New Research on Estimating Success Rates for the Housing Choice Voucher Program

New Research on Estimating Success Rates for the Housing Choice Voucher Program

Being able to estimate PHA-level and national success rates for recipients of housing choice vouchers can help with identifying broader affordable housing issues.

The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program is the nation’s largest federal rental assistance program, serving approximately 2.3 million households annually. Unlike project-based rental assistance programs, new voucher recipients must search for and lease a housing unit on the private rental market, and not all participants are able to do so.

In this context, “success rates” represent the proportion of searches by new voucher households that resulted in a successful lease-up. A low success rate indicates that many families face barriers that prevent them from joining the voucher program and receiving the assistance for which they are eligible. A low success rate also creates administrative burdens for public housing agencies (PHAs), which must reissue the vouchers to other eligible families. Researchers, policymakers, and practitioners are interested in measuring success rates, but this task typically has required costly new data collection. HUD’s Office of Policy Development and Research (PD&R) recently funded a study by the New York University (NYU) Furman Center to examine the feasibility of using HUD’s existing administrative records to calculate success rates at the national level and for individual PHAs. The project’s goal was to better understand the challenges and opportunities associated with quantifying success rates.

The now-completed study, "Success Rates in the Housing Choice Voucher Program: 2018–2022" by the Furman Center's Ingrid Gould Ellen, Katherine O'Regan, and Sarah Strochak, was published in April 2025 and is available for download. The researchers also released a dataset containing PHA-level success rates, numbers of search events, and median search times for each year between 2018 and 2022. The final report discusses the sample, data, and methodology used to compute success rates and outlines several key findings, which are summarized below.

Findings

Finding 1: During the study period (2018 to 2022), success rates decreased.

Success rates remained stable at approximately 65 percent from 2018 through 2020 and then declined in 2021, remaining at approximately 58 percent in 2021 and 2022 (see figure 1).

Figure 1.

Source: Calculating Success Rates for the Housing Choice Voucher Program Using HUD Administrative Data – NYU Furman Center.

Finding 2: During the study period (2018 to 2022), HCV search times increased.

Search times, defined as the elapsed time between the issuance of the voucher and a successful lease-up, increased across the study period (see figure 2).

Figure 2.

Source: Calculating Success Rates for the Housing Choice Voucher Program Using HUD Administrative Data – NYU Furman Center.

Finding 3. During the study period (2018 to 2022), success rates and search times varied significantly across PHAs.

Generally, rural counties had lower success rates than urban counties. Researchers can access PHA-level success rate data here.

Figure 3.

Source: Calculating Success Rates for the Housing Choice Voucher Program using HUD Administrative Data – NYU Furman Center.

Finding 4. During the study period (2018 to 2022), success rates were higher, and search times were longer, in counties with the highest rents.

Using the rent level from the county where a PHA was predominantly located, the research team found that, although regional differences were small, county-level rent amounts impacted success rate and search time estimates.

Figure 4.

Source: Calculating Success Rates for the Housing Choice Voucher Program Using HUD Administrative Data – NYU Furman Center.

Finding 5: During the study period (2018 to 2022), Moving to Work (MTW) PHAs experienced higher success rates than non-MTW PHAs.

PHAs that were part of the initial MTW group (that is, excluding recent MTW Expansion PHAs) largely avoided the widespread 2021 national decline in success rates.

Figure 5.

Source: Calculating Success Rates for the Housing Choice Voucher Program Using HUD Administrative Data – NYU Furman Center.

Moving Forward

This new research finds that HUD administrative data can be reliably leveraged to quantify success rates annually, both nationally and for most PHAs. The research team found that national success rates decreased and search times increased between 2018 and 2022. The research indicates the importance of continued tracking of this metric and suggests a need for additional research to better understand the causes of success rate variation across time and place. To learn more, read the full report and download data here: Calculating Success Rates for the Housing Choice Voucher Program Using HUD Administrative Data – NYU Furman Center.