Nearly 327,000 people in the United States experiencing homelessness lived in shelters, a small proportion (0.1%) of the U.S. population from 2018 to 2022 but higher than from 2013 to 2017, according to American Community Survey (ACS) 5-year estimates released in a working paper.

The 2013-2017 ACS, the previous 5-year ACS with no overlapping years, showed there were approximately 267,000 people (0.08% of the U.S. population) in shelters during that period.

Among the sheltered population age 16 and over experiencing homelessness, nearly 15% were unemployed and an additional 61% were not in the labor force.

A change in the number of people experiencing homelessness and living in shelters could be due to a change in economic circumstances or resources devoted to shelters or a combination of both.

Group quarters are places — owned or managed by an entity or organization providing housing and/or services for the residents — where people live or stay in a group arrangement.

They consist of institutional (residents primarily not eligible, able, or likely to participate in the labor force) and noninstitutional (residents primarily eligible, able or likely to participate in labor force) facilities. Noninstitutional group quarters include places like college dorms and military housing and other noninstitutional facilities.

In the ACS, the sheltered population experiencing homelessness is sampled from facilities where people stay overnight as part of the noninstitutional facilities

That operate on a first-come, first-served basis where people must leave the next morning and have no guaranteed bed for another night.

Where people are assigned a bed for a specified period (even if they leave the building daily).

That provide temporary shelter during extremely cold weather (like churches). This category does not include shelters that operate only in the event of a natural disaster.

The sheltered population is an estimate of the population experiencing homelessness that stay in emergency and transitional shelters. It is not a complete count of the total U.S. population experiencing homelessness, which the Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) estimated was 582,500 in 2022. HUD conducts a Point-in-Time count of sheltered people experiencing homelessness on a single night in January every year and a count of unsheltered people every other year.

It’s important to note that some detailed group quarters types are included in the decennial census as “other noninstitutionalized facilities” but not in the ACS, which may lead to higher or overestimates of this population in the ACS. More information about this is available in Estimates of the Population Experiencing Homelessness and Living in Shelters.

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