The United States has a shortage of more than 7.2 million rental homes affordable and available to extremely low-income renter households, per the National Low Income Housing Coalition's Gap: A Shortage of Affordable Homes report released in March 2026. Nationally, just 35 affordable and available homes exist for every 100 extremely low-income renter households.
This is information about a research release, not investment advice. Extremely low-income, or ELI, households are defined as those earning at or below the poverty line or 30 percent of area median income, whichever is higher.
What does the shortage number measure?
It counts the gap between ELI renter households and rental homes those households can afford that are actually available to them — meaning not already occupied by higher-income households. That distinction is why the shortage is larger than a simple count of cheap units: units renting at low price points are frequently held by renters who could afford more, shrinking the effective pool. The 35-per-100 ratio is the report's headline way of stating the same shortfall.
Where is the shortage concentrated?
State-level tables in the report show the shortfall is national but uneven. Ohio's coalition, citing the report, counted 1.58 million renters paying more than they can afford against a statewide shortage of 266,000 affordable and available units. No state supplies enough — the best-performing states still leave ELI households short by wide margins, per the report's state rankings.
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Why does an affordability report matter to landlords?
Because the shortage sits below the market where most investors operate, it is context rather than deal flow. The report implies sustained demand for units at the lowest price tiers — demand that public subsidy programs, not market rents, pay for. Landlords participating in voucher programs price into that demand; the parallel HUD FY2026 Fair Market Rent benchmarks, effective for the current fiscal year, set the payment ceilings those tenants bring. At market price tiers, the report says nothing direct: its shortage is measured against ELI income, not against asking rents for new Class B or Class A leases.
What are the report's limits?
The Gap is an advocacy organization's annual count built on Census and HUD data, and its policy recommendations are the coalition's own. The underlying counts are lagged — they reflect the most recent American Community Survey and HUD supply files — so the March 2026 release describes the market of the data vintage, not of the spring 2026 leasing season. The companion Out of Reach report, published later in the year, covers the wage side of the same question.
For market-rate investors, the honest read is a segmented one: 7.2 million homes short at the bottom of the income distribution, while the delivered apartment pipeline in 2026 pressures rents at the top in supply-heavy metros. Both facts can be true, and the Gap report documents only the first.