Business owners whose properties are seized through eminent domain are now likely to get more compensation from the city.

A decision by a mid-level appellate court in Manhattan strengthens the legal cases of business owners seeking reimbursement for tools and equipment inside their properties. On Tuesday, the court upheld most of a lower court’s decision to compensate a Bronx cabinetmaker, Fred Kaiser, for more than 100 tools in his shop.

“It will definitely re-establish the law that in a condemnation, businesses have to be paid for all the machinery, equipment, and installation,” a lawyer for Mr. Kaiser, Michael Rikon, said of the decision. Although the ruling does not turn over much new legal ground, Mr. Rikon said it is the appellate court’s first decision in years in an eminent domain case involving compensation for work equipment.

The appellate court issuing the decision has jurisdiction only in Manhattan and the Bronx. Owners of seized businesses in the three other boroughs would be compensated for their tools and equipment under a different standard.

A lawyer for the city, Lisa Bova-Hiatt, said a 1990 decision that is binding for Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island makes it likely that business owners from those boroughs who are in Mr. Kaiser’s circumstance would be compensated to a lesser extent.

“I think this leaves uncertainty,” Ms. Bova-Hiatt, who is the deputy chief at the city law department for condemnation proceedings, said of the discrepancy.

In contrast, Mr. Rikon said the relevant legal precedents in those three boroughs were actually friendlier than Tuesday’s decision to the owners of seized commercial properties.

In the ruling on Tuesday that said items such as belt sanders and table saws should be deemed “compensable trade fixtures,” the panel of five judges weighing Mr. Kaiser’s case decided the machines would face “substantial depreciation in value if removed.”

“They were an integral part of Kaiser’s woodworking business, and most of the machines were large,” the court wrote in explaining why it upheld nearly all of the $525,000 that a Bronx judge awarded Mr. Kaiser for 132 pieces of equipment. The decision, written by Judge David Saxe, noted that “the machines were arranged in a particular order to mirror the flow of work for maximum efficiency.”

The city had said Mr. Kaiser should have received about $129,000.

Still the court did decide that Mr. Kaiser should not be reimbursed for a tiny fraction of the items, including handheld tools, cinder blocks, or a custom door.

In 1998, the city seized Mr. Kaiser’s woodworking shop on Third Avenue in the Bronx to make room for the Melrose Commons Urban Renewal project. At the time, Mr. Kaiser, 67, “closed the doors and delivered the keys to the city and that was that,” Mr Rikon, said, adding that Mr. Kaiser, a woodworker since the age of 16, had since moved to Florida. The shop employed between eight and 12 people, Mr. Rikon, of Goldstein, Goldstein, Rikon & Gottlieb, said.

Ms. Bova-Hiatt, the city lawyer, questioned the usefulness of yesterday’s decision as precedent.

“I don’t think this decision would provide any type of road map for how the courts would compensate a tenant who was not a woodworking shop,” she said.