On a single night in January 2025, 7,120 Marylanders had no home. That’s 1,051 more people than the year before — a 17.3 percent increase that ranks among the steepest one-year jumps of any state in the country, trailing only Oregon and North Carolina in raw numbers. While the national homeless count fell 3.4 percent that same year — its first year-over-year drop since 2016 — Maryland moved in the opposite direction, and faster than all but two states.
Zoom out and the reversal looks even starker. Maryland cut its homeless count roughly in half between 2010 and 2022 — from an estimated 10,800-plus people down to 5,349, a 50.7 percent decline, with a 15.9 percent drop in just the two years from 2020 to 2022. That was more than a decade of steady, hard-won progress. The 2024–2025 surge alone — a jump to 7,120 — has already erased roughly a third of it.
“Maryland’s homeless population grew faster than every state in the country except two — while the nation’s, as a whole, shrank.”
The state’s Department of Housing and Community Development did not sit on its hands — or so it says. A DHCD press release from May 2026 claims the department “appropriates $73.4 million for programs through the Department’s Division of Homeless Solutions.” That number doesn’t match the state’s own nonpartisan budget analysts. The Department of Legislative Services — which reviews the governor’s budget line by line for the General Assembly — puts total Division of Homeless Solutions funding at $48.0 million for fiscal 2027, up from $41.7 million in fiscal 2026. That’s a $25.4 million gap between what the agency’s press shop claimed and what DLS’s own fiscal summary shows funded the division. It’s possible DHCD is counting money outside the Homeless Solutions line item — some capital funds or a different accounting boundary — but as written, the two numbers describe the same program in the same year and don’t reconcile. That gap is worth a records request before it goes in print.
What isn’t in dispute: shelter beds, caseworkers, and coordinated-entry systems expanded. Homeless Solutions Program grants alone served more than 12,700 people in fiscal 2025 — a 27 percent jump in demand from fiscal 2024. And homelessness got worse anyway.
“The state says it’s spending $73.4 million on homeless solutions. Its own legislative analysts say the real number is $48 million. Someone’s math is off by $25 million.”
Children paying for it
The sharpest edge of the increase wasn’t single adults sleeping outside — it was families. Statewide, the number of people in homeless families with children rose 36 percent in a single year, adding 695 more people, mostly children, to the count. Nine of Maryland’s ten Continuums of Care reported the increase; three jurisdictions — Montgomery County, Baltimore City, and the rural/suburban Balance of State region — drove most of it. The state’s own CoCs pointed to a familiar list of culprits: a weak job market, the disappearance of affordable childcare, rising rents, and cuts to eviction-prevention funding that used to catch families before they hit the street.
“Nine of Maryland’s ten homeless-services regions reported more families losing housing this year. Statewide, that’s 695 more people — most of them children.”
Baltimore City: up sharply, then an asterisk
Baltimore City’s count told the story in the sharpest terms. The city counted 2,024 homeless residents in January 2025 — a 26.5 percent jump from the year before, and a reversal of a five-year, 12-percent decline the city had managed between 2019 and 2024. That’s not an all-time high — Baltimore counted 2,669 people back in 2017, and the state’s own legislative fiscal analysts describe 2025’s statewide total as merely “the highest level since 2018.” This is a real reversal, not a record — which somehow makes it worse: Baltimore had already been through a worse period once, spent years climbing back out, and just lost most of that ground in a single year.
The composition of who’s showing up is what should worry city officials most. Households with children in the city’s count rose 46 percent — well above even the statewide family-homelessness jump. More than half (52 percent) of unsheltered residents and 37 percent of sheltered residents were experiencing homelessness for the first time, meaning the system isn’t just failing to move people out — it’s failing to keep new people from falling in. Residents 65 and older rose 22 percent, mirroring a national graying of the homeless population. City officials pointed to the same drivers as the state: the end of COVID-era rental protections, the disappearance of pandemic rental assistance, and the rising cost of everything else.
“Households with children in Baltimore’s homeless count rose 46 percent. More than half of unsheltered residents had never been homeless before.”
Then, in 2026, Baltimore reported a decline — down to roughly 1,600 people, a 12 percent drop. It would be a genuinely good story if it held up. It doesn’t, cleanly: a snow and ice storm hit the city during this year’s count window, and the city did not conduct its full unsheltered street canvass as a result, relying instead on shelter and transitional-housing data plus a rough outreach estimate — officials put the strictly-unsheltered figure at roughly 188 people, a number they acknowledge is soft. A count that skips the hardest population to find is not the same instrument that produced last year’s number. The sheltered population — a harder number to fake, since it comes from actual bed counts rather than street canvassing — tells a more consistent story: chronic homelessness, among people with a year or more without housing and a disabling condition, kept climbing 7 percent even where the headline total didn’t. Of everyone counted this year, 230 were children living with a parent.
“The same year Baltimore’s homeless count went down, the city stopped fully counting.”
Nine counties up, one down
HUD’s underlying county-level data — the same raw numbers that roll up into the statewide 17.3 percent figure — shows just how broad the 2025 increase was. Of Maryland’s ten homeless-services regions, nine saw their counts rise. The only exception was Prince George’s County, and as the next section shows, that exception didn’t last.
Balance of State (Allegany, Garrett, Washington, Cecil, Calvert, Charles, St. Mary’s, Harford, Frederick)
1,188
1,295
+9.0%
Prince George’s County
650
588
−9.5%
Montgomery County
1,144
1,510
+32.0%
Maryland total
6,069
7,120
+17.3%
The standout nobody’s covering is the Mid-Shore Regional CoC — Talbot, Caroline, Dorchester, Kent, and Queen Anne’s counties — where the count rose 51 percent, the largest percentage jump of any jurisdiction in the state. It’s a small, rural, low-population-density region, which is exactly why a swing that size draws no headlines even though, proportionally, it outpaces what happened in Baltimore.
The Montgomery-Prince George’s lag, corrected
The most interesting split in the data isn’t between Maryland and the nation — it’s between two adjacent D.C. suburbs, though the timing is more complicated, and more damning, than a simple same-year contrast.
Montgomery County’s count spiked 32 percent in January 2025, to 1,510 people, with family homelessness in the county nearly doubling. The county responded by launching the Short-Term Housing and Resolution Program (SHaRP) to move families into permanent housing faster instead of leaving them in shelter indefinitely. By the 2026 count, Montgomery’s total had fallen by 390 people — a 26 percent drop.
Prince George’s County moved in the opposite direction on a one-year delay. While Montgomery was spiking in 2025, Prince George’s count actually fell 9.5 percent that same year — the only Maryland jurisdiction to post a decline. Then, in 2026, as Montgomery’s numbers dropped, Prince George’s reversed hard and rose 29 percent — 175 more people. The math is suggestive, if not proof: it looks less like simultaneous cross-border displacement and more like a lag, where pressure that built up in Montgomery’s system in 2025 didn’t show up in Prince George’s until the county next door tightened its own shelter pipeline a year later. People priced or pushed out of one county’s system don’t stop being homeless when they cross the county line — they just take a little time to show up in the next jurisdiction’s count.
“Nine of Maryland’s ten homeless-services regions saw their numbers rise in 2025. The tenth didn’t stay down for long.”
The wider Washington-region count — spanning D.C. and eight jurisdictions in Maryland and Virginia — barely moved across the same two years, up about 1 percent to 9,790 people by 2026. That regional flatness sitting on top of two counties’ sharp, opposite-direction swings is exactly what you’d expect if people are cycling between systems rather than actually finding stable housing.
“Montgomery County’s homeless count fell by 390 people in 2026. Prince George’s rose by 175. A year earlier, it ran the other way.”
The bottom line
Strip away the county-level noise and the state-level trend is the bleakest fact in the dataset: Maryland expanded shelter capacity and homeless-services funding across multiple jurisdictions in this period, and finished it with more homeless residents — including hundreds more children — than when it started. Where the numbers do show improvement, as in Montgomery County, the evidence points toward displacement to a neighboring jurisdiction rather than a net reduction. And in the state’s largest city, the “improvement” arrived in the same year the city stopped fully counting.
None of this means the money accomplished nothing — shelter beds and rapid-rehousing placements are not nothing to the families who used them. But the trend line Maryland taxpayers are actually funding is homelessness getting worse, not better, and the counties reporting good news are, so far, the exception rather than the rule.
“Maryland spent more, expanded shelter capacity, and finished the year with more homeless residents than when it started.”
Sources: HUD 2025 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report (AHAR) Part 1; HUD 2007–2025 Point-in-Time Estimates by CoC (raw HDX dataset); HUD 2025 CoC Homeless Populations and Subpopulations Report – Maryland; Baltimore City Mayor’s Office of Homeless Services 2025 PIT Count Report; WYPR reporting on the 2026 Baltimore count; Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments 2026 Point-in-Time Count (via WTOP); Montgomery County press release, May 2026; Maryland Department of Housing and Community Development budget press release, May 2026; Department of Legislative Services, “Analysis of the FY 2027 Maryland Executive Budget” — S00A Department of Housing and Community Development, 2026; Health Care for the Homeless (Baltimore/Maryland) historical PIT figures; HUD Office of Policy Development and Research 2022 state data (via Patch).
Note: all county/CoC-level 2024–2025 figures in this piece are drawn directly from HUD’s official CoC-level dataset and independently sum to the state’s official total (7,120), confirming consistency across sources.
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