The National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA) has released its 2026 Fair Housing Trends Report, analyzing fair housing complaints in 2025 and funding disruptions affecting community-based fair housing organizations (FHOs).
Since the annual report began in 1996, this year marks the first time the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) and the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) did not provide NFHA with the requested data, preventing a complete comparison across years.
According to the report, the Trump administration has attempted to defund “private, local nonprofit fair housing enforcement organizations that are often the only place a family has to turn when they’re unlawfully denied housing.”
A 2025 NFHA press release reported that HUD was “flouting its Fair Housing Initiatives Program (FHIP) mandate by refusing to spend congressionally appropriated funds for existing grants and failing to award new grants from pending application cycles.”
Despite NFHA winning a federal court order requiring HUD to release money to organizations relying on FHIP, the Trump administration delayed releasing those funds by more than six months for nearly half of the recipients.
According to the report, these delays resulted in 76% of reporting FHOs experiencing funding disruptions. The vast majority had to reduce services, “limiting their ability to serve veterans, seniors, people with disabilities, families with children, people of color, and more,” NFHA noted in its press release.
Of the 62 organizations that identified disruptions, 58 had to reduce services. Fifteen reduced or stopped fair housing testing, 14 made workforce cuts, 11 scaled back or stopped taking new cases, nine were unable to pay staff, and four temporarily closed. Two groups in the Phoenix and Denver metropolitan areas are ceasing their work permanently.
Alongside the cuts to FHOs, HUD’s Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity (FHEO) is operating with one-third of the staff it had in January 2025, mainly because of a deferred resignation program implemented by the Trump administration. About 75% of the career attorneys working for the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division were no longer working there by August 2025.
The NFHA report identified the DOJ’s diminished capacity as one reason only 31 housing and civil enforcement cases were filed in fiscal year 2025, a decrease from 44 in fiscal year 2024. Additionally, only five cases were filed in fiscal year 2025 after the Trump administration took office.
While the DOJ did not voluntarily provide its housing and civil enforcement case summary, NFHA found the fiscal year 2025 data on the department’s public website.
Another reason NFHA cited for the decline in housing and civil enforcement cases was “reassigned DOJ priorities,” which the organization described as enforcing unlawful executive orders “attempting to eliminate diversity, equity, inclusion, and accessibility efforts in the private sector and in higher education; eliminating prorated housing assistance for ‘mixed status’ families and requiring proof of citizenship or eligible status for every resident in federally assisted housing; replacing ‘gender identity’ and ‘sexual orientation’ with ‘sex’ across nearly 50 housing regulations; addressing what it describes as ‘anti-Christian bias’; preventing antisemitism; and investigating alleged voter fraud and noncitizen voting, among others.”
HUD has disputed claims that the administration is retreating from fair housing enforcement.
In a Sept. 24 announcement, HUD reported that it had reduced its backlog of pending Fair Housing Act complaints by 46% since September 2025 and announced nine recent discrimination charges involving disability, familial status and sexual harassment.
“HUD is efficiently delivering relief for victims of housing discrimination while clearing out the indefensible case backlog left behind by the Biden administration,” HUD Secretary Scott Turner said.
Without data from HUD or the Fair Housing Assistance Program (FHAP), which encompasses state and local government organizations, NFHA prepared its report using data from nonprofit fair housing organizations and publicly available information from the DOJ.
The report found that in 2025, nonprofit fair housing organizations and the DOJ received 20,805 complaints of housing discrimination, a decrease of 13% from the 24,001 complaints recorded in 2024.
However, those figures represent only the reporting sources for which data was available in both years. Without the missing federal, state and local agency data, the decline cannot be interpreted as a comprehensive nationwide decrease in housing discrimination complaints.
Disability discrimination remained the most frequently reported category, accounting for 11,543 complaints, or more than 55% of the available 2025 total. Such complaints can involve housing providers refusing reasonable accommodations, denying access to assistance animals or failing to meet accessibility requirements.
NFHA explained that the decline from 2024 may not reflect an actual decrease in housing discrimination. According to the report, “multiple organizations noted that the community’s demand for their services did not stop, but their reduced capacity to serve their community resulted in fewer complaints being logged and processed.”
The organizations’ reduced capacity stemmed from funding disruptions that NFHA attributed to the Trump administration.
In July 2026, NFHA and the Massachusetts Fair Housing Center (MFHC) filed a lawsuit against HUD for making major changes to its fiscal year 2025 and 2026 Notices of Funding Opportunity (NOFOs) for FHIP.
They claimed that the administration’s changes violated the Administrative Procedure Act by “implementing arbitrary, capricious, and unlawful structural changes without justification.”
Previously, FHIP funding had been divided among more than 100 local community grants. However, the fiscal year 2025 NOFO allocated $46 million of the $56 million budget to just five multimillion-dollar grants for outside institutions, including state agencies and law schools.
The eligibility requirements for these larger grants excluded local enforcement organizations such as MFHC, meaning the funding they previously relied on was no longer accessible.
NFHA and MFHC alleged that the NOFO guidelines would force nonprofit fair housing organizations to close or significantly downsize.
On Aug. 26, U.S. District Judge Myong J. Joun of the District of Massachusetts issued an order vacating the challenged NOFOs and directing HUD to distribute the fiscal year 2025 FHIP funds under the previous funding structure.
However, the litigation continued into October, when the First Circuit Court of Appeals partially granted the administration’s request to suspend the district court’s orders while the appeal proceeded.
On Oct. 19, the appeals court temporarily suspended the requirement that HUD issue replacement funding notices using the fiscal year 2024 funding structure, while leaving the remainder of the district court’s restrictions in place.
In an Oct. 28 order, Joun clarified that the original funding notices remained vacated and that HUD was still required to comply with reporting requirements concerning its plans for distributing the funds.
The court also determined that the appeals court’s ruling did not prevent HUD from developing replacement funding notices under a different lawful structure.
According to the NFHA report, the litigation has not ended the funding disruptions, since “the money that keeps the doors of local fair housing organizations [FHOs] open is now litigated year over year instead of allocated and disbursed as Congress intended.”
“A firehose without water doesn’t mean there’s no fire. Local fair housing groups are our nation’s first responders to housing discrimination, but HUD shut off their water when it withheld funds Congress appropriated to help these groups enforce the law. HUD then refused to provide its own data on the discrimination people reported,” said Lisa Rice, president and CEO of NFHA.
Since the Reagan administration, Congress has supported enforcement of the Fair Housing Act by funding community-based fair housing groups, Rice recalled.
“In the middle of a fair and affordable housing crisis, lawmakers must turn the water back on and make sure critical funding reaches the first responders on the ground: the people answering the phones, conducting investigations, and providing direct assistance to families facing housing insecurity and injustice.”
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