The Housing Choice Voucher Program provides rental assistance to more than 2.3 million low-income households in the United States. However, public housing agencies (PHAs) that administer the program face challenges to effectively utilizing program resources. In this report, the authors share insights about policies and practices associated with high utilization and offer recommendations for PHAs to address barriers to administering the program.

Improving Utilization in the Housing Choice Voucher Program

Christi Economy, Ryan Finnigan, Susha Roy, Jason M. Ward

ResearchPublished Sep 16, 2025

The Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) Program serves more than 2.3 million low-income households in the United States, and research has shown that the vouchers improve recipients' housing quality and stability, financial security, and health and well-being. However, because the program is not an entitlement, the assistance that it provides is incredibly scarce relative to demand — housing vouchers and similar federal assistance programs assist only roughly one in four eligible households. Despite this scarcity, HCV Program resources (in terms of both housing vouchers and rental assistance budgets) are often not fully utilized. The authors of this report focus on the factors, policies, and practices that affect the ability of local public housing agencies (PHAs) to maximize their use of HCV Program resources.

The authors highlight three overarching themes related to the HCV Program and its administration by PHAs. First, the HCV Program's budget is the primary constraint to serving more households. Second, many key factors related to utilization are outside PHAs' control. Third, PHAs have the potential to increase voucher and budget utilization within their existing circumstances by adopting policies and practices used by the most successful PHAs. The authors address voucher utilization goals and issuance strategies, tight housing markets, and practices to support voucher holders and landlords and to increase the affordable housing supply. Each chapter concludes with recommendations for PHAs that can contribute to higher utilization of scarce program resources.

Key Findings

  • Achieving high levels of budget utilization is becoming much more common than achieving high levels of voucher utilization. The latter goal has become increasingly difficult to achieve because of changes in how the HCV Program is funded and historic increases in rental costs.
  • Some PHAs are consistently able to mitigate these funding and housing cost challenges and achieve high utilization rates.
  • The use of HCV Program flexibilities has been a valuable tool for PHAs to keep up with rapid rent increases, but this has tended to open a wider gap between budget utilization and voucher utilization.
  • Many PHAs are now experimenting with geographic variations in payment standards.
  • Many PHAs have increased allowable search times for voucher recipients to find and lease housing to address declining success rates (the shares of households that successfully lease homes after receiving vouchers).
  • Given that many households that receive vouchers do not successfully lease housing with them, many PHAs issue vouchers to more households than they have the resources to support, and views differ among PHAs regarding the trade-offs between maximizing voucher and budget utilization through overissuing and risking budget shortfalls.
  • PHAs are increasingly undertaking innovations to support voucher holders' housing searches and increase landlord engagement and participation in the program.
  • PHAs have substantially increased the number of vouchers that they attach to properties rather than issue directly to households. These project-based vouchers facilitate the production and preservation of deeply affordable housing, including permanent supportive housing projects for people exiting homelessness.

Recommendations

  • PHAs seeking to maximize their budget resources should use the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) utilization analysis tools or customized applications that leverage local contextual knowledge to develop data-driven voucher issuance strategies. PHAs might also benefit from considering more-active issuance strategies that allow for a slightly higher risk of shortfall, in accordance with HUD guidance on this issue.
  • PHAs with low success rates should extend allowable search times to 180 days and allow even longer search times for households facing higher barriers to finding housing.
  • PHAs should proactively experiment with variable payment standards, including across-the-board increases or payment standards that vary by geographic location based on higher-quality housing and neighborhood amenities.
  • To maximize utilization and program stability, PHAs should adopt a customer-service approach to recruiting and managing landlord relationships and assisting tenants with their housing searches and other needs.
  • PHAs struggling with challenging conditions that are preventing them from achieving consistently high budget utilization should consider project-basing more vouchers if they have not reached their limit for doing so.

Topics

Document Details

Citation

Chicago Manual of Style

Economy, Christi, Ryan Finnigan, Susha Roy, and Jason M. Ward, Improving Utilization in the Housing Choice Voucher Program. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2025. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA3913-1.html.
BibTeX RIS

This research was supported by the Cooper Housing Institute and conducted in the Community Health and Environmental Policy Program within RAND Social and Economic Well-Being.

This publication is part of the RAND research report series. Research reports present research findings and objective analysis that address the challenges facing the public and private sectors. All RAND research reports undergo rigorous peer review to ensure high standards for research quality and objectivity.

This document and trademark(s) contained herein are protected by law. This representation of RAND intellectual property is provided for noncommercial use only. Unauthorized posting of this publication online is prohibited; linking directly to this product page is encouraged. Permission is required from RAND to reproduce, or reuse in another form, any of its research documents for commercial purposes. For information on reprint and reuse permissions, please visit www.rand.org/pubs/permissions.

RAND is a nonprofit institution that helps improve policy and decisionmaking through research and analysis. RAND's publications do not necessarily reflect the opinions of its research clients and sponsors.