While prompt public and private actions, including standard mortgage forbearance, kept millions of U.S. residents in their homes following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, a new report reveals that the government’s $10 billion Homeowner Assistance Fund (HAF) played a vital role in stabilizing vulnerable borrowers who required help beyond standard loss mitigation tools.

A comprehensive study released Tuesday by the Mortgage Bankers Association’s Research Institute for Housing America (RIHA) details how the federal HAF program, authorized by the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021, functioned in practice. This marks the first rigorous, data-driven exploration of the program’s impact.

As of March 2025, HAF distributed $7.8 billion to more than 570,000 homeowners nationwide through state housing finance agencies, U.S. territories and tribal governments. Drawing from national data and a deep-dive analysis into Ohio’s HAF program specifically, the researchers found that the fund successfully targeted financially fragile populations, with over 90% of assisted homeowners nationwide earning below the area median income.

The report concluded HAF bridged gaps that traditional relief missed. The program assisted borrowers with non-traditional credit instruments — such as reverse mortgages and land contracts — and covered non-mortgage expenses like property taxes, homeowners insurance and utilities.

The standard pandemic-era loss mitigation approach prioritized forbearance as an immediate step, “followed by a transition to more substantial loss mitigation options as needed,” the researchers wrote. While this strategy was immensely effective for the majority of borrowers, it had limitations, particularly for non-governmental private loans and non-mortgage financial obligations. 

The RIHA report indicates that HAF stepped in as either a complement to or a substitute for forbearance. Geographically, HAF funds were concentrated in areas that were more distressed during the pandemic, characterized by higher rates of unemployment and mortgage delinquency.

In Ohio, roughly one-third of homeowners receiving HAF assistance did not have evidence of a traditional mortgage on their credit files. This highlights how the fund successfully reached borrowers with alternative financing structures or those who solely needed non-mortgage expense relief.

Ohio homeowners who received only HAF mortgage assistance were more likely to hold private, non-governmental loans, which frequently fell outside the standard federal loss mitigation mandates that covered government-sponsored enterprises Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and Federal Housing Administration loans.

Despite serving a severely distressed population — many of whom experienced deep, long-lasting income shocks and were already in default prior to receiving HAF relief — the intervention yielded largely successful outcomes. According to the report, more than 80% of HAF-assisted homeowners in the Ohio sample were successfully making their on-time mortgage payments by the end of 2023.

The RIHA researchers concluded that these findings underscore the necessity of targeted assistance programs to supplement standard loss mitigation measures, ensuring long-term housing stability for the market’s most vulnerable participants.

RIHA selected Ohio’s HAF data because it provided a natural experiment for assessing the efficacy of HAF as opposed to forbearance programs. HAF was not available in Ohio until the third quarter of 2021, “well after the peak of forbearance in April 2020,” the researchers explained.