About this site

Section8.fyi is a free directory of public housing authorities and their Section 8 / Housing Choice Voucher waitlists. It is a public service from Rentell. There are no ads and no trackers.

We do not take applications, sell placements, or charge a fee. Applying for a voucher is free.

How we check a waitlist

The HUD directory tells us the housing authority’s name, address, phone, and programs. It does not say whether the waitlist is open. Until a person reads the housing authority’s own website, the status on this site is “not yet verified.”

Every published status has two things you can check:

• A source link, which should be a page run by the housing authority or another government site.
• A last-verified date, the day a person looked at that page.

A nightly job can fetch a housing authority page we have chosen to watch. If the cleaned text changes, it opens a review for a person. It does not change the status on the site by itself. A model may suggest a status in that review. The suggestion is not published.

You can report a status. That opens a GitHub issue. Please link the housing authority’s page and do not include your phone number or a case number.

Status changes are also in an RSS feed, plus a feed for each state and each housing authority.

How the rent and income figures are attached

A housing authority page shows the Fair Market Rent for the county code on the HUD directory record, and the Small Area Fair Market Rent for the office ZIP when HUD published one. The office is not always the whole area the authority serves. Connecticut and a few other places use town codes in the rent files that do not match the older county code on the authority record, so the county table can be blank while the ZIP table still appears.

The income check, rent estimator, and ZIP lookup run in your browser. They compare the numbers you type with HUD’s published figures. They do not approve an application, and they are not legal advice.

Where the records come from

• Housing authorities: the HUD Public Housing Authorities dataset on Data.gov (3,776 records, snapshot 2026-10-21).
• Fair Market Rents and Small Area FMRs: HUD USER, fiscal year 2027 in this copy (3,161 county rows and 38,601 ZIP rows). The nightly job refreshes these from the HUD USER API when a token is available.
• Income limits: HUD USER income limits, fiscal year 2026(4,764 county and town rows). That year is chosen on its own. It is not forced to match the Fair Market Rent year.
• Maps: state outlines are U.S. Census Bureau cartographic boundaries (public domain). ZIP distance on the open-now page uses Census ZIP Code Tabulation Area centers from the 2024 Gazetteer. The explore map uses OpenFreeMap tiles, made from OpenStreetMap data. That library loads only on the map page.
• Voucher counts: each page shows the Section 8 unit count from the HUD directory. When a Picture of Subsidized Households file is included, the page shows that count too.

We do not copy other waitlist websites. There are no ads.

Still waiting on a person

A Spanish edition, and a map of source-of-income laws, stay unpublished until a person reviews the translation or the official legal text. Email alerts stay off until the mail and database secrets are added. The list of what is shipped is inROADMAP.md.