Where Summer Interns Live in NYC: Housing Guide by Firm Type

You’ve accepted an offer. The start date is in a few weeks. Now comes the housing question — and in New York, it is not a simple one. The city is large, transit-dependent, and organized around borough and neighborhood clusters that each have different commute profiles. Where a summer intern actually ends up living depends heavily on which district their firm sits in, how much transit time they are willing to absorb, and what kind of living environment they want during the 10 or 12 weeks they are here. This guide exists to make that decision easier.

The answer varies meaningfully by sector. Finance interns at firms headquartered in Lower Manhattan face different transit math than consulting interns based in Midtown or tech interns whose offices sit along the West Side corridor. Law firm placements break roughly evenly between Midtown and the Financial District. Each firm type maps to a distinct office geography, and each office geography rewards different starting neighborhoods. This guide maps those districts and explains the commute from a range of starting points.

Throughout this guide, the Upper West Side — specifically the 86th Street corridor — is used as the central reference point. That is deliberate. The 86th Street station is one of the more useful transit hubs in Manhattan: the 1 train runs express along the West Side from there, and the B and C trains connect directly to Midtown and Central Park West. The result is that interns based in this part of the city can reach most major office districts without a transfer. We will note where other starting neighborhoods have a material advantage.

The major management consulting firms are concentrated in Midtown Manhattan, broadly in the 40s and 50s on both sides of Fifth Avenue. This is one of the most transit-accessible office districts in the city — nearly every subway line funnels through it in some direction — which means that consulting interns are less constrained by neighborhood choice than finance interns whose offices sit at the ends of express train lines. From most parts of upper Manhattan, Midtown is reachable in 15 minutes or less during weekday service.

From 86th Street on the Upper West Side, the calculus is particularly clean. The B train is the most direct line for the core Midtown consulting district: Rockefeller Center at 47th–50th Street is approximately 12 minutes away. Times Square — home to a cluster of office towers — is roughly 12 minutes via the B train or about 15 minutes via the 1 train, both of which run from 86th Street. There are no transfers required on either route during normal service. For an intern spending 10 weeks commuting to a Midtown address, that is one of the simpler transit situations available anywhere in Manhattan.

Many consulting interns choose the Upper West Side specifically because of the B train connection. The line runs frequently on weekday mornings and afternoons, covers the Midtown band efficiently, and deposits riders in the middle of the consulting district rather than at its edges. Interns whose offices are on the East Side of Midtown — Lexington or Third Avenue in the 40s and 50s — may find the B train slightly less direct and will occasionally use the crosstown bus or a short walk east from Fifth Avenue. For West Side Midtown offices, the B or the 1 train both work without any additional steps.

Large law firms in New York are split between two primary districts, and the split is fairly even. Midtown Manhattan — particularly the Lexington and Park Avenue corridors in the 42nd to 57th Street range — hosts many of the city’s largest firms. Lower Manhattan, in the Broad Street and Fulton Street area, hosts another significant concentration, often firms with longer histories in the city’s financial district. Some firms have offices in both locations or have moved in recent years, so interns at the same firm can sometimes find themselves placed in different buildings than summer associates from prior years.

For Midtown law firm placements, the Upper West Side is among the closer residential areas outside of Midtown itself. The B train from 86th Street reaches the Rockefeller Center / 49th–50th Street station in about 12 minutes; from there it is a short walk to most Midtown office addresses. Law interns placed on the East Side of Midtown — Lexington, Park, or Third Avenue in the 40s and 50s — can take the B train to Fifth Avenue and walk east, or transfer briefly to a crosstown bus. Travel time remains well under 20 minutes in most scenarios.

For Lower Manhattan placements, the transit profile from the UWS is the same as for finance interns: the 2 or 3 express train from 96th Street, approximately 28 to 32 minutes to the Fulton or Wall Street stops. Law interns with FiDi placements who prefer a shorter commute sometimes opt for the Lower East Side or Brooklyn, though both require different trade-offs in cost and neighborhood type. The UWS remains a common choice even for downtown placements, because the express train makes the ride consistent and interns tend to value the residential environment for evenings and weekends.

Once an intern has worked through the commute math, the second major filter is lease structure. Summer internships in New York run 10 to 12 weeks — a span that fits cleanly into a summer calendar but sits awkwardly against the standard apartment rental market, which operates on 12-month leases. A standard Manhattan apartment requires a year-long commitment, first and last month’s rent, a security deposit, and often a broker fee. None of that works for a two-and-a-half month stay. The practical options that actually match a summer internship timeline are month-to-month furnished sublets, short-term furnished room rentals through direct operators, and furnished coliving arrangements designed specifically for this use case.

Furnished matters more than interns sometimes anticipate at the start of the process. Arriving in a city for ten weeks and needing to source a mattress, bedding, towels, cookware, and basic kitchen equipment is a logistics problem — particularly when most of those items are not worth shipping home and not easy to donate efficiently when the summer ends. Furnished housing eliminates that problem entirely: the room is ready when the intern arrives and empty when they leave.

All-in pricing has a similar practical value. When rent includes electricity, Wi-Fi, and laundry, the monthly number on the listing is a real number — the amount that will leave a bank account at the start of each month. When it does not, interns routinely discover that the base rent understated the real cost by a material amount. Summer electricity bills in air-conditioned New York apartments, combined with fast internet and laundry, add costs that are easy to underestimate when comparing listings. An all-inclusive price, whatever it is, is at least honest.

Amsterdam Place is a furnished coliving building at 205 and 207 West 85th Street on the Upper West Side. Rooms are fully furnished and all-inclusive — utilities, Wi-Fi, and laundry are covered in the monthly rate. The minimum stay is four weeks. The building is one block from the 86th Street station on the 1 line and two blocks from the 86th Street station on the B and C lines, which together cover the full range of office districts discussed in this guide. There is no broker fee and no US credit history requirement. Current rates are on the pricing page. For a broader overview of the intern housing market in this part of the city, see the NYC summer intern housing guide.