AUSTIN, Texas (Oct. 30, 2026) – The Ending Community Homelessness Coalition (ECHO) today released the 2026 State of the System Report, our community’s annual review of the people, programs, and progress in the Austin/Travis County Homelessness Response System (HRS).

The report is available on ECHO’s Reports & Research page.

“Every year, ECHO takes the opportunity to analyze the unmet needs of our most vulnerable neighbors and their journey through the Homelessness Response System,” said Joseph Erik Montaño, ECHO’s Director of Research & Evaluation. “The system works best when it is informed by the data providers collect every day about people’s needs, and we remain committed to supporting data-led system-level change through this report.”

The 2026 State of the System Report covers calendar year 2025 and is the result of in-depth analysis of who in our community needs housing and supportive services, the kinds of housing and services that exist to serve people, gaps in those services, and how our system is growing and adapting to fill them. It is intended to be a resource for policymakers, HRS funders, and our community to understand our system and how we can work together to improve outcomes for people who rely on it. It’s important to note none of the statistics in this report should be interpreted as capturing the number of people who are homeless in our community.

“The reasons for homelessness are complex and vary from household to household. The solutions are straightforward: housing and services,” said ECHO Executive Director Matt Mollica. “This report offers a look at how our Homelessness Response System in Austin and Travis County is performing over time – where we’re succeeding and where there is more work to do together to be the community we want to be.”

“The State of the System Report demonstrates the impact of our community’s investments and reinforces the need to prioritize young people and people with disabilities, ensuring everyone has access to the support and resources they need to find a safe, stable place to call home,” said Director of Austin Homeless Strategies and Operations, David Gray.

Key takeaways from the 2026 State of the System report include:

• The number of people who became homeless for the first time declined for the second year in a row
  • The drop is likely attributable, in part, to Austin rent prices dropping in 2025 following a significant increase in housing development. Researchers at Pew found Austin’s average rent fell from $1,546 in December 2021 (15% above the national median) to $1,296 in January 2026 (4% below the national median). The connection between housing costs and homelessness is well-documented: The federal Government Accountability Office (GAO) published research in 2020 that shows for every $100 increase in rent in a community, homelessness increases by 9%. Part of the reduction in first-time homelessness is likely also due to decreases in street outreach and service projects, meaning providers were documenting fewer interactions.

• Providers added nearly 600 new Permanent Housing beds in 2025, a 15% increase for our System
  • This includes 237 Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH) beds, a 13% increase in one year. This is a result of rapid and consistent investment by the City of Austin and Travis County in site-based PSH units across our community. These partners, along with philanthropic leaders in our community, are dedicating more money to supporting people who need the level of care PSH can provide. The number of PSH units in our system has nearly doubled since 2020, and more developments are on the way. Three new properties with dedicated PSH have already opened this year – The Roz, Seabrook Square II, and Burleson Studios – and more than a half dozen others will open or begin offering leases through 2027.

• Young people made up a larger share of people served, a trend that continues to grow rapidly
  • Young people leaving foster care are increasingly finding themselves in need of homelessness services in our community. This is backed up by recent research that found 1-in-3 people who aged out of foster care in Texas experienced homelessness by age 21. The number of households led by someone aged 18-24 recorded as homeless for the first time in Austin/Travis County increased by over 32% from 2024 to 2025. The number of youth families (meaning families with no one over the age of 24) grew by 15%. As Texas lawmakers prepare for the 2027 Legislative session, this report supports continued focus on solutions to disrupt this foster care-to-homelessness pipeline, such as fully implementing the federal Foster Youth to Independence (FYI) voucher program.

Together, these takeaways reinforce that people experiencing homelessness are not a fixed population with fixed needs. Our solutions must be responsive to changing economic and social realities in our community and across the country that impact not just who becomes homeless, but how homelessness response systems like ours are able to operate.

Ongoing Challenges

Despite growth we see in some areas of our system, such as PSH, some areas require greater focus as a community. Rapid Re-Housing, for example, is declining, both in total number of units in our system and in the number of people who are able to move through this short-term housing resource. These declines result from losses of federal funding provided through the pandemic-era American Rescue Plan Act (ARPA). We expect to continue to see declines in RRH unless this funding source is replaced.

Our community also continues to see high rates of domestic violence survivors (33.1% of all people served in 2025), people with disabilities (54.9%), and people experiencing chronic homelessness (30.9%) in the population we serve. These groups often need different kinds of support to rebuild and maintain stability in their lives – a key reason housing must be paired with appropriately tailored services to ensure our system works for everyone.

About the Data in the Report

This report covers an entire calendar year (2025) of interactions between providers in our HRS and people served by the system. “People served” includes people who are currently experiencing homelessness, people in shelters, people currently housed by housing programs, and other types of experiences.

The data here is different from what we gather during the Point in Time (PIT) Count and on our community’s HRS dashboard. Both the PIT Count and dashboard reveal snapshots of who’s experiencing homelessness on a single day, giving us a picture of the need at a given point in time. The State of the System report tracks interactions with service providers over time and includes people who may not be homeless during the reporting period, but instead working with a service provider in another capacity. The report also compares data from calendar years 2020-2024 to identify trends and measure progress.

Neither this report nor other measures of homelessness should be viewed in a vacuum. Each is important and tells us something different about people who need housing and supportive services. The next opportunity to survey people in person during the PIT Count will be January 27. We encourage community members to sign up for our newsletters and follow our social media channels for information on how to volunteer and help our community shape its understanding of and response to homelessness.

HMIS Migration

In Fall 2025, our community transitioned to a new software provider for our Homeless Management Information System (HMIS). This will provide new capabilities and flexibility to providers in our community. Transferring to new software required transferring massive troves of data, which impacts the report in a couple ways.

First, transferring so much data provided an opportunity to remove duplicate profiles and profiles that are incomplete or no longer needed. This ensures our new HMIS is founded on the highest-quality data possible. Second, there was a blackout period during which providers could not enter information into either HMIS system. Paper records were kept during this time and retroactively entered into the new system, but this is not as consistent as using the database directly. Both of these factors affected the total amount of data available for this analysis. The HMIS migration is referenced throughout the report where the difference may have affected the analysis of our system.