Section 8

What Is Section 8?

Section 8 refers to Section 8 of the United States Housing Act of 1937, codified at 42 U.S.C. § 1437f. The Housing and Community Development Act of 1974 added it during a major restructuring of federal housing aid. Its stated purpose is to help low-income families obtain “a decent place to live” and to promote economically mixed housing.

Rather than building and owning housing, as public housing does, Section 8 pays private landlords to house low-income families. In everyday speech, “Section 8” usually means a housing voucher. Legally, though, it covers several distinct forms of assistance.

How Section 8 Works

There are two main branches:

• Tenant-based vouchers. The Housing Choice Voucher program lets a family rent a private unit it chooses. Local public housing agencies run it. Since 1998, 75% of the households an agency admits each year must have extremely low incomes, meaning at or below 30% of area median income or the federal poverty level, whichever is higher. The rest can earn up to 80%.
• Project-based assistance. Under Project-Based Rental Assistance, HUD signs long-term contracts with owners of specific buildings. NLIHC’s 2026 guide reports that project-based rental assistance serves about 1.3 million households. More than 800,000 such units were developed from 1974 to 1983, when the authority for new construction was repealed. Agencies can also attach some vouchers to buildings as project-based vouchers.

In both cases, the household generally pays about 30% of its adjusted income, known as the total tenant payment. The subsidy covers the rest of the rent and utilities, up to a program limit. A voucher family that chooses a unit costing more than the local payment standard pays the extra itself.

Criticisms and Limitations

The biggest limitation is scale. Section 8 depends on annual appropriations, and NLIHC’s 2026 guide reports that only one in four households eligible for federal rental assistance receives any. Waitlists can be long, and some agencies close them to new applicants.

Vouchers also work only if landlords accept them. Families generally have 60 days to find a unit, though agencies can extend the search, and in tight markets some struggle to find one in time. Landlords generally are not required to accept vouchers, although some states and cities prohibit turning tenants away for using one, a practice known as source-of-income discrimination. On the project-based side, owners can opt out when contracts expire and convert buildings to market-rate housing, removing those units from the affordable stock.

For a full walkthrough, see the guide to housing choice vouchers.