Our Mission

The Section 8 Housing Choice Voucher (HCV) program is the largest federal rental-assistance program in the United States, serving roughly 2.3 million households through more than 3,700 local Public Housing Authorities (PHAs). It is also one of the most jargon-heavy, regulation-heavy corners of the federal safety net. PlainVoucher exists to make Section 8 legible — so a renter searching for help, a landlord deciding whether to accept a voucher, an advocate challenging a payment-standard decision, or a researcher studying affordability can find the facts they need in plain English, without a login, a paywall, or an acronym decoder ring.

Our position is simple: public data about a public program should be publicly legible. HUD publishes excellent raw data. PlainVoucher turns it into usable pages.

Our Data Sources

All figures on PlainVoucher come from published, authoritative data sources: the HUD PIH Open Data PHA directory, HUD USER's Fair Market Rent and Income Limits files, HUD's ArcGIS FeatureServer for HCV tract concentration, and our sister site PlainRent for advertised market-rent medians. Every page cites its source by agency name and vintage year. Detailed processing steps are documented on our methodology page.

Data Currency & Updates

Data currency matters. Payment Standards reflect HUD Fiscal Year 2025 (effective October 1, 2024). Income Limits also reflect FY25 (effective April 1, 2024). Our PHA directory was last consolidated in April 2026 and is refreshed quarterly. HCV tract concentration is refreshed on HUD's own irregular update schedule. When HUD publishes new annual data, we run our ETL within about two weeks — see /methodology for the full refresh schedule.

What We Do

PlainVoucher consolidates and cross-references the full HCV data stack:

• 3,780 Public Housing Authorities — contact details, unit counts, program types, state and city coverage
• 4,764 payment standards — bedroom-level voucher amounts for every metro-year we track
• HUD Income Limits — Extremely Low (30% AMI), Very Low (50% AMI), Low (80% AMI), by county and household size
• 85,154 HCV concentration measurements — voucher density by U.S. census tract
• Cross-DB voucher-vs-rent gap analysis — HUD payment standards joined against PlainRent's advertised-rent index, so you can see where vouchers cover the market and where they fall short

Who Built This

PlainVoucher is built and maintained by an independent editorial team that compiles, verifies, and contextualizes public datasets for general readers. Every dataset and data-framing decision on this site passes through a human editorial review before publication. You can see our byline on editorial guides and our publisher metadata in the schema on every page.

Our standard is consistent across everything we publish: public data in the public interest, presented plainly, with every figure traceable to a named government source and a documented methodology.

How It's Built

Every page on this site is computed from source datasets, not hand-edited. Our ETL pipeline downloads raw HUD files — the PIH Open Data PHA directory, the HUDUSER FMR and Income Limits files, and the ArcGIS FeatureServer for HCV tract density — then normalizes, joins, and stores them in a read-only SQLite database that our Astro SSR front-end reads in real time. See our methodology page for the full pipeline.

The site's signal feature is a cross-database join: we match HUD payment standards (by Core Based Statistical Area, or CBSA) to current advertised-rent medians from our sister site PlainRent, computing a "gap percent" that shows where vouchers cover the market (negative gap), where they are roughly in line (±10%), and where they fall materially short (positive gap >10%). That analysis is the fuel behind the metro pages at /gap/{cbsa}.

Known Limitations

We are honest about what PlainVoucher is not:

• We do not process voucher applications. To apply, you must contact your local PHA. We publish each PHA's contact details; we do not take or forward applications.
• We do not guarantee waitlist times. Historical wait times are informational only; your actual wait depends on local demand, PHA preferences, funding, and your household composition.
• We are not affiliated with HUD or any Public Housing Authority. We are an independent publisher.
• Payment standards change. PHAs set payment standards at 90–110% of the published Fair Market Rent. Always confirm the current standard with your PHA before signing a lease.
• Data is only as fresh as the federal release cycle. HUD publishes most of our source files once per federal fiscal year. Our dates and vintages are disclosed on every data page.
• Not every PHA's waitlist status is tracked. That data is not centrally published; where we show waitlist status it is sourced best-effort and stamped with a confidence level.

If you find an error, please email corrections@plainvoucher.com with a link to the page and a source for the correct value. We review every correction request.

YMYL Disclaimer

⚠ PlainVoucher is for general information only. Section 8 / HCV policies vary by PHA and change frequently. Always contact your local PHA directly to confirm eligibility, waitlist status, and current requirements before making housing decisions. Nothing on this site is legal, financial, or housing-counseling advice. For HUD-certified housing counseling, visit hud.gov/findacounselor.

Published by Kiznis Studio

PlainVoucher is published by Kiznis Studio, an independent digital publisher focused on making public data legible. Editorial standards, author bylines, and publisher identity are visible on every editorial page. See " for more on our work.

Editorial Independence & How Content Is Produced

Content on PlainVoucher is compiled by our editorial team from official source data. Raw data from HUD PIH Open Data, HUDUSER (Fair Market Rent, Payment Standards, Income Limits), HUD ArcGIS HCV tract concentration, and our primary source PlainRent is transformed into readable profiles by our continuous editorial pipeline, then validated against the source before publication. The PlainVoucher editorial team, operating under Kiznis Studio, is responsible for editorial standards, methodology, and corrections.

We do not accept payment, sponsorship, or promoted placement from Public Housing Authorities, landlords, housing-counseling agencies, or any covered entity. Our only revenue source is contextual display advertising served by Google AdSense — advertisers do not influence which PHAs or metros we cover or how we present data, and they do not receive preferential placement.

Contact & Feedback

General inquiries: hello@plainvoucher.com
Data corrections: corrections@plainvoucher.com
Press / partnerships: press@plainvoucher.com

We read every message. If you are a tenant advocate, housing counselor, PHA staffer, or researcher and want to flag a data gap, we are especially eager to hear from you.