Fair Market Rents

The FMR Documentation Systems are intended to provide an in-depth exposition of the methodology used to generate Fair Market Rents for a given geographic area selected by the user. The actual FMRs published in the Federal Register are computed using data on rent distributions that are prohibited from public release under Title XIII to protect the confidentiality of respondents. The documentation systems re-calculate Fair Market Rents based on publically available data from the 2000 Census. These data contain rounded distributions to assure the confidentiality of respondents. Calculations using the rounded data may not produce the same result as calculations using the protected data. Consequently, the documentation system provides a demonstration of the methodology and results that are close to, but in some cases different from, the official FMRs published for a given year. The difference between HUD's actual results and those demonstrated here are inversely related to the size of the FMR area. That is, the larger the area, the closer the calculation based on the rounded data is likely to be to the census base rent computed from the protected data.