By Sonya Acosta, Center on Budget and Policy Priorities
Housing vouchers are a proven, research-backed tool to help people avoid homelessness and afford a stable home—something we all deserve. Housing vouchers and other rental assistance bridge the gap between rents and incomes. This provides a stable home, which makes finding and keeping a job easier, improves health, reduces the use of emergency services, and improves children’s educational and long-term income outcomes.
Funding for the Emergency Housing Voucher (EHV) program is expected to start running out later this year. Congress and the Biden Administration created the EHV program in 2021 to specifically help people at risk of or experiencing homelessness and to help survivors of gender-based violence. Without additional funding from Congress, close to 60,000 households are at risk of losing assistance, undoing years of progress in their lives and possibly increasing homelessness across the country by as much as 10% on average, and by even higher rates in some states (see map below).
However, Congress has released proposals that fail to address the EHV funding cliff and would also reduce the number of Housing Choice Vouchers (i.e., Section 8 vouchers) available across the country. While these are only proposals for now, if enacted, each would worsen the already unacceptable homelessness crisis. Congress should instead build toward assisting everyone who is eligible by making EHVs permanent.
Most urgently, to avoid directly causing a spike in homelessness, Congress should provide enough funding in 2026 to assist at least the same number of families currently receiving Housing Choice Vouchers as well as the 57,000 families at risk of losing their EHV.
Emergency Housing Vouchers successfully help people afford housing
Congress created the EHV program as part of COVID-19 pandemic relief efforts, but the program has also helped address housing instability that people were experiencing before the pandemic. EHV vouchers helped house people more quickly than any other new HUD voucher program, even in a period of income uncertainty for families, skyrocketing rents, and competitive local rental housing markets.
The program received a set pot of funding and used up those resources faster than housing agencies expected, largely due to unexpectedly high rent prices. Rents rose by 22% between April 2021 and April 2023—at the same time the EHV program was getting started. Because housing vouchers cover part of the rent, higher rents led to higher program costs.
Although rents have continued to rise since early 2023 due to inflation, the rapid increase shortly after the EHV program began used up substantial resources. HUD estimates that housing agencies should have enough funding to continue helping families already receiving EHV assistance partway through calendar year 2026, although some agencies report that their funds are likely to run out even before the end of 2025.
While the largest number of EHVs are in the most populous states, the loss of EHVs would have the greatest proportional impact on the number of people experiencing homelessness in Mississippi, Puerto Rico, Connecticut, Wisconsin, and Louisiana (see map). Over 770,000 people in the U.S. were unhoused on a single night in the most recent national count from January 2024. This was the highest level of homelessness since reporting of such data began in 2007. At the state and local levels, many housing agencies and communities lack the resources to transition families with EHVs to another form of assistance (such as Housing Choice Vouchers or public housing). Even if housing agencies were able to transition some people to other programs, the limited supply of rental assistance means someone else in need would continue waiting for help, after already waiting years.
Both the House and the Senate have introduced their funding bills for 2026, neither of which address the funding cliff for EHVs. The House bill would allow HUD to make available Tenant Protection Vouchers (TPVs)—which are generally meant for people displaced from HUD subsidized housing—for families with EHVs. However, the bill does not include enough funding to help both those needing TPVs because of displacement and families losing their EHVs. The Senate bill would allow HUD to simplify some administrative processes to more easily transfer households with EHVs to Housing Choice Vouchers, but it does not provide additional money to cover the added costs.
Congressional funding proposals could lead to even fewer people receiving vouchers
Potentially making it more difficult to help families with EHVs, neither the House nor Senate bill provides enough funding to maintain the current number of Housing Choice Vouchers. Each year, housing vouchers need additional funding to keep pace with rent prices and other inflation-related increases for administering the program. Without that added funding, agencies will be forced to cut costs in ways that will serve fewer people, such as not helping people from the waitlist when a voucher becomes available.
Already, less than one in four people who are eligible for rental assistance receives it. Funding levels in the proposed 2026 funding bills could make this statistic even worse: the House bill could lead to about 411,000 fewer people receiving a housing voucher to help them afford a stable home, while the Senate bill could result in about 243,000 fewer people receiving housing vouchers (these estimates exclude households at risk of losing EHVs).
Funding for housing voucher subsidies in 2025 is already below the level some agencies need to continue to assist the same number of families, and there are reports that some agencies have stopped issuing vouchers to new households. In fact, HUD sent a letter to housing agencies acknowledging that it expects “a sizeable number” of housing agencies will not have enough funding to maintain current levels of assistance. The funding levels in the proposed funding bills, especially the House bill, would exacerbate the existing voucher shortage and lead to more extreme cost-cutting measures.
Indeed, instead of making sure rental assistance programs get the resources they need, the House bill includes a provision that would let state and local agencies raise rents for people who receive vouchers or live in public housing, with no limits. Essentially, the House is proposing people with low incomes cover costs that Congress decides not to pay. In combination with the cruel cuts to Medicaid and SNAP in the recently enacted Republican megabill, higher rents and fewer vouchers would make life even more precarious for people with low incomes, the opposite of President Trump’s promise to make people’s basic needs more affordable.
Both the House and Senate bills have passed out of their respective committees but are a long way from becoming final, which means there is still time to advocate for sufficient funding. Congress should ensure that any funding bill for 2026 includes at least enough housing voucher funding to help the same number of families, including the close to 60,000 at risk of losing their EHVs. Looking forward, policymakers should expand rental assistance to help all low-income households who need it and fund additional supports, like those included in the EHV program, to help people stay stably housed and end homelessness.