Austin and Travis County’s homelessness providers served 7% fewer people in 2025 than in 2024, the first such decline since 2021. But that measure of service use does not tell the whole story: young adults and youth-led families continued to show up for help in greater numbers. Those contrasting trends are among the findings in the Ending Community Homelessness Coalition’s newly released 2026 State of the System Report.
ECHO released the report on Friday, describing it as an annual review of people, programs and progress in the Austin/Travis County Homelessness Response System, according to KXAN. Drawing on data from 2020 through 2025, the report examines housing and supportive-service needs, available services and gaps, and changes in the system. ECHO says it is intended for policymakers, system funders and community members.
A Rare Decline After Years of Growth
The 7% decline in people served marks the first year-over-year decrease since 2021, according to ECHO. Local provider use had risen significantly in 2023 and 2024, during a period that also saw evictions increase after COVID-era eviction moratoriums ended. The service figures track people who accessed the system; they are not, by themselves, a count of everyone experiencing homelessness.
The decline also lines up with a broader pattern — the report noted that the local drop mirrors a national decrease found in the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development's Annual Homelessness Assessment Report. At the same time, the number of people becoming homeless for the first time fell in 2025 for the second consecutive year, with 6,895 people receiving Homelessness Response System services for the first time last year — a figure that was still 3.3% below the all-time high recorded in 2023, per the report.
No Clear Culprit — Or Credit — Yet
Joseph Montaño, ECHO's director of research and evaluation, said data collected by providers helps drive system-level change, but he was careful not to pin the 2025 dip on any single cause. Montaño said the report's trends should be considered alongside a mix of environmental factors, including an internal ECHO data migration, lower local rents, and increased rental inventory — all unfolding as housing development in Austin increased significantly in 2025 and as some street outreach projects ceased operations during the year.
The city's Homelessness Strategy Office, meanwhile, has been pushing a larger effort to incorporate more street outreach, according to the report. Montaño said it would take one or two more years of decreases before the trend could be confidently attributed to any particular event — Austin's median rent, for context, fell from $1,546 in December 2021 to $1,296 by January 2026, according to Pew, as the city added 120,000 housing units between 2015 and 2024, a 30% jump in its housing stock.
Youth Homelessness Keeps Climbing
The overall decline did not extend to every group seeking help. Households led by someone ages 18 to 24 who were documented as homeless for the first time increased by more than 32% from 2024 to 2025. The number of youth families — defined as families with no one over age 24 — rose by 15%, the report found.
Montaño said youth entering the system have increased across several recent years and that this population has a high need for services. He said rising housing costs may be contributing to the increase, and that youth aging out of foster care are more likely to experience homelessness. Separate research from the University of Texas's Texas Institute for Child and Family Wellbeing found that the number of young adults ages 18 to 25 seeking housing assistance through Austin's homeless response system has nearly tripled over the past three years. The Austin Monitor has also reported that the number of Travis County residents under 25 without permanent housing and without parental or guardian care nearly quadrupled, from 247 in 2020 to 934 by 2024.
Disability, Domestic Violence and Mental Health Needs
The report also found that more than half of people served in 2025 — 13,607 people — reported having a disability, and that survivors of domestic violence accounted for 33% of people served that year. Mental health conditions reached a six-year high, affecting 39.4% of people served, the report found, underscoring Montaño's point that housing alone isn't enough — the system also needs to pair housing with healthcare, benefits assistance, case management and other supportive services.
Persistent Racial Disparities
Racial disparities remained persistent in the report. Black people made up 34% of Homelessness Response System clients in 2025, despite representing just 8.5% of Travis County's population — a rate Montaño said amounts to roughly four times Black residents' share of the county's census. Hispanic and Latino people accounted for 28.7% of clients, while white people represented 25.6%; Montaño said the disparity was inverted for white clients.
ECHO cautioned that its report does not capture the total number of people experiencing homelessness in the community. The scale varies across local estimates: a Point-in-Time count on the nights of Jan. 25-26, 2025, identified 3,238 people experiencing homelessness in Austin and Travis County, including 1,577 unsheltered and 1,661 sheltered individuals, according to The Austin Independent. That differs from ECHO’s estimate that at least 6,235 people experienced homelessness on a single day in May 2024 and a more recent dashboard figure of 4,935. An ECHO spokesperson told the outlet the Point-in-Time count and dashboard estimate are not comparable because they use different methodologies.
What different homelessness counts show
ECHO describes the Point-in-Time count as a snapshot of homelessness at a particular moment. A separate running estimate maintained by ECHO is based on incoming requests for housing and assistance and tends to be higher than the Point-in-Time count, according to KUT. These measures differ from the report’s annual count of people served by providers.
Student homelessness figures provide another view of housing instability among young people, using a different population and measure. KXAN reported that Austin ISD counted more than 970 students as doubling up with other families in 2025.
