HUD’s Fair Market Rents for fiscal year 2027 take effect today, October 1, 2026. The rents are the benchmark behind every Housing Choice Voucher payment standard, so a new set matters to the households holding vouchers, the landlords renting to them and the local housing agencies that sit in between. The notice gives one national figure, $1,014 for the national non-metropolitan rent, and no national average change.
What the notice published on September 1 does
HUD printed the rents at 91 FR 56156 on September 1, 2026, under the title “Fair Market Rents for the Housing Choice Voucher Program, Moderate Rehabilitation Single Room Occupancy Program, and Other Programs, Fiscal Year 2027.” The notice sets an October 1, 2026 effective date, and federal law requires HUD to publish the rents at least once a year with that October 1 effective date. It is signed by Reid Wilson, Deputy Chief of Staff to the Secretary, with Adam Bibler listed as the HUD contact.
The same notice lists October 1, 2026 as its comment due date, which means the public comment deadline and the effective date fall on the same day. HUD User, the department’s research arm, carries the notice on its Fair Market Rents page, along with the data files and the lookup tools for each area.
How a rent is built from old survey data
Each Fair Market Rent is an estimate of the 40th percentile gross rent paid by recent movers into standard-quality units in an area. The starting point is Census Bureau American Community Survey five-year data collected between 2020 and 2024. HUD then moves those base rents forward with shelter-rent inflation factors drawn from private data providers and the Consumer Price Index, and applies utility inflation factors built from state-level Energy Information Administration data.
The notice’s list of private sources includes Apartment List, CoStar Group and the Zillow Observed Rent Index. Because the base data stops in 2024, each FY2027 rent is a projection forward from survey years to the fiscal year that begins now. A landlord or tenant who sees a rent that looks out of step with a local market is looking at an estimate built from older survey data, adjusted by index.
The notice does not publish a national average percent change from last year’s rents, and none is reported here. Nor does it give a count of areas or households affected.
From a Fair Market Rent to a voucher payment
The Fair Market Rent is not itself the check a voucher pays. It sets the band within which a local housing agency picks its payment standard. HUD’s voucher guidebook on payment standards, dated June 2025, says payment standards must fall between 90 percent and 110 percent of the applicable Fair Market Rent, and that agencies may set an amount in that range without HUD approval. The guidebook defines the payment standard as the maximum monthly assistance payment for a family, before the family’s own share is subtracted.
In the guidebook’s account, an agency has up to three months after new rents take effect to revise its payment standards if they would otherwise fall outside the range. For a household, that means the new rents reset the benchmark today while the amounts that reach a particular lease change on each agency’s own timetable, if they change at all.
Existing leases and the tenant’s share
A higher payment standard can lift the ceiling on the rent a voucher will cover. A lower one runs into protections written for families already under contract. The guidebook gives agencies three options when a payment standard falls for a family already under a housing assistance contract: no reduction during the tenancy, a gradual reduction no earlier than two years out, or applying the cut after two years. It requires 12 months of written notice before any family’s payment standard is reduced.
The guidebook also states a limit that applies when a family first signs a lease. If the gross rent is above the payment standard, the family’s share cannot exceed 40 percent of its adjusted gross income. That cap applies at the start of a tenancy and is separate from the Fair Market Rent itself.
Where the benchmark reaches beyond vouchers
The HUD User page says Fair Market Rents also determine renewal rents for expiring Section 8 contracts and rent ceilings for the HOME and Emergency Solutions Grants programs, and flat rents in public housing. The notice’s title names the Moderate Rehabilitation Single Room Occupancy Program among the other programs the rents serve, and its small-area rents are capped at 150 percent of the two-bedroom Fair Market Rent for the metropolitan or non-metropolitan area.
The controlling record for all of it is the Federal Register notice at 91 FR 56156 and the HUD User dataset page that carries it. Anyone looking for a specific county’s rent has to use HUD’s area lookup, because the notice itself reports a single national figure rather than a table a reader can scan.
A kit for older homeowners and renters watching housing costs
The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit is written for older homeowners and renters who want one place to see the kinds of housing-cost relief that exist. It addresses a separate problem from voucher rules: keeping track of what relief programs exist and when each one needs attention.
The Senior Property Tax & Home-Cost Relief Kit is an 11-page kit covering the 5 kinds of property-tax relief and the circuit-breaker credit that includes renters, with an application log and renewal calendar.
Compare the five kinds of property-tax relief with a household’s housing costs →
This article was drafted with AI assistance and checked against the Federal Register and HUD pages linked above.
