HUD Formally Pushes Multifamily HOTMA Compliance to January 2028

The Department of Housing and Urban Development on Monday formally extended the deadline for multifamily housing owners to comply with the income and asset rules of the Housing Opportunity Through Modernization Act, pushing mandatory compliance from January 1, 2027 to January 1, 2028. Notice H 2026-07, issued November 2, 2026, supersedes Notice H 2025-07, which had set the 2027 date less than a year ago.

The notice is narrow in scope. It applies to Multifamily Housing owners participating in the programs listed in Section 4 of Notice H 2023-10, the department's implementation guidance for HOTMA Sections 102 and 104, and it changes only the compliance date. The underlying requirements - how owners calculate income, treat assets, and document certifications under the HOTMA final rule published at 88 Fed. Reg. 9600 on February 14, 2023 - are untouched. And the extension does not reach the public housing and voucher side of the department, where a separate January 1, 2027 enforcement date still stands.

WHAT SECTIONS 102 AND 104 ACTUALLY REQUIRE

The two HOTMA sections at the center of the notice rewrote the income and asset rules that sit underneath every assisted multifamily certification. Section 102 overhauled how owners calculate and review household income: it changed the definition of income, restructured annual and interim reviews, and set the documentation standards owners must use when they verify what a household earns. Section 104 imposed asset limits tied to eligibility, requiring owners to determine whether a family's net assets exceed statutory caps and to account for income those assets produce.

Together, the sections replaced rules that had governed multifamily certifications for decades, and they are the reason the compliance date matters so much to the industry. An owner's entire certification workflow - the forms tenants sign, the verifications staff collect, the software that calculates the numbers - turns on which rulebook applies to a given certification's effective date. Every extension moves the line between the old rules and the new ones, which is why owners have watched each notice closely.

WHAT THE NOTICE DOES

Notice H 2026-07 is a single-page revision with a single operative act: it moves the mandatory compliance date in Section 6.2 of Notice H 2023-10. That section governs when Multifamily Housing owners must be in full compliance with the HOTMA final rule and HUD's updated income and asset documentation requirements, which attach to income certifications with effective dates on or after the compliance date.

The new notice states its purpose directly: to extend the compliance date to January 1, 2028. In the revision section, HUD formally rewrites the date in the 2023 guidance from its original January 1, 2025 to January 1, 2028, absorbing the intermediate extensions that had already pushed the deadline twice. The notice supersedes Notice H 2025-07, the December 2025 document that had most recently moved the date to January 1, 2027, and it cross-references Notice H 2023-10 as the governing implementation text.

The addressee list on the notice reads like an org chart of the multifamily delivery system: the regional center directors and satellite office directors who run HUD's field operations, the asset management division directors and operations officers who oversee individual properties, the field counsel who advise them, the contract administrators who process subsidy payments on the department's behalf, and the multifamily project owners who must ultimately make the change in their files. Routing the notice through the full chain signals that HUD expects the revised date to be applied uniformly rather than property by property.

It was signed by Joseph M. Gormley, performing the delegable duties of the Assistant Secretary for Housing - Federal Housing Commissioner, and addressed to the full multifamily field structure: regional center directors, satellite office directors, asset management division directors, operations officers, field counsel, contract administrators, and multifamily project owners. Questions go to a dedicated mailbox, MFH_HOTMA@hud.gov.

THE RUNNING HISTORY OF THE DATE

The January 1, 2028 deadline is the fourth date owners have been given for the same requirement. Notice H 2023-10 originally required full compliance for income certifications effective on or after January 1, 2025. HUD later extended that to January 1, 2026, and Notice H 2025-07, issued December 17, 2025, extended it again to January 1, 2027. Monday's notice adds a third extension, to January 1, 2028.

The move did not arrive without warning. HUD Office of Housing staff told attendees at the Public Housing Authorities Directors Association's 2026 Legislative Forum in September that the department planned to move the multifamily compliance date to January 1, 2028, and that a formal notice was working its way through approval channels. Industry groups tracked the pending notice through the fall. Monday's publication on HUD's official Housing notices index makes the change formal and operative.

For the industry groups that had pressed for more time, the September preview and Monday's formal publication follow a now-familiar pattern in the HOTMA rollout: the department signals a move verbally, stakeholders plan around it, and the written notice arrives weeks later to make it binding. Until the written version appears, the prior notice technically controls - a gap that compliance officers have learned to manage carefully.

Owners and compliance vendors should note one practical detail: HUD's online Multifamily HOTMA resource page still carried its December 2025 policy update language as of Monday afternoon. The controlling document is the notice itself, posted at the top of the department's 2026 Housing notices index, not the resource page, which typically lags formal issuances.

WHO IS COVERED, AND WHO IS NOT

The extension covers Multifamily Housing owners participating in the programs listed in Section 4 of Notice H 2023-10. That applicability list spans HUD's privately owned, federally assisted multifamily stock, including the project-based rental assistance portfolio. For those owners, income certifications with effective dates before January 1, 2028 continue under the pre-HOTMA rules, and certifications effective on or after that date must follow the HOTMA income and asset framework.

The extension does not cover the programs administered by HUD's Office of Public and Indian Housing. Public housing, the Housing Choice Voucher program, project-based vouchers, and Section 8 Moderate Rehabilitation administered by non-MTW agencies remain on the January 1, 2027 enforcement track set by Notice PIH 2026-15, issued May 14, 2026, and reaffirmed in HUD's PIH HOTMA implementation FAQs dated September 29, 2026. For most public housing agencies, in other words, nothing changed on Monday.

The distinction matters because the two offices have been running parallel but separate HOTMA clocks since the final rule published. The multifamily side has now slipped its date three times; the PIH side has held its January 2027 date through multiple rounds of guidance. Owners with properties on both sides of the line - a project-based voucher building overlaid on public housing, for example - now face a full year of separation between the two compliance dates for the same household income rules.

WHAT THE EXTENSION DOES NOT CHANGE

Nothing in Notice H 2026-07 reopens the substance of the HOTMA final rule. The income definitions, asset limitations, and documentation standards that owners will eventually apply remain the ones published in February 2023 and elaborated in Notice H 2023-10 and its attachments. HUD did not invite new comment, did not revise the forms, and did not alter the interim provisions that let owners begin using HOTMA flexibilities ahead of full compliance where the earlier guidance allowed it.

The notice also leaves the Community Planning and Development side of HOTMA untouched. The January 2027 compliance date covering the HOME Investment Partnerships, Community Development Block Grant, and homelessness programs, set in a December 2025 Federal Register document, is a separate track administered by a different office and was not addressed in Monday's issuance.

The one-year reprieve also has a budget and operations dimension for owners. Contract administrators process renewals and adjust subsidy payments against the certification rules in force at the time, so the extension keeps the current playbook in place through all of calendar 2027. The stakes of a rushed transition are concrete for large portfolios: certification errors that surface in management reviews, delayed approvals that hold up subsidy payments, and disruption for tenants whose annual recertifications would land in the first weeks of a new regime. A full extra year gives owners room to sequence the change property by property rather than all at once.

WHAT OWNERS SHOULD DO WITH THE EXTRA YEAR

HUD offered no stated rationale in the notice beyond the date change itself. But the practical effect for multifamily owners is another full year of runway on a transition that has already been years in the making. Compliance teams that had been racing the January 2027 date - reconfiguring software, retraining certification staff, and rebuilding tenant file documentation around the new income and asset rules - can stretch that work across 2027 instead of compressing it into the next two months.

The department's posture through three extensions has been consistent: the dates move, the requirements do not. Owners who used prior extensions to slow their preparation found the rules unchanged when the new dates arrived. HUD's dedicated HOTMA mailbox remains the channel for questions, and the multifamily field offices copied on the notice remain responsible for guiding owners through the transition ahead of January 1, 2028.