Housing Waitlist

What Is a Housing Waitlist?

A housing waitlist is the queue of eligible households waiting for rental assistance. Federal rental assistance is not an entitlement: funding covers a limited number of vouchers and subsidized units, and far more households qualify than there is help to go around. The waitlist decides who is served next.

The best-known lists belong to public housing agencies that run the Housing Choice Voucher program, often called Section 8. Public housing, project-based Section 8 buildings, and Low-Income Housing Tax Credit properties keep lists too, usually one per agency or property. That is why renters often need to apply in several places.

How It Works

For vouchers, HUD’s rules at 24 CFR part 982 set the framework:

• One list, written rules. An agency must use a single waiting list for its voucher program, though it may keep separate lists by county or municipality, and it must select applicants according to its administrative plan.
• Opening and closing. An agency may stop taking applications when its list holds enough applicants for the funding it has available. When it opens the list, it must give public notice that says where and when to apply.
• Preferences. Agencies may adopt local preferences based on local needs, such as working families, people with disabilities, survivors of domestic violence, or elderly or homeless individuals. Residency preferences may not cover an area smaller than a county or municipality.
• Order within a preference. Applicants are ranked by date and time of application or by a drawing or other random method.
• Income targeting. At least 75% of the families an agency admits from the list in each of its fiscal years must be extremely low income, generally at or below 30% of area median income or the federal poverty guideline, whichever is higher.
• Removal. Agencies may drop applicants who do not respond to requests for information or updates. That decision is subject to reasonable accommodation: an applicant who did not respond because of a family member’s disability must be put back in the same place on the list.

Owners of project-based Section 8 properties keep their own lists under a written tenant selection plan.

Criticisms and Limitations

Waits can be long. In a Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP) analysis of 2020 HUD data, as summarized by NLIHC in 2021, households that received vouchers had waited about 28 months on average, ranging from about 9 months in Nebraska and West Virginia to about five years in Alabama. Those figures count only households that were eventually served. They leave out households that never receive assistance and those who cannot join a list because it is closed.

Because agencies may remove applicants who do not respond to update requests, a household that has moved can lose its place if a notice goes to an old address. And where an agency ranks applicants by random drawing, a household’s place depends on chance rather than on how long it has waited.