The Affordable Housing Landscape, State by State

What the design assumes, and why the floor exists. Congress set the national goal in 1949: a decent home for every American family. The way the country builds those homes changed in 1986, when the tax credit replaced direct construction as the main engine. The credit pays to build homes. It does not pay to run them. With no money for operating costs, rent cannot rise and fall with a resident's income. It has to be a fixed number, set by a table. A fixed number has to be tested against something, and what properties test is income. The programs that came before worked the other way: public housing from 1937 and Section 202 housing for older adults from 1959 charged residents about 30 percent of whatever they earned and covered the rest, so there was nothing for a floor to test. The result is built around a household whose income can grow to meet a fixed rent. A household on a retirement benefit is measured the same way and meets both lines at once: the levels cheap enough to reach have ceilings a full benefit already passes, and the levels with comfortable ceilings have floors that benefit cannot reach. The floor can be set by law, and two places have done it: Portland, Oregon caps it at two and a half times the rent and Colorado caps it at two times, statewide.

Why this household. We measure the system from the position of an older adult on a fixed retirement income. That is a stated point of view, not a neutral one. Every number on this page comes from published tables and holds for any household at the income shown; choosing which household to follow is the part that belongs to us.

Data vintage. HUD FY2026 income limits, effective 1 May 2026, covering 2,623 income limit areas across the 50 states and the District of Columbia. Social Security benefit figures from SSA, January 2026. NLIHC availability figures from March 2026. ACS capacity figures from the 2023 1-Year sample.

What this page is. An interactive tool for stakeholders: it shows the windows open to a household seeking income-restricted housing, by state, and how those windows change with household size, affordability level, the property's income screen and how areas are counted.

Our words. Ceiling, floor and window are HomeShare America's terms, used to keep this research and the interactive tool speaking the same language. HUD publishes income limits; the IRS sets maximum rents; the floor has no official name.

The household. One person, or a couple, applying for a one-bedroom. The single figure is the Social Security Administration's average monthly benefit for a retired worker, $2,071, which is $24,852 a year. The couple figure is SSA's published average for a retired worker and aged spouse, $3,211 a month or $38,532 a year, after the 2.8 percent cost-of-living raise payable in January 2026. A couple where both partners worked would be nearer $49,728, further above the ceilings again.

State incomes. SSA publishes the average monthly retired-worker benefit for every state in its Annual Statistical Supplement, table 5.J6, December 2025. It runs from $1,890 in Mississippi to $2,286 in New Jersey, a spread of about 21 percent. The national average in that table is $2,071.30, the same figure the brief uses, so each state's income here is that state's ratio to the national average applied to $24,852 or $38,532. Switching the income control to state averages moves two variables at once, income and housing, which is why the national average is the default for comparing states.

The areas. HUD Multifamily Tax Subsidy Project income limits and income averaging tables, FY2026, effective 1 May 2026. Maximum rents are 30 percent of the income limit for an imputed household size over twelve months, under Internal Revenue Code section 42(g)(2), with the imputed size set at 1.5 persons for a one bedroom. The imputed size does not change with the number of people who actually live there, so a couple faces the same maximum rent as one person but is measured against the two-person ceiling.

Rank is the state's position out of the 50 states and the District of Columbia on the share of its areas where any of the four levels is in the window, highest first, at the household, income, level and screen currently selected. It moves when those controls move. "T" marks a tie, and the ties are large: with the floor at three times rent most states sit at zero, so most of the table is tied last.

Areas measured is the denominator behind each percentage. Texas has 214 HUD income limit areas and Delaware has three, so the same percentage carries very different weight, and a state showing 33 percent may be describing a single area. It is also why the page offers a population-weighted view.

The three shares never overlap, and they add to 100 percent of areas at every level and every screen. Over the ceiling means the household income exceeds the published income limit for that household size at that level. Under the floor means it does not exceed the ceiling, but the chosen multiple of the maximum one-bedroom rent, over twelve months, is more than the household income. In the window means neither is true. Figures at a stated multiple are calculated, not observed: no national source for screening multiples exists.

Counted by. "Areas" gives every income limit area equal weight, which is the method behind the published national figures. "Population" weights each area by the 2023 population of the counties it covers, from HUD's FY2026 Fair Market Rent file, and a multi-state metropolitan area contributes only its in-state counties to each state. Population is a proxy for where older renters are, not a count of them.

Affordable and available per 100 comes from the National Low Income Housing Coalition, The Gap: A Shortage of Affordable Homes, March 2026, Appendix A, using 2024 American Community Survey data, for extremely low income renter households of all ages. NLIHC publishes the affordable-and-available figure by state; the affordable-only figure, and therefore the state-level share occupied by higher-income households, is published nationally but not by state.

Potential capacity comes from HomeShare America, The Rooms Already Exist, American Community Survey 2023 1-Year public use microdata. It counts bedrooms minus household members, floored at zero, in owner-occupied homes with a householder aged 65 or over. It is capacity inside occupied homes, not vacant units and not proof any particular room sits empty. It is here because it is the one form of supply neither the ceiling nor the floor applies to.

Older adult figures. Urban Institute and HUD: households headed by or including someone 62 or over are 42 percent of HUD-assisted households, up from 33 percent in 2014. HUD's Annual Homeless Assessment Report: about one in five people experiencing homelessness on a single night are 55 or over. Sheltered homelessness among older adults rose 37 percent between 2019 and 2022 (HUD CoC data, via Urban Institute), and The Emerging Crisis of Aged Homelessness projects the number roughly tripling by 2030. HUD's most recent single year is milder, about 6 percent growth for older adults from 2023 to 2024 against about 18 percent overall, so the multi-year trend and the projection carry that claim rather than any one year. AARP surveys report roughly three-quarters of adults 50 and over prefer to remain in their current home.

Coverage. The 50 states and the District of Columbia: 2,623 of HUD's 2,644 income limit areas. Puerto Rico, Guam, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa and the Northern Mariana Islands are excluded, because the SSA state averages, the NLIHC availability figures and the ACS capacity figures used here are not published for them. The national figures in the companion briefs include those 21 areas, so a figure here can differ by a few tenths of a point: at the 30 percent level, 92.7 percent over the ceiling either way, and 1.1 percent in the window here against 1.2 percent with the territories included.

Color. Plum is over the ceiling, sage is in the window, coral is under the floor. Magenta is none of the three: it is this page's alarm, used for the count of states with no window at any level and for the callout explaining that being in the window is not the same as finding a home. The three data colors are steps of the HomeShare plum, sage and coral ramps, chosen so that every pair stays distinguishable under the common forms of color-vision deficiency. Every share is also printed as a number, so color never carries the meaning alone.

Every area-level figure is computed in this page from HUD's published tables.

Sources. HUD Multifamily Tax Subsidy Project income limits and income averaging tables, FY2026 · Social Security Administration, average retired-worker benefit and average for a retired worker and aged spouse, January 2026, and Annual Statistical Supplement table 5.J6 · National Low Income Housing Coalition, The Gap: A Shortage of Affordable Homes, March 2026 · HomeShare America, The Rooms Already Exist, ACS 2023 1-Year PUMS. This product uses HUD published data but is not endorsed or certified by HUD.