HUD Fair Market Rents: Finding Housing Data by County FIPS

The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) publishes Fair Market Rents (FMRs) annually for every county and metropolitan area in the US. FMRs are used to determine payment standards for the Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher program and are widely used by researchers, housing advocates, and urban planners as a benchmark for rental housing costs. All HUD geographic data uses FIPS codes, though the implementation has a few quirks worth knowing.

HUD uses a hybrid geography called "FMR areas" — in most cases these align with metropolitan areas (identified by their MSA FIPS code) or individual counties (identified by 5-digit county FIPS codes). However, in high-cost metros like San Francisco and New York, HUD sometimes uses smaller subarea geographies. The federal datasets guide covers HUD's data products in the context of the full federal FIPS ecosystem.

HUD also publishes the Comprehensive Housing Affordability Strategy (CHAS) data, which shows the distribution of housing needs by income level at the county and place level, and the Low-Income Housing Tax Credit (LIHTC) database, which tracks affordable housing developments by county FIPS. For both datasets, the join key to Census demographic data is the standard 5-digit county FIPS code.

One particularly useful HUD resource for data professionals is the ZIP-to-FIPS crosswalk, published quarterly. Many administrative housing datasets use ZIP codes while federal datasets use FIPS — this crosswalk, identified by county FIPS code, bridges the gap. You can look up any county's FIPS code using the search tool or navigate via state pages like California or New York to find the codes you need.