Veterans Affairs houses largest number of homeless vets in seven years

The Department of Veterans Affairs, including locally the VA Lebanon Healthcare System, permanently housed 51,936 homeless veterans in the United States in 2025, up 4,011 from the previous year.

The national numbers include 463 permanently housed by the VA Lebanon Healthcare System, according to a release from chief communications officer Doug Etter.

This is VA’s best national performance since it began tracking the number of individual veterans permanently housed instead of the total number of permanent housing placements to ensure a more accurate count of the number of veterans helped, the release states.

According to the release, the VA began using the new methodology in 2022 and applied that formula retroactively to 2019. The chart below demonstrates the national trend over seven years.

Veterans Affairs launched the Getting Veterans Off the Street initiative in May 2025, requiring every VA health care system in the country to host “dedicated outreach surge events,” the release said, to locate unsheltered veterans and offer them immediate access to housing programs, health care, behavioral health services, and VA benefits. The program helped move 25,065 unsheltered veterans to interim (emergency and transition) or permanent housing, the release said.

“This is life-changing and in many cases life-saving work,” said VA Lebanon Medical Center director Jeffrey A. Beiler II. “We are proud of the progress VA Lebanon Healthcare System is making to get Veterans off the streets and are redoubling our efforts to continue this momentum moving forward.”

Visit VA.gov/homeless to learn about housing initiatives and other programs supporting homeless veterans.