Microproduct data guidebeginner

HUD Fair Market Rents

County and metro Fair Market Rents for building rent-burden screens and voucher-payment comparison tools.

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At a glance

Difficulty
Beginner — comfortable for a first prototype
Size
Tiny · ≤0.05 GB
Formats
JSON, Excel
Access
API or Download
API key
Required
Provider
U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development
Updates
Annual
Data terms
U.S. Government public data / federal copyright guidance

From source to product signal

Test a product idea in four steps

HUD publishes Fair Market Rents by county and metro area. Start with one state's statedata endpoint for a single fiscal year. FMR is a 40th-percentile estimate used in voucher programs, not an observed asking rent.

1

Check the setup

  • Python 3.10 or newer
  • A notebook environment such as Jupyter or Google Colab
  • A free HUD User API token saved in the HUD_API_TOKEN environment variable
2

Access the data

  1. 1.Register for a HUD User API token from the FMR API documentation on HUD User.
  2. 2.Save the token in the HUD_API_TOKEN environment variable.
  3. 3.Request one state's county FMRs for a single fiscal year.
Open official source
3

Run the Python example

Install the packages, then run the notebook cell.

python -m pip install pandas requests

import os
import pandas as pd
import requests

response = requests.get(
    "https://www.huduser.gov/hudapi/public/fmr/statedata/CO",
    params={"year": 2025},
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['HUD_API_TOKEN']}"},
    timeout=30,
)
response.raise_for_status()
payload = response.json()["data"]
rents = pd.DataFrame(payload.get("counties", payload))
rents["retrieved_at_utc"] = pd.Timestamp.now(tz="UTC")
print(rents.head(20))
4

Test a useful signal

Compare two-bedroom FMRs across one state's counties

Test whether county FMRs can support a bounded rent-burden screen.

  1. 01Keep county names and two-bedroom FMR values for Colorado.
  2. 02Rank counties and flag missing bedroom-size fields.
  3. 03State that FMR is not observed asking rent and that Small Area FMRs can differ inside a metro.

Dataset details

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development is a government source. Last verified 2026-08-17. Temporal coverage: annual fiscal-year FMRs.

Theme

Markets & Economics

Domains

HousingRegional Economics

Data types

TabularTime Series

Tasks

Market MonitoringRegional ComparisonSite Selection

Geography

United States

Formats

JSONExcel

Provider

U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development

Data terms

U.S. Government public data / federal copyright guidance