U.S. Homelessness Statistics: The Full National Picture

Cherry Willow Apparel Editorial Team · Published August 19, 2026 · Sourced from HUD & the National Alliance to End Homelessness

On a single night in January 2025, 745,652 people were experiencing homelessness across the United States, according to the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's newest national count. These homelessness statistics mark the first year-over-year decline since 2016, a 3.3 percent drop from 2024. But the full national picture is more complicated than one headline number: chronic homelessness and homelessness among people without children both hit record highs the same year, and the gains were concentrated in only a handful of states. Here is what the latest data shows, category by category and state by state, along with what the count leaves out.

The Headline Numbers for 2025

HUD's 2025 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report, based on point-in-time counts conducted by local Continuums of Care across the country in January 2025, found 745,652 people experiencing homelessness on a single night. That included 266,320 people who were unsheltered: sleeping outside, in vehicles, or in encampments rather than in a shelter or transitional housing program. Compared with January 2024, the total fell 3.3 percent, the first national decline HUD has recorded since 2016.

Source: HUD, 2025 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report.

The Ten-Year Trend by Population

Zooming out changes the story. Measured against 2013, the earliest year HUD tracks consistently across every population group, homelessness overall is still up sharply, and the growth has not landed evenly across groups.

Source: HUD, 2025 AHAR Part 1. HUD's own materials round the total 2013-to-2025 increase to 27 percent.

• Unaccompanied youth: 35,159 people under 25 without an accompanying adult were counted in 2025, down 7.9 percent from 2024, though HUD has only tracked this group consistently since 2017.
• Veterans: 32,495 counted in 2025, down 56 percent since 2009, when a coordinated federal effort to house homeless veterans began, though 2025's improvement was the smallest of any recent year.

Sheltered, Unsheltered, and Where People Sleep

Of the 745,652 people counted in January 2025, most were in some form of shelter program, but more than a third were not:

• 56% (emergency shelter): staying in an emergency shelter on the night of the count.
• 8% (transitional housing): in a transitional housing program.
• 36% (unsheltered): sleeping outside, in vehicles, or in encampments, places not meant for human habitation.

Unsheltered figures are the most volatile part of the count from year to year. HUD notes that weather on the night of the count, local outreach capacity, and changes in counting methodology can all shift the number independent of any real change in how many people are without housing.

Which States Carry the Most of the Crisis

Homelessness is not spread evenly across the country. As of the most recent full state-level analysis, seven states, California, Illinois, Texas, Massachusetts, Florida, Washington, and New York, accounted for roughly 64 percent of the national homeless population. California alone has consistently carried the largest total count of any state.

The 2025 count also showed how unevenly the national decline landed. Illinois recorded the steepest single-state drop, down 43.6 percent, while New York (-7.9%), Colorado (-10.8%), Maine (-10.7%), Alabama (-10.1%), and Minnesota (-8.8%) all posted double-digit or near-double-digit declines. California, still the state with the largest homeless population, saw a comparatively modest 2.8 percent decrease.

Racial and Demographic Disparities

The people experiencing homelessness in the U.S. are not a demographic cross-section of the country. Analysis of the 2025 count found Black Americans made up about 32.7 percent of people counted homeless while representing roughly 14.4 percent of the total U.S. population, a gap researchers connect to a long history of discrimination in housing, employment, and wealth-building.

Homelessness among older adults is climbing quickly, too: the population grew roughly 6.8 percent in the most recent year alone, and researchers at the National Alliance to End Homelessness project it could nearly triple between 2017 and 2030 without new intervention, as fixed incomes fail to keep pace with rising housing costs.

The 2025 federal report notably did not break out data on gender-expansive and transgender populations, even though earlier reports had documented steep increases in homelessness among this group. That gap is itself worth noting: it means one of the fastest-growing and most vulnerable populations in the homelessness system is currently among the least visible in the federal count.

Why the National Number Finally Dropped

The reasons behind the 2025 decline depend on who you ask, a good reminder of how much public framing of these numbers can diverge from what the underlying data actually shows (see our related breakdown, Public Perception vs. Reality). HUD's own announcement credited the drop largely to reduced shelter use tied to a smaller number of sanctuary cities, and HUD Secretary Scott Turner used the report to argue that the prevailing Housing First approach has "failed to meaningfully reduce homelessness." Researchers at the National Alliance to End Homelessness point to a different driver: targeted investment in family and youth housing, the two categories that saw the largest declines (11.3 percent and 7.9 percent respectively), while chronic homelessness and homelessness among individuals without children, categories that receive less of that targeted investment, both hit record highs.

What the Count Doesn't Capture

Every number in this article comes from a point-in-time count: a single night in January when local outreach teams and shelter providers count everyone they can find. It's the most consistent measure available, but it is also, by design, a floor rather than a ceiling. The count excludes people who are "doubled up," staying with family or friends out of financial necessity rather than choice, a group researchers estimate in the millions nationally and one that carries a significantly elevated risk of becoming literally homeless. For more on how these numbers get used, and sometimes misused, in public debate, see Numbers Don't Lie.

None of that is a reason to distrust the data. It's a reason to read it carefully, and to remember what it is actually measuring: not a fixed population, but hundreds of thousands of individual people. Cherry Willow was built on the belief that everyone deserves to "rediscover their light and share it with the world," and that starts with treating people experiencing homelessness as neighbors to know, not statistics to manage. You can read more about that approach on our mission page.

Frequently Asked Questions

Sources: U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, 2025 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report Part 1 (hud.gov and huduser.gov); National Alliance to End Homelessness, State of Homelessness: 2025 Edition (endhomelessness.org). Figures reflect the most recent point-in-time data available as of publication (the January 2025 count, published May 2026) and will shift as new counts and reports are released.