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US rent, house price and building permit data by ZIP, county and metro

HUD Fair Market Rents, HUD tax credit and assisted housing records, the FHFA house price index back to 1975 and Census building permit counts, joined on one geography key. 21 tables, 6,905,803 rows.

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Coverage: HUD fiscal year 2026 rents for 2,622 FMR areas, 3,234 counties and 38,601 ZIP Codes. FHFA annual index for 19,024 ZIP Codes, 63,930 census tracts, 2,795 counties, 922 metro and micro areas and every state, 1975 to 2025, plus quarterly series to 2026. Census permit counts for 3,029 counties and 20,070 permit-issuing places in 2025, by county from 1990, by place from 2000 and by state from 1980. HUD assisted housing: 50,566 Low-Income Housing Tax Credit projects placed in service from 1987, nearly all through 2020, 6,211 public housing developments and 23,783 HUD-assisted multifamily properties as of June 2026, and Housing Choice Vouchers for 85,154 census tracts, 37,691 of them with a published count.

Why pay for public data

HUD, FHFA and the Census Bureau publish on different keys, in different file layouts, with permit values in different units. This package keys all three to ZIP, county FIPS, metro code and state, attaches a state to every ZIP, bridges every county to its HUD rent area and puts rent, price index and permits in one tidy table. HUD’s tax credit, public housing, multifamily and voucher records come on the same zero-padded keys.

How it is built

  1. 1

    Pull the HUD FMR and Small Area FMR files for fiscal year 2026, the FHFA House Price Index annual and quarterly files, the Census Building Permits Survey annual county, place and state files, and the HUD open-data layers for tax credit properties, public housing developments, assisted multifamily properties and Housing Choice Vouchers by tract.

  2. 2

    Assign each county to its HUD rent area from HUD codes and HUD area boundaries, with the match method on every row. Attach a state to every ZIP and document ZIPs that do not map.

  3. 3

    Convert permit valuation to whole dollars at every level and keep every source value as published. Never download owner, contact or manager fields, and drop the name, address and coordinates of properties under 5 units. Rebuilt once a year after HUD and FHFA publish.

What is in each record

FieldNotes
HUD_FMR, HUD_FMR_COUNTYFMR_0BR to FMR_4BR by rent area and by county, with FMR_CODE, AREA_TYPE and MATCH_METHOD
HUD_SAFMR, HUD_SAFMR_FMR_AREASAFMR_0BR to SAFMR_4BR by ZIP with the 90 and 110 percent payment standard bounds
HUD_LIHTC_PROPERTYTOTAL_UNITS, LOW_INCOME_UNITS, UNITS_0BR to UNITS_4BR, YEAR_PLACED_IN_SERVICE, CREDIT_TYPE and other funding for 50,566 tax credit projects
HUD_SUBSIDIZED_PROJECTPROGRAM, TOTAL_UNITS, PCT_OCCUPIED, RENT_PER_MONTH, HH_INCOME and household mix for public housing and assisted multifamily properties
HUD_HCV_TRACTHCV_COUNT and HCV_PCT_OF_RENTER_UNITS by 2020 census tract. HUD withholds counts of 10 or fewer
FHFA_HPI_ZIP5, FHFA_HPI_TRACT, FHFA_HPI_COUNTY, FHFA_HPI_CBSA, FHFA_HPI_STATEYEAR, HPI, ANNUAL_CHANGE_PCT, HPI_1990_BASE, HPI_2000_BASE
FHFA_HPI_QUARTERLYINDEX_TYPE, GEO_LEVEL, QUARTER, INDEX_NSA, INDEX_SA for states, metro areas, divisions and the nation
BPS_COUNTY_ANNUAL, BPS_PLACE_ANNUAL, BPS_STATE_ANNUALBuildings, units and value by structure size: 1 unit, 2 units, 3 to 4 units, 5 or more
HOUSING_BENCHMARKSOne long table: GEO_LEVEL, GEO_ID, YEAR, METRIC, VALUE, UNIT for 2,870,204 rows
STATE, COUNTY, CBSA, DATA_DICTIONARYFIPS codes, names, regions, metro membership and every column definition

Who uses it

  • Lenders, appraisers and underwriting teams
  • Site selection and real estate analytics teams
  • Compensation and relocation planners

Pricing

$599 a year.

No personal contact data is collected or sold in any QuestionPunk dataset.

Questions

Is this data not free from the government?
Yes. The source files are public and we link to them. You pay for the cleaning, the joins, the documented schema and the refresh, not for the data itself.
How is it delivered?
As Parquet or CSV files, by download link or to your own cloud bucket. The same tables load into Snowflake with the scripts we include. A Snowflake Marketplace listing is being set up and is not live yet.
Can I see the data before paying?
Yes. Ask for a sample and we send the Vermont rows from every table, plus the full data dictionary.
Does it include HUD Income Limits or past years of Fair Market Rents?
Not yet. Every HUD rent is the fiscal year 2026 value. The HUD User download site answered automated requests with a bot challenge in September 2026, so Income Limits, FMR history and 50th percentile rents are left out rather than filled from elsewhere. For the same reason the assisted housing tables come from HUD’s open-data services: the tax credit table is the release those carry, not HUD User’s newer one, and the Picture of Subsidized Households tract and county summaries are not included.
Does it include personal data?
No. Every row is an area statistic, a housing property or a tract. Owner, contact and manager fields are never downloaded, properties under 5 units lose their name, address and coordinates, and HUD suppresses resident figures where 10 or fewer households reported.
Which FHFA index is this?
The ZIP, tract, county and metro series are the developmental indexes FHFA publishes as not seasonally adjusted research series, not the headline index. The state and national annual series are the all-transactions index. FHFA asks users of the local indexes to cite Bogin, Doerner and Larson (2019), Real Estate Economics 47(2), and the documentation does.

Tell us what you need

Geography, size and fields. A two-line email is enough, and a person replies.

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