Section 8 Waiting Lists

The exact date is currently unavailable from the Housing Authority.

Section 8 Waiting Lists

The Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher Program is a National rental assistance program managed by HUD and administered at the local level by housing authorities or other HUD contracted administrators. The program provides rental assistance to low income persons in the form of monthly rent payments based on the renter’s income. Renters find private rental housing in the open market and the Section 8 voucher payment makes the rent affordable.

The program is extremely oversubscribed meaning that there are many more people in need of the rental assistance than the government is currently funding. This has created the need for waiting lists.

We are unaware of even one housing authority in the Nation (and there are 2,320 that offer Section 8) that doesn’t have a waiting list. Most of the time, these waiting lists are years long. Yes, a person on most of these waiting lists will wait several years before receiving the assistance.

A few of these housing authorities (usually the small ones) keep their waiting lists open all the time, but most of them close the list for years at a time.

Federal law allows anyone to apply for a Section 8 waiting list anywhere in the country. If you live in Chicago and want to apply to the Section 8 waiting list in Texas, by law you are permitted to do so. However, housing authorities are permitted to administer waiting list preferences that allow certain persons to move above other on the list, even if they apply later. Many housing authorities use a local residency preference. That means that any local applicants will automatically move ahead of non-local applicants. In effect, nonlocal residents would likely never be reached on the waiting list.

However, not all housing authorities offer a local residency preference, making it possible for all applicants (local and non-local) to receive equal placement on the waiting list.

Wait times on Section 8 waiting list can vary from place to place. Some big cities may have a 10 year waiting list and some small, rural counties may only have a one year waiting list.

If an applicant is selected for a voucher, they would be required to live in the locale that issued the voucher for at least 12 months before the voucher could be ported elsewhere. Also, waiting list procedures differ greatly among housing authorities. Though some allow online applications that don't require you to physically be there when applying, others may require you to appear at the housing authority office to pick up or submit an application or otherwise be present to get the application processed.

In our waiting lists posts, we always try to give details about local residency preferences but we recommend you closely review any out of town lists you decide to apply to to make sure it's worth your time.

Rarely, they will open the waiting list to build it back up with fresh applicants. In these cases, there is usually public notice given in local media and a large number of people submit an application. The numbers of applicants are so high that usually, all of the applicants aren’t added to the list. Instead, a small fraction of applicants are chosen through a lottery drawing from the overall list of applicants.

For example, a recent waiting list opening in Florida had more than 50,000 applicants in just a few days. The housing authority chose only 2,500 people from those 50,000+ people through the lottery. And to show how urgent the need is, in that case the housing authority only had a total of 5,000 Section 8 vouchers under management, all of which are already being used. The “lucky” 2,500 applicants in this case will still wait for years to receive any assistance.

We work really hard to locate any open Section 8 waiting lists. We constantly monitor social media channels, regularly visit housing authority web sites and have even developed a proprietary web technology that monitors housing authority web sites for waiting list openings. We may not have all of the open lists in the country, but we feel we are the most complete source of open lists.

If you don’t see an open waiting list that you know is open, please let us know.

Following are the open waiting lists and those opening soon that we are aware of. We will constantly update this list as we find additional list openings.