower Farms in the Hudson Valley. Three are in Manhattan.

Wildflower Farms is the outlier by geography and the more interesting result: its promotion makes it the only Two-Key hotel in New York State outside New York City.

Among outright additions, the Waldorf Astoria entering directly at Two Keys after a seven-year restoration is the headline, and Faena New York takes the Guide's most theatrical write-up of any American entry.

Four hotels lost their Keys

Nine Orchard is the severe case. It held Two Keys in 2025 — the joint-highest of any hotel on this list — and its page has since been removed from the MICHELIN Guide altogether. It has not been downgraded; it has left the selection.

Ace Hotel Brooklyn held One Key and now holds none, while remaining in the Guide's selection. So do Eastwind and INNESS, both in the Catskills and Hudson Valley, which between them represent a quiet reversal for the upstate hospitality boom the 2025 list had rewarded — even as Wildflower Farms, forty minutes from INNESS, was promoted to Two Keys in the same announcement.

The region gained a Two-Key hotel and lost a Two-Key hotel in the same year. Read only the announcement and you would see the first.

The wider 2026 picture

Worldwide the Key list grew 15.3 percent in a year, from 2,457 hotels to 2,832. That growth was not evenly spread across the tiers: One-Key hotels rose 16.0 percent and Two-Key hotels 14.9 percent, while Three-Key hotels rose only 8.4 percent, from 143 to 155. The top tier's share of the list fell from 5.82 percent to 5.47 percent.

Tier	2025	2026	Change
Three Keys	143	155	+8.4%
Two Keys	572	657	+14.9%
One Key	1,742	2,020	+16.0%
All Key hotels	2,457	2,832	+15.3%

Growth on that scale means removals are easy to miss. Across our full reading of the 2026 selection, 482 hotels gained a Key they did not hold in 2025 and 86 moved up a tier, while 85 lost their Key outright and 28 dropped a tier. The Guide publicises the additions; the subtractions arrive without an announcement.

How these numbers were checked

Every hotel named above was read from the MICHELIN Guide's own country listings, where each property carries an explicit One-, Two- or Three-Key marking, and the totals reconcile to the counts the Guide published on 18 September 2026.

Losses were then checked a second time, one hotel at a time, against that property's own page on the Guide. That second pass matters: a hotel missing from a country listing has not necessarily lost anything, because several properties that plainly still hold Keys never appear in those listings at all. Only a hotel that the Guide still lists, without a Key, has actually lost one. Every removal and downgrade in this article cleared both checks.

One property in this round did something different again: where a hotel's Guide page has been taken down entirely, it has left the selection rather than merely lost its Key, and that is stated as such rather than counted as a downgrade.

What a MICHELIN Key is

MICHELIN introduced the Key in 2024 as the hotel counterpart to its restaurant Star. Inspectors assess architecture, interior design, service, character, consistency and value across a selection of more than 9,000 hotels in over 100 countries, and award One, Two or Three Keys: a very special stay, an exceptional one, an extraordinary one. Nightly rate is not a criterion, which is why a four-cottage property and a 500-room resort can hold the same distinction.

The 2026 selection, the second, named 2,832 Key hotels worldwide — 155 with Three Keys, 657 with Two and 2,020 with One — against 2,457 a year earlier. The criteria are set out in the Guide's explainer on the Key, and the full country-by-country list is published here.