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.