Calculating Success Rates for the Housing Choice Voucher Program using HUD Administrative Data
The Housing Choice Voucher program is the nation’s largest rental assistance program, providing critical support to 2.3 million low-income households. Ensuring its continued effectiveness requires understanding not just where vouchers succeed, but also where improvements can help more families secure stable housing.
A challenge for the country’s largest rental assistance program, which requires participants to search for and lease a home on the private rental market, is the difficulty many voucher recipients face in finding homes that they can rent with their voucher. Yet the share of new voucher recipients who successfully use their vouchers to lease homes has rarely been estimated. Most prior estimates of voucher success rates have required collecting original data on the experiences and outcomes of voucher recipients, a time- and resource-intensive process. But new research from the NYU Furman Center demonstrates the feasibility of using national administrative data provided by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) to calculate success rates for housing choice voucher recipients.
The study, “Success Rates in the Housing Choice Voucher Program: 2018-2022,” by the NYU Furman Center’s Ingrid Gould Ellen, Katherine O’Regan, and Sarah Strochak, estimates success rates for recipients of housing choice vouchers nationally and by local public housing agencies between 2018-2022. Their work shows that national success rates have fallen and search times have increased markedly in recent years. The study also shows that these metrics vary widely across the Public Housing Authorities (PHAs) that administer the federally funded program. Finally, their research also demonstrates the feasibility and value of using HUD’s administrative data to calculate voucher success rates for the vast majority of PHAs and voucher recipients in the country.
Using the methodology laid out in the report, researchers suggest that HUD could release timely estimates of voucher success rates and search times on an annual basis and thereby provide PHAs, HUD, Congress, and researchers with up-to-date information on these critical outcomes for the housing choice voucher program.
To be clear, lower success rates do not mean that housing agencies are not fully deploying federal resources. In fact, PHAs typically spend the entirety of their voucher funds by basing the number of vouchers they can issue to account for the estimated share of recipients who won’t successfully use their vouchers. But low success rates may add to PHA administrative costs and are a serious blow to the individual voucher recipients who have to return their vouchers to the housing agency after years of waiting for assistance. Further, as noted in Congressional budget language, lower success rates should not necessarily be taken as an indicator of poor performance. Rather metrics showing dampened success rates may be instructive for “identifying broader issues such as a lack of available housing stock at current fair market rents or a lack of landlord participation.”
The research offers three main findings:
1. Success rates have fallen precipitously in recent years, and search times have increased
Up until 2021, success rates were relatively constant at just above 65 percent, though significantly lower than the 69 percent national voucher success rate that Abt Associates estimated in 2000. In 2021, success rates declined sharply to 58 percent, and then remained depressed in 2022, standing at 57 percent.
The drop in success rates during this time period was widespread. Over 70 percent of PHAs saw a decline in success rates between 2020 and 2022, more than half of which saw a substantial decline of at least 10 percentage points.
The chart below shows annual success rates nationally from 2018-2022. Note, all reported success rates use a one-year search window, meaning a search is considered unsuccessful if the households fails to lease up within one year of their voucher being issued. Virtually all (98.6%) of searches that are ever successful succeed within one year.
Success Rates Have Fallen Precipitously
Success Rate vs. Utilization Rate
Success rates are different from utilization rates. A utilization rate measures what share of a housing authority's voucher budget is currently leased up in vouchers, while the success rate measures the ability of individual recipients to use their vouchers, or the share of individual voucher recipients who are able to lease homes with their vouchers. Both metrics are important for understanding how the Housing Choice Voucher program is operating.
Search times for voucher holders are rising
In 2021, search times, or the elapsed time between the issuance of the voucher and when a successful household leases up into the program, increased sharply. They then rose markedly again in 2022 to 78 days – an increase of 16 days from just two years earlier. The increase in search times may reflect both a tighter rental market and the policies of many PHAs to extend the amount of time that households are given to search as a market tightens.
The following graph shows the median search time nationally by year.
Search Times Have Grown Longer
2. While the decline in success rates was widespread, success rates and search times vary widely across PHAs
PHAs in rural counties tend to have lower success rates than those located in urban counties. This is a persistent pattern, and the gap has grown over time; in 2022, success rates at rural PHAs were 11 percentage points lower than those at urban PHAs.
Readers can access an associated file with success rates for individual PHAs here.
Housing Authorities in Rural Counties Have Lower Success Rates than those Located in Urban Counties
Regional differences are relatively small and have shifted over time. In 2022, success rates were lowest in the Midwest and South and highest in the Northeast and the West. This marks a shift from from 2018, when the Northeast also had the highest success rate, but the West had the lowest.
The last market characteristic the researchers examine is the rent level of the county where a PHA is predominantly located. Perhaps surprisingly, success rates are highest in the counties with the highest rents. This pattern grew much more pronounced between 2018 and 2022. In 2022, success rates were nearly 20 points higher in the highest rent counties, compared to the lowest rent counties. PHAs in tighter markets may dedicate more resources and adopt specific strategies to counter market challenges. But search times were also longer in higher rent markets, and differences in search times also grew over time. It is possible that PHAs in higher rent markets permit voucher recipients to search for longer, and that these longer search times contribute to the higher success rates in tighter markets.
Success rates are also substantially higher in larger PHAs, and PHA size differentials in search times are even larger. At the largest PHAs, the median successful voucher recipient takes over 110 days to use their voucher, compared to just 46 days at the set of smallest PHAs.
Success Rates Are Higher and Search Times are Longer in High Rent Counties
3. Moving-to-Work (MTW) PHAs had higher success rates than other PHAs
The PHAs that were part of the Initial Moving-to-Work cohort, and were thereby granted exemptions from many existing rules around vouchers and other federally assisted housing, achieved higher success rates than other PHAs in all time periods, but this gap has grown significantly over time. By 2022, initial cohort MTW PHAs had success rates that are nearly 20 percentage points higher than other PHAs. Strikingly, PHAs in the initial MTW cohort appear to have largely avoided the widespread decline in success rates that most PHAs experienced in 2021 and 2022, perhaps aided by their greater flexibility though more research is needed to understand what drove these differences and whether there were any associated tradeoffs.
Initial Moving-to-Work Programs had Higher Success Rates than other PHAs
Future program monitoring and assessment
An overarching finding is that timely success rates can be calculated on an annual basis using HUD administrative data. Success rates are a critical metric for understanding how the federal government’s voucher program is functioning. While there is room for data improvements, this research demonstrates the feasibility and value of using HUD’s administrative data to reliably calculate voucher success rates for the vast majority of PHAs and voucher recipients in the country. The report outlines a replicable methodology that could be used on an ongoing basis to calculate timely, annual success rates and recommends modest data improvements that would expand coverage to even more PHAs.
Going forward, the authors recommend that HUD adopt this methodology and release timely estimates of voucher success rates on an annual basis. This would provide PHAs, HUD, Congress, and researchers with up-to-date information on perhaps the most important outcome for the housing choice voucher program.
Lastly, while the report documents recent declines in success rates and increases in search times, HUD recently adopted a new methodology for calculating Fair Market Rents to better capture recent changes in rents. We suspect that this change may lead to more accurate Fair Market Rents and in turn, improvements in success rates, particularly in places where rents have increased rapidly. Further, the variation across PHAs and the higher success rates of PHAs in the initial MTW cohort both suggest that local practices can potentially boost success rates, even in tight markets. Future research should examine the operation of the MTW cohort PHA voucher programs to learn how they are accomplishing these higher success rates. More generally, continued timely calculation of success rates using HUD administrative data is an important tool to enable research on which practices are most effective in boosting success rates.
