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The social housing construction now delivering thousands of homes a year to Australians with nowhere to live has extremely limited funding beyond the end of this decade, and new analysis finds the gains will dwindle unless governments commit to keep building.

A working paper by Professor Hal Pawson and Dr Andrew Clarke for the Australian Homelessness Monitor 2026, is the first to break down the real world impact of the boosted supply of social housing from different levels of government. It finds the increase rests entirely
on construction that has a limited funding future.

Key findings:

• Social homes let to new tenants each year rise to around 36,000 between 2026 and 2030, up from around 30,000 in the late 2010s.
• Around 28,000 of those lettings are existing homes being re-let after a tenant moves out or dies, a number that won’t shift, because fewer social renters can afford to leave for the private market.
• Every additional social home comes from new construction. First-time lettings in newly built homes rise from around 2,000 a year before 2020 to around 8,000 a year between2026 and 2030.

“The only part of this system that has moved is the part governments paid to move,” Professor Pawson said. “Re-lets have been declining for three decades and there is no policy lever that turns them around, because they depend on social renters being able to afford to move to
market housing. But, as our paper also shows, that’s become a near impossibility in recent years. If we’re talking about people who are homeless or in danger of homelessness, and if we’re thinking about secure long-term living arrangements, building social housing is the only
thing that adds to the number who can be housed.”

Homelessness Australia CEO Kate Colvin said the finding described what her members had lived through for a generation.

“For most of the past thirty years, the only way into social housing in this country has been to wait for someone to die or move out,” Ms Colvin said. “That’s what our workers have been doing all that time. Ringing around, waiting for a vacancy and telling everyone else there is nothing. Except for a very brief spurt in the Global Financial Crisis, the last five years are the first time governments have actually added homes to that pipeline at scale.”

The analysis notes that the $10 billion Housing Australia Future Fund is exhausted by the end of 2026, with its returns committed for the next 25 years to existing projects.

‘Within months, now, the HAFF will be maxed out, with nothing left in the tank to extend the current program of new project approvals beyond 2029’ said Prof Pawson.

Most state and territory investment commitments made in the first half of the decade likewise expire across the second half.

Unless federal and state commitments are renewed, construction falls back sharply after 2030 and the flow of lettings available to people experiencing homelessness drops back to barely above where it sat in the late 2010s.

“Governments have just begun to pick up pace and now appear to be planning for a standstill,” said Ms Colvin. “While badly needed new homes are going up today the Commonwealth funding needed to continue this effort has not been committed.

The Monitor reports the current investment is enough to halt social housing’s shrinking share of all housing without reversing it. Australia’s social housing stock grew 4% between 2018 and 2025, from 428,000 to 446,000 dwellings, against projected household growth of 12%. Only in the second half of the 2020s will we see the production of new social homes catching up to population growth. And, unless new funding commitments quickly materialise, that will prove very shortlived.

Contact: Nick Lucchinelli 042222903