By Ed Gramlich, NLIHC Senior Advisor
The 2025 National Housing Trust Fund (HTF) allocations for each state, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. territories are now available. A total of $223 million in HTF funds is available for 2025, a slight increase from the 2024 HTF total of $214 million. The amount of HTF available has remained low in recent years, probably due to the ongoing sluggishness in single-family mortgage loan and refinancing purchases by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac resulting from the Federal Reserve Board’s decisions to maintain relatively higher interest rates in an effort to lower the rate of inflation.
Also available are the amounts allocated to jurisdictions from other formula programs administered by HUD’s Office of Community Planning and Development (CPD): Community Development Block Grant (CDBG), HOME Investment Partnerships (HOME), Emergency Solutions Grants (ESG), Housing Assistance for Persons with HIV/AIDS (HOPWA), and Recovery Housing Program (RHP).
Created through the “Housing and Economic Recovery Act of 2008” (HERA) and overseen by CPD’s Office of Affordable Housing Programs (OAHP), the HTF allocates funding annually to states to build, preserve, rehabilitate, and operate rental housing for extremely low-income (ELI) households – those with incomes less than 30% of the area median income (AMI) or with income less than the federal poverty line. Nationally, there is a shortage of 7.1 million rental homes affordable and available to people with the lowest incomes.
HERA stipulated that the initial dedicated source of revenue for the HTF and the Capital Magnet Fund (CMF) was to derive from an annual set-aside of 4.2 basis points (0.042%) for each dollar of the unpaid principal on Fannie Mae’s and Freddie Mac’s new business purchases, which consist of single-family and multifamily mortgage loans purchased during the year, and single-family and multifamily mortgage loans underlying mortgage-backed securities issued during the year.
Funds from the HTF are awarded as block grants to states and distributed by a statutory formula based on four factors that consider renter household needs only. Seventy-five percent of the value of the formula goes to two factors that reflect the needs of ELI renters. The other two factors relate to the needs of very low-income renter households – households with income between 31% and 50% of AMI. A state may choose to award up to 10% of its annual HTF allocation to homeownership activities, though to date no state has done so.
When it was established in 2008, the HTF was the first new housing resource since 1974 targeted to building, preserving, rehabilitating, and operating rental housing for extremely low-income people. Starting in 2000, NLIHC, its members, and other stakeholders played a critical role in the creation of the fund and continue to advocate for increases to annual HTF funding. Since 2016, when the first $174 million of HTF dollars were allocated to states, HTF allocations have been: $219 million (in 2017), $267 million (in 2018), $248 million (in 2019), $323 million (in 2020), $690 million (in 2021), $740 million (in 2022), $382 million (in 2023), $214 million (in 2024), and now $223 million in 2025.
In past years, CPD would announce HTF allocations via a media release and later a formal notice in the Federal Register. In addition, CPD would post the allocations on its website. However, under the Trump Administration, HUD revamped their webpages, eliminating vital information for many programs, including the HTF (see Memo, 4/7). The so-called “streamlined” HUD website buries CPD programs under Opportunity Zones (which are not required to, nor do they, create new affordable homes for lower-income households, much less ELI or VLI households). While the Housing Trust Fund is listed under “CPD Programs” on the current HUD website, the link still does not work – there is no information at all about the HTF. An entirely separate site called HUD Exchange includes a link to the Housing Trust Fund, but it hasn’t been updated since the change in administrations. The link providing the 2025 HTF allocations cannot be found by following any of the links in the current HUD website. 2025 allocations were provided by HUD staff when NLIHC inquired about the 2025 allocations.
The 2025 HTF allocations, along with CDBG, HOME, ESG, and HOPWA allocations are at https://www.hud.gov/hud-partners/community-budget-25.
More information about the National Housing Trust Fund is on page 3-1 of NLIHC’s 2025 Advocates’ Guide.
NLIHC has produced reports summarizing how 2019, 2018, 2017, and 2016, (2016 supplement) HTF allocations were used. A similar report summarizing 2020 HTF allocations will be released this summer.