What Are the Odds of Winning a Housing Lottery?

Published October 11, 2026. San Francisco lottery figures come from RentReboot's copy of the city's DAHLIA housing portal, read on October 11, 2026. New York City applicant figures come from NYC Department of Housing Preservation and Development (HPD) publications, because our New York data has no applicant counts. Regular San Francisco rents are the figures published in our report on what it costs to rent in the Bay Area in 2026 (active listings first listed in the 180 days before October 1, 2026). Regular New York rents come from new listings RentReboot collected from August 27 to October 10, 2026.

Answer first: In San Francisco's 53 DAHLIA rental lotteries with closed applications (lottery dates July 30, 2024 to October 20, 2026), 125,115 applications were filed for 666 units, or 188 applications per unit. The median lottery had 451 applications per unit. In New York City, HPD reported nearly 6,000,000 applications for over 10,000 units in 2024, about 600 per unit. These are ratios of applications to units. They are not one applicant's chance of winning, because preferences, set-asides and eligibility review decide who is reached first.

On rent, the median San Francisco lottery one-bedroom rent was $1,594 a month (44 lottery listings). The median ask for a regular San Francisco one-bedroom was $4,250 a month (4,639 units, from our Bay Area rents report). That is a gap of $2,656 a month, or $31,872 a year, at the two medians.

What "odds" means in this report

Every ratio below is the number of applications divided by the number of units. If 2,240 applications go to one lottery for one apartment, the ratio is 2,240 to 1. That does not mean each applicant had a 1 in 2,240 chance:

• Applications, not people. One household can apply to many lotteries. DAHLIA and HPD count each application.
• Preferences move groups up the line. In San Francisco, Certificate of Preference holders, displaced tenants and neighborhood residents are ranked first. In New York, a share of units goes first to community board residents, municipal employees and people with disabilities.
• Eligibility review removes applicants. Income, household size and documents are checked after the lottery. People who do not qualify, or do not answer, are passed over.

So a ratio tells you how crowded a lottery was. It does not tell you your own chance.

San Francisco: applications per unit

We counted DAHLIA rental lotteries with applications closed before October 11, 2026, at least one application and at least one unit. DAHLIA labels 53 of them "Standard Lottery". Those are the lotteries in the charts and tables below.

Across the 53 lotteries:

• Pooled: 125,115 applications for 666 units, or 188 per unit.
• Median lottery: 451 applications per unit. A quarter of the lotteries had 215 or fewer, and a quarter had 1,197 or more.
• Range: from 42 per unit (272 Folsom: 5,057 applications for 120 units) to 2,935 per unit (Modera Rincon Hill Unit 408: 2,935 applications for 1 unit).
• 15 of the 53 lotteries had 1,000 or more applications per unit.

The pooled figure is lower than the median because a few large buildings had many units. The seven lotteries with 21 or more units held 487 of the 666 units.

In our data, 16 lotteries offered a single below-market-rate (BMR) unit, and the median one drew 2,157 applications for it.

By income tier. Each DAHLIA listing states the highest income tier it serves, as a percentage of area median income (AMI).

By year. Lotteries held in 2025 had a median of 334 applications per unit (22 lotteries). Lotteries held or scheduled in 2026 had a median of 741 (30 lotteries). Our copy has only one 2024 lottery (Isle House, 73 per unit). A year's median depends on which buildings held lotteries that year, so it is not a measure of demand on its own.

Waitlists and homeownership. DAHLIA also ran 16 waitlist lotteries in this data (29,670 applications; 64 units listed as available). They rank applicants for future openings, so we keep them out of the main figures. San Francisco's 27 homeownership lotteries with closed applications (July 2025 to October 2026) had 436 applications for 27 units, or 16 per home.

How preferences change the line

San Francisco

San Francisco's lottery gives every complete application one random rank. Applicants who qualify for a preference are then ranked above the general pool, in this order for BMR rentals in new buildings, per the Mayor's Office of Housing and Community Development (MOHCD) lottery manual:

1. Certificate of Preference (COP): households displaced by the former San Francisco Redevelopment Agency, and their descendants.
2. Displaced Tenant Housing Preference (DTHP): tenants displaced by an Ellis Act or owner move-in eviction, a fire, and some other causes. Up to 20% of units.
3. Neighborhood Resident Housing Preference (NRHP): people who live in the same supervisor district or within half a mile. Up to 40% of units. DTHP and NRHP do not apply to projects with fewer than 5 affordable units.
4. Live or Work in San Francisco: people who live in the city, or work at least 75% of their hours there.
5. General pool: everyone else.

In our 53 standard lotteries, every listing offered the COP and Live or Work preferences, 42 offered DTHP, and 9 offered NRHP. Veterans who also qualify for another preference get priority inside it. Our guide to how San Francisco housing lotteries work covers each step.

New York City

HPD's Marketing Handbook (revised April 2026) sets the order. Disability set-asides come first (5% of units for mobility, 2% for vision or hearing). Next come community board residents, then New York City municipal employees (5% of units, or one unit). New York City residents in the general pool are then reviewed before non-residents.

The community board share changed in the adverts we collected. In Housing Connect adverts with 2022 and 2023 deadlines, every one with a community board preference set it at 50% of units (59 and 62 adverts). In adverts with 2025 deadlines, all 94 set it at 20%. That matches the January 2024 legal settlement that cut the preference from 50% to 20% of units from late April 2024, as City Limits reported. In adverts with 2026 deadlines (through October 10), the median municipal employee preference was 10% of units, up from 5% in earlier years. HPD's marketing page lists an addendum on the municipal employee and military veteran preference, effective November 15, 2025.

HPD's own data show how much a preference can matter. Its Local Law 217 report covers lotteries advertised from 2014 to June 2020 with units leased by the end of 2021. In the lotteries that had a community district preference:

Applicants with the preference filed 4.7% of these applications and signed 48.9% of the leases. Read this with care: on applications the preference is self-reported, while on leases it is confirmed by the marketing agent, so the two columns are not counted the same way.

New York City and San Francisco side by side

Our New York data comes from public Housing Connect adverts: 285 rental lotteries with deadlines from October 13, 2025 to October 8, 2026, advertising 9,696 units. The adverts list rents and income limits, but not how many people applied. For applicant counts we use HPD's published figures:

• 2024: nearly 6,000,000 applications for over 10,000 units marketed in over 300 lotteries, as HPD Acting Commissioner Ahmed Tigani told the City Council's Committee on Housing and Buildings on April 29, 2025. That is about 600 applications per unit. Because the totals are rounded ("nearly" and "over"), the ratio is approximate.
• Lotteries advertised 2014 to June 2020: 28,904,451 applications and 27,819 signed leases in HPD's Local Law 217 report (2022), or 1,039 applications per signed lease.

The counting rules are close but not identical. Both cities count applications, not households. The San Francisco figures cover 53 lotteries we hold; the New York figures are citywide totals from HPD. The 2014 to 2020 New York figure divides by signed leases, and HPD notes that homeownership selections are not in its signed-lease count.

Lottery rent vs a regular apartment

For each size we compare the median lottery rent with the median ask of regular apartments.

• San Francisco lottery rent: the BMR rent for each size in each of the 53 DAHLIA lottery listings, then the median across listings.
• New York lottery rent: the rent of each unit in the 285 Housing Connect adverts, then the median across units. We left out 482 units advertised with a rent of $0 or no rent.
• Regular asking rent, San Francisco: the whole-city medians published in our Bay Area rents report: active listings first listed in the 180 days before October 1, 2026, one price per unit. That report has no whole-city 3-bedroom median, so we computed it with the same rules.
• Regular asking rent, New York: the median ask of new listings we collected from August 27 to October 10, 2026 (details in the method notes).

The San Francisco 3-bedroom lottery median rests on 9 listings, so treat it as a rough figure. San Francisco regular figures cover units first listed over 180 days and New York's cover six weeks of new listings, so compare each city's gap within that city.

The income each one asks for

A lottery unit has a minimum and a maximum income. A regular apartment often has only a minimum: many landlords ask for a monthly income of about 3 times the rent, which is 36 times the monthly rent a year. That 3x rule is a common landlord practice, not a law, and many New York landlords use 40 times the monthly rent instead.

The minimum and maximum columns are separate medians across listings (SF) or units (NYC), so one row does not describe a single apartment. DAHLIA states incomes per month; we multiplied them by 12. The calculator below checks your income against each listing's or unit's own range.

Check your own numbers

Regular apartments in San Francisco

These are the San Francisco figures from our report on what it costs to rent in the Bay Area in 2026: active listings first listed in the 180 days before October 1, 2026, one asking price per unit, classified-board listings excluded. The same data is behind our Bay Area average rent pages.

The 3-bedroom row is not in that report. We computed it with the same rules, reading the data on October 11, 2026. On that date the same rules gave $3,000, $4,200 and $5,950 for studios to 2 bedrooms, within 1.2% of the published figures. A later read cannot match exactly, because listings whose status changed after October 1 drop out, so treat the 3-bedroom figure as approximate.

By neighborhood, the report lists 18 San Francisco neighborhoods. For one-bedrooms, the medians ran from $3,200 in the Outer Sunset (120 units) to $5,700 in the Financial District (217 units). For studios, they ran from $2,295 in Downtown/Civic Center (600 units) to $4,650 in the Financial District (111 units).

These are asking rents in listings, not signed leases. The neighborhoods cover only part of the city, so they do not add up to the whole-city totals.

How we measured this

San Francisco lotteries. Source: DAHLIA, run by MOHCD, as stored by RentReboot on October 11, 2026. We kept rental listings with the application deadline before October 11, 2026, an applicant count above zero and at least one unit available. The applicant count is DAHLIA's count of applications in the lottery; the unit count is the number of units the listing advertised. The main figures use the 53 listings DAHLIA labels "Standard Lottery"; waitlist lotteries and homeownership are reported separately. Rents and incomes come from each listing's unit summary for the general pool.

New York lotteries. Source: public Housing Connect adverts as stored by RentReboot. We kept rental adverts with deadlines from October 11, 2025 to October 10, 2026, without Mitchell-Lama waitlist lotteries: 285 lotteries and 9,696 units. Rents and income limits are per unit. These adverts have no applicant counts, so all New York applicant figures are HPD's. We did not use any RentReboot user's application data.

Regular apartments, San Francisco. The whole-city and neighborhood medians published in our Bay Area rents report, read on October 1, 2026. The 3-bedroom median uses the same rules (see above).

Regular apartments, New York. New listings RentReboot collected from August 27 to October 10, 2026, one row per apartment (the latest asking rent), studios to 3 bedrooms, asking rents from $800 to $30,000, in the five boroughs' ZIP codes. We left out room shares, listings re-published from other sites, and classified-board posts, where many one-bedroom asks were far below every other source. Our NYC rent data and average rent pages use a different measure: medians by area of rents recorded when apartments were rented, over two years, with no whole-city figure. So the New York figures here are a different series. Applying the San Francisco rules to New York gave medians within 2.3% of ours: $3,550 for a studio, $4,080 for a 1-bedroom, $4,675 for a 2-bedroom and $4,500 for a 3-bedroom.

Limits. A ratio of applications to units is not a probability. Asking rents are not leases. Lottery income limits are set per unit and change each year. The full queries, results and a map from every number to its source are in our reproducibility notes.

Housing lottery odds FAQ

What are my odds of winning a San Francisco housing lottery? We cannot give one person's odds. In 53 San Francisco rental lotteries, the median had 451 applications per unit, and the pooled ratio was 188 per unit. A preference, such as Live or Work in San Francisco, moves you above the general pool; failing the income rules takes you out.

Are NYC housing lotteries harder to win than San Francisco's? By the ratios available, New York's are more crowded: HPD reported about 600 applications per unit in 2024, against 188 per unit pooled across our 53 San Francisco lotteries. The figures come from different sources and windows, so treat the comparison as rough.

How much cheaper is a lottery apartment? In San Francisco, the median lottery one-bedroom rent was $1,594 a month, against a $4,250 median ask for a regular one-bedroom: $31,872 a year apart. In New York, the gap for a one-bedroom was $23,088 a year ($2,166 against $4,090).

Does it cost money to apply? No. Applying on DAHLIA and on NYC Housing Connect is free. Do not pay anyone to enter a lottery for you.

Which lotteries have the fewest applications per unit? In our San Francisco data, the large new buildings: lotteries with 21 or more units had a median of 73 applications per unit, against 2,157 for single-unit lotteries.

Related guides

• How Do San Francisco Housing Lotteries Work?
• NYC Housing Connect: How to Apply Without Missing a Step
• Bay Area average rents by area
• What Does It Cost to Rent in the Bay Area in 2026?

Sources

Checked on October 11, 2026.

1. DAHLIA San Francisco Housing Portal: lottery listings, applicant counts, units, rents and income limits (read through RentReboot's copy).
2. sf.gov: How the affordable housing lottery works: random rank and preferences.
3. sf.gov: Housing lottery preference programs: who qualifies for each preference.
4. MOHCD: Marketing, Housing Preferences and Lottery Procedures Manual (January 22, 2024): preference order and the DTHP and NRHP shares.
5. NYC HPD: Testimony of Acting Commissioner Ahmed Tigani, April 29, 2025: written testimony on Housing Connect.
6. NYC Council Committee on Housing and Buildings, April 29, 2025, hearing transcript (Citymeetings.nyc): HPD's answer on 2024 applications, units and lotteries.
7. NYC HPD: Local Law 217 of 2019 Report (published April 2022): applications and signed leases, including by community district preference.
8. NYC HPD: Marketing Handbook (revised April 2026): set-asides, preferences and their order.
9. NYC HPD: Marketing guidelines: the municipal employee and military veteran preference addendum.
10. City Limits: Community preferences curtailed (January 26, 2024): the settlement that cut the community preference from 50% to 20%.
11. NYC Housing Connect: public lottery adverts (read through RentReboot's copy).