FY 2026 Housing Needs Assessment Sections:

Homeownership Rate

Housing Market

Barriers to Homeownership

Monthly Homeownership Costs

Severe Mortgage Burden

Home Value & Housing Wealth Gap

Home Improvement & Refinancing

Average weekly mortgage rates are derived from a national survey of credit unions, commercial banks, and mortgage lending companies and are based on rates for first-lien prime conventional conforming house purchase mortgages with a loan-to-value ratio of 80%.

Debt in collections includes past-due credit lines that have been closed and charged-off on the creditor's books as well as unpaid bills reported to the credit bureau that the creditor is attempting to collect.

The FICO^® Score is the consumer credit score used by most U.S. banks and credit grantors. It is based on data gathered by third-party consumer credit reporting agencies.

Mortgage loan denial rate is the percentage of home purchase mortgage loan applications denied by lenders. Applications include pre-approval requests. Applications approved but not accepted are counted as approved. Applications withdrawn by applicant, files closed for incompleteness and loans purchased by a financial institution are excluded from the analysis.

Selected homeowner costs include mortgage payments, property taxes, utilities, and condominium or mobile home fees (if applicable).

Severe housing cost burden is defined as spending more than 50% of income on housing-related costs or having no income. The 50% threshold is commonly associated with being housing unstable and at risk of losing one's home. Severe mortgage burden is a related term applicable to mortgage holders.

The housing wealth gap is the difference between the share of households and the share of aggregate home values by the race/ethnicity of the head of household. Estimates include all heads of household who identify as a race alone or in combination with other races.

For time series based on American Community Survey (ACS) or the ACS Public Use Microdata Sample, a gap is shown for the year 2020. Due to the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic in the data collection process, the level of nonresponse bias did not meet the Census Bureau's quality standards for a reliable release of standard one-year estimates for 2020. While experimental one-year estimates were released for that year using weighting methods to address the nonresponse bias, the Census Bureau has advised against comparing these to one-year estimates from other years. For time series only using ACS one-year estimates for a denominator, the 2022 ACS five-year estimate is used in place of the 2020 one-year estimate, as 2020 represents to the mid-point of that five-year estimate.

Inflationary adjustments are based on the Consumer Price Index for All Urban Consumers (CPI-U), from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, for "all items less shelter."

Ohio Regions are defined at the county level by TourismOhio, part of the Ohio Department of Development. Regional estimates of IPUMS USA data are calculated using a geographic correspondence file from the Missouri Census Data Center at the University of Missouri to "crosswalk" the data from Public Use Microdata Areas (PUMAs) to counties.