New Study on Housing Voucher Success Rates

• Author: Margaret Hills
• Posted: 2025-07-31

The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program is the biggest federal program helping families pay rent, helping around 2.3 million households every year. Unlike some other programs, those who receive these vouchers have to find their housing in the regular rental market, and not everyone manages to do so.

The term "success rates" refers to how often families successfully find and rent a home with their vouchers. A low success rate means many families struggle to use these vouchers, facing obstacles that stop them from getting housing assistance.

This not only affects the families but also creates extra work for the agencies that manage the vouchers, as they need to reassign vouchers that are not used.

The Department of Housing and Urban Development's Office of Policy Development and Research funded a study by the New York University Furman Center to see if they could use existing records to track these success rates.

They hoped to help understand the challenges and find better ways to measure and perhaps improve these rates.

The results of this study from 2018 to 2022 were published in a report titled "Success Rates in the Housing Choice Voucher Program: 2018–2022" by Ingrid Gould Ellen, Katherine O'Regan, and Sarah Strochak.

Here are a few key points:
 

1. Success Rates Dropped: Initially, around 65% of those with vouchers found housing from 2018 to 2020, but this dropped to 58% in 2021 and stayed the same in 2022.
2. Longer Search Times: The time it took for voucher holders to find housing increased over these years.
3. Varied Results by Location: Success rates and search times differed widely depending on the area, with rural areas generally performing worse than urban ones.
4. Impact of Rent Levels: In places with higher rents, people had a bit more success in using their vouchers, but they also spent more time searching.
5. Better Performance in Certain Programs: Agencies that were part of the initial Moving to Work group had better success rates compared to others, especially during the drop in 2021.

The study shows that it's possible to use existing data to track the success of the housing voucher program, which could be crucial for making improvements.

This information suggests it's important to keep monitoring how well the system works and to investigate further into why these rates change.

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