Success Rates in the Housing Choice Voucher Program: 2018-2022

The housing choice voucher program is the largest federal rental assistance program in the U.S., serving roughly 2.3 million households annually. While this program is funded federally, it is administered by local public housing agencies (PHAs). Unlike other federal housing programs, vouchers require participants to search for and lease a home on the private rental market, and not all participants succeed in doing so. Yet success rates, defined as the share of searches by new voucher recipients that result in a lease-up, have rarely been estimated on a national scale. The few prior analyses that do exist are from decades ago and have required collecting original data on the experiences and outcomes of voucher recipients.

The overarching goal of this study is to estimate PHA-level and national success rates for recipients of housing choice vouchers and to do so solely using administrative data already collected by the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD). Building from previous work, this report specifically aims to:

• Validate and improve the methodology, including streamlining the underlying data steps and coding to facilitate replication;

• Expand coverage to include initial Moving to Work (MTW) PHAs;

• Provide updated success rate and search time calculations through 2022;

• Make recommendations to improve the quality of data used for calculating success rates.

The approach draws on administrative data that include information on the issuance of search vouchers, expirations of search vouchers, and movements of voucher recipients into and out of the voucher program. At a high level, there are two core steps in the approach. The first step is to clean and organize these data into search events. The second step is to apply two metrics that assess the quality of each PHA’s data for purposes of calculating success rates: the share of new admissions to the program that are preceded by a search voucher and the share of participants that enter the program very shortly after receiving a search voucher. These metrics are designed to identify PHAs that are recording all, or nearly all, search vouchers that are issued and doing so in a timely manner. After accounting for data quality standards, the analysis sample includes 1,232 PHAs across the country and covers around 75% of voucher holders nationally. 

We highlight three key findings. First, success rates declined significantly, and search times increased between 2020 and 2022. In 2022, 57% of searches were successful, which is down markedly from 66% in 2020. The median time for a successful search was 78 days in 2022, up from 62 days in 2020. As noted in Congressional budget language, 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” (U.S. Senate Committee on Appropriations, 2023).

Second, while the decline in success rates was widespread, success rates and search times vary widely across PHAs. Success rates are lower in rural counties, where searches tend to be much shorter. Success rates and search times also vary markedly with PHA size, with larger PHAs record- ing higher success rates and much longer search times. Both success rates and search times are also associated with median rent in the surrounding county, with higher rent counties seeing higher success rates and longer search times.

Third, the initial cohort of Moving-to-Work (MTW) PHAs largely avoided the decline in success rates. In 2022, the initial cohort of MTW PHAs achieved a success rate of 74.2%, which is nearly 20 percent- age points higher than the 55.9% success rate for all other PHAs. PHAs in the initial MTW cohort may have been able to avoid the decline in success rates by using the greater flexibility afforded to them.

Finally, the report includes suggestions on how to improve the quality of HUD’s administrative data so that success rates can be calculated on an annual basis across the vast majority of PHAs going forward.