Public housing agencies that run two pandemic-era rental assistance programs just lost the extra room they’ve had for years to stretch a voucher into a pricier apartment. The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development has ordered every agency administering Emergency Housing Vouchers and Stability Vouchers to bring the most it will subsidize on a…

Shelter is the single biggest line in most household budgets, and the government’s latest reading on it points the wrong way. After a monthly increase of just 0.1 percent in July, the shelter index jumped 0.3 percent in August, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Over the past twelve months, shelter costs are now…

The Department of Housing and Urban Development has thrown out an eleven-year-old legal theory that let disability-access complaints against apartment buildings and condos sit open indefinitely, replacing it with a hard one-year filing deadline. HUD says the old approach pushed more than $110 million in unplanned repair costs onto building owners over the past five…

The federal government has just made it easier for the smallest local housing authorities to walk away from running public housing altogether. A notice from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, effective August 28, 2026, raises the size cutoff for the fastest exit path from 50 public housing units to 75, letting more…

A one-bedroom renter moving from Toledo, Ohio to San Francisco would need to more than quadruple their housing budget just to keep a similar-sized apartment. Toledo’s overall median rent sits at $916 a month as of August 2026, the lowest of the 100 largest U.S. cities tracked by Apartment List. San Francisco’s median rent is…

Two of the country’s largest rental markets got more room to charge under a federal rent ceiling this fall, while five others got less. Los Angeles and Chicago are among the metro areas where HUD’s newly published Fair Market Rents rose sharply for fiscal year 2027, effective October 1, 2026. Phoenix, Dallas, Houston, San Diego…

The federal government just reset the maximum rent it will help cover in more than 2,600 housing markets across the country, and in a large share of them, the new number is smaller than last year’s. The Department of Housing and Urban Development’s Fiscal Year 2027 Fair Market Rents take effect October 1, 2026. In…

The rent ceiling HUD is imposing nationwide this fall was not measured this year, or even last year. It traces back to a five-year Census Bureau survey that began collecting rent data in 2020, years before the sharpest run-up in the rental market. The Fair Market Rents that take effect October 1, 2026, for fiscal…

Some of the cheapest rental markets in the country just picked up a rule that has nothing to do with how cheap rent actually is there. Each October, the Department of Housing and Urban Development recalculates the ceiling that decides how much a Housing Choice Voucher will cover in every county and metro area in…

For decades, the Bureau of Labor Statistics tracked what households paid for electricity and natural gas city by city, feeding that local detail into how the government calculates rent ceilings for housing vouchers nationwide. Then the agency stopped. Starting with data published in February 2025, BLS discontinued the local and regional versions of that index,…