2012 Income Limits

2012 Income Limits

HUD has published the FY 2012 Median Family Income estimates, Section 8 Income Limits, and other HUD Income Limits; they were posted to our HUD User website on December 1, 2011 and can be found at https://www.huduser.gov/portal/datasets/il.html.

The FY 2012 Income Limits are based on the same American Community Survey data that was used in developing the FY 2011 Income Limits, which were released on May 31, 2011. An additional year of update data was used in crafting the FY 2012 Median Incomes. From now on, Income Limits and Fair Market Rents will be based on the same American Community Survey data; the 2009 ACS data were used for both the FY 2012 FMRs and Income Limits. Some Income Limits use FMRs for the determination of high housing cost adjustments; having them based on the same year of data is beneficial for purposes of consistency.

Income Limits will continue to be published on December 1 in subsequent fiscal years. We made this change for several reasons. First and foremost, we understand that having a certain date for the publication of median family income and income limits is important to many of our constituents. Additionally, publishing income limits on December 1 better aligns the availability of these program parameters with the fiscal year for which they’re applicable.

Last August, we sought comments on the prospect of setting a “date certain” for publication of Income Limits, and received only one comment, which favored the change. We decided to move away from our traditional spring publication of Income Limits, both for consistency and to ensure that we have sufficient time to accurately incorporate the source data from the Census Bureau.