How Voucher Rent Guide Builds Its Fair Market Rent Pages

What the catalog holds

The pages read data/catalog.json. The site build does not download HUD files. A fiscal year other than the current HUD fiscal year stops the build.

Each area row is one HUD Fair Market Rent area for one state. The five amounts are whole dollars per month for the 0-bedroom rent and the 1, 2, 3, and 4 bedroom rents. FMRs are HUD's estimate of 40th-percentile gross rent (shelter rent plus utilities) for recent movers in standard units. An FMR is not a voucher amount. Each housing authority sets its own payment standards, normally between 90% and 110% of the FMR; HUD rules also allow exception amounts above 110% in some cases. Where HUD requires Small Area FMRs, or a housing authority has chosen to use them, payment standards are based on ZIP code rents, not the area-wide FMR shown here. Ask your housing authority for its payment standard.

The fiscal year, the effective date, and the workbook URLs are fields on the catalog. Each page prints that fiscal year and that effective date.

Effective date

HUD's notice sets the effective date, with a reevaluation exception. The sentence on each page is built from the catalog date and the prior fiscal year. It links to HUD's Fair Market Rents page, which is where HUD lists areas that may keep the prior year's FMRs.

Where the area rows come from

The county workbook URL is the catalog field sourceFileUrl. The pipeline reads stusps, hud_area_code, hud_area_name, and fmr_0 through fmr_4. Rows that share one HUD area code and the same rents become one area. The label is HUD's area name.

Areas in more than one state

Some HUD areas contain counties in more than one state. The Washington-Arlington-Alexandria area is one example. The catalog copies that area onto each of those states. The rents are the area rents, not a separate county rent.

The site covers the 50 states and the District of Columbia. HUD's workbook also has rows outside that list. This catalog omits them because the state list in src/states.ts does not include them.

ZIP rents

HUD also publishes Small Area Fair Market Rents (SAFMRs), which are FMRs for ZIP codes. Housing authorities in metro areas where HUD requires SAFMRs, and those that choose to use them, set voucher payment standards from the SAFMR for the unit's ZIP code instead of the area-wide FMR. These pages show only area-wide FMRs. The catalog field zipSourceFileUrl is that workbook. The workbook has no state column. The same ZIP is often listed under more than one HUD area, with the same five rents. The 90 percent and 110 percent columns in that workbook are not the rents and are not stored.

A ZIP is attached to a state only when the single-state areas on that ZIP all name one state. ZIPs that appear only on a multi-state area, ZIPs that point at more than one state, and ZIPs whose only state is a territory are left out. The District of Columbia has no ZIP rows from that rule, because its metro area is shared with Maryland and Virginia.

These pages do not publish a route per ZIP. The catalog keeps the placed ZIP rows.

What a failed catalog build does

If the workbook is missing, the fiscal year sheet is wrong, a required column is absent, or two rows for the same area or the same ZIP disagree, the pipeline does not replace the catalog. The pages keep the last catalog that parsed.