Words the Agencies Use

Point-in-time count

Often shortened to PIT

A census of one night. Every region that takes federal homeless-assistance money has to count the people who are homeless on a single night and report the result to the federal housing department. Volunteers walk assigned areas, and shelters report who slept there. It reaches people in three situations: emergency shelter, transitional housing, and a place not meant for sleeping. A hotel or motel room paid for by a government program or a charity is counted too, as emergency shelter rather than as a fourth situation. It does not reach families staying with other people.

24 CFR 578.7(c)(2) requires the count at least every other year, and sets what must be recorded as sheltered and as unsheltered. It leaves the rest to HUD, whose annual notice is what fixes the count on a night in the last ten days of January.

Continuum of Care

Often shortened to CoC. We usually call it a region.

The regional body that plans homeless services and applies for federal money on behalf of everyone in its area. HUD counted 386 of them in the country in 2025, and twelve are in North Carolina. Buncombe County is its own, the Asheville-Buncombe Continuum of Care. The Continuum runs the point-in-time count, keeps the local data system, and files one application covering all the projects in its area.

Established by 24 CFR part 578. The national count is HUD's 2025 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report, which says "386 CoCs covered virtually the entire United States"; the twelve North Carolina Continuums are the NC Coalition to End Homelessness's figure.

Balance of State

The Continuum of Care that covers everywhere in a state not already covered by a local one. North Carolina's takes in 79 of the state's 100 counties, including most of the mountains outside Buncombe. The name reads like a common phrase and is a proper name.

NC Coalition to End Homelessness: the NC Balance of State CoC is one of twelve in the state, "representing 79 out of 100 counties in the state."

Annual Homelessness Assessment Report

Often shortened to AHAR

The federal housing department's yearly report to Congress on homelessness. Part 1 carries the point-in-time count results. It has usually been published about eleven months after the January it describes.

HUD USER publishes it as "Part 1 - PIT Estimates of Homelessness in the U.S." The eleven-month lag is the observed publication pattern, not a rule.

Housing Inventory Count

The companion to the point-in-time count. Instead of counting people, it counts beds: how many emergency shelter, transitional housing and permanent housing beds a region has, and how many are set aside for particular groups such as families or veterans.

HUD Exchange, PIT and HIC data since 2007, which describes the pair as reporting "the capacity to house homeless persons" alongside the count of people.

Homeless Management Information System

Often shortened to HMIS

The shared database local homeless-services agencies use to record who they served. Every region is required to run exactly one of them, and to name an agency to manage it.

24 CFR 578.7(b): the Continuum of Care must "Designate a single Homeless Management Information System (HMIS) for the geographic area" and designate an HMIS Lead to manage it.

EDFacts

The federal education department's system for collecting data reported by states, including the number of students each school district identified as homeless. EDFacts is the collection, not a publication. The district-by-district figures reach the public through Ed Data Express, and in North Carolina the state homeless education program holds them as well.

U.S. Department of Education, Ed Data Express: it exists to "improve the public's ability to access and explore high-value state- and district-level education data collected by the U.S. Department of Education."

McKinney-Vento Act

The federal law that gives homeless children the right to stay in one school. Its education provisions use a wider definition of homelessness than the housing department does, and the statute's own term for the children it covers is "homeless children and youths." A child is covered if they lack a fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence. The definition then names the situations it includes, among them sharing the housing of other people because of loss of housing or economic hardship, and living in a motel for lack of anywhere adequate to go. Schools identify these students across the whole school year.

Definition at 42 U.S.C. 11434a(2); the rights are at 42 U.S.C. 11432.

Doubled up

The statute's phrase is "sharing the housing of other persons due to loss of housing, economic hardship, or a similar reason." The reason is part of the test, not a detail. A child living with grandparents because that is the family's arrangement is not covered. A child living with grandparents because the family lost its apartment is. Districts decide case by case, and the question they have to answer is whether the arrangement is a fixed, regular and adequate nighttime residence.

About three in four students schools identify as homeless are in this situation. The point-in-time count does not include any of them, which is the main reason the two counts differ so much.

42 U.S.C. 11434a(2)(B)(i). The case-by-case instruction is the Department of Education's, in its data guidance for this collection.

Unsheltered

Sleeping in a place not meant for sleeping. Outside, in a car, in a tent, or in a building nobody lives in. That is the housing department's meaning, and it is the one the one-night count uses. The count schools run uses the same word for something wider; see unsheltered, the school-count sense.

24 CFR 578.3, the homeless definition's second category: a "public or private place not designed for or ordinarily used as a regular sleeping accommodation for human beings, including a car, park, abandoned building, bus or train station, airport, or camping ground."

Unsheltered, the school-count sense

The same word, doing wider work, in the count schools run. Here it covers cars and tents, and also campgrounds, temporary trailers and substandard housing. So a family still living in a house that is no longer fit to live in belongs in the school count's unsheltered row, and outside the housing department's category entirely. That is not a technicality: after Helene it is a large part of what the row means in the mountain districts.

Whether a home counts as substandard is decided case by case by the school district. Federal guidance says a district may weigh whether the place lacks water, electricity or heat, is infested with vermin or mold, has no working kitchen or working toilet, or presents unreasonable dangers, and local building codes count too. When you read an unsheltered figure, check which count it came from.

42 U.S.C. 11434a(2)(B)(iii), which lists "cars, parks, public spaces, abandoned buildings, substandard housing, bus or train stations, or similar settings." The NC Homeless Education Program's own description of the category adds that it takes in "temporary trailers and campgrounds due to inadequate alternative housing," and its data guide tells district staff that "Cases of 'substandard housing' are included in the 'unsheltered' category." The National Center for Homeless Education repeats the mapping for this collection in May 2025. The substandard criteria are the U.S. Department of Education's, in its non-regulatory guidance for the program, and are offered as things a district "may consider" rather than as a test.

Emergency shelter

Short-term shelter, usually night to night or for a set number of days. The federal housing department's definition of homelessness covers anyone in a supervised shelter providing temporary living arrangements, and it says in the same breath that this includes hotels and motels paid for by charities or by government programs for low-income people. That is why a disaster voucher program can move a region's count sharply.

24 CFR 578.3, definition of "homeless," paragraph (1)(ii).

Transitional housing

Housing offered for a limited period as a step toward permanent housing. Every participant signs a lease or occupancy agreement of at least one month, and that agreement has to end within 24 months and cannot be extended.

24 CFR 578.3.

Safe haven

A narrow federal category that exists mainly to decide who counts as chronically homeless. It is supportive housing that serves hard-to-reach homeless people with severe mental illness who came from the streets and have been unwilling or unable to take part in supportive services; provides 24-hour residence for an unspecified period; holds 25 or fewer people overnight; and offers low-demand services and referrals. Time in one counts toward the chronic-homelessness clock, which is why the term appears in the definition at all.

24 CFR 578.3.

Chronically homeless

A federal category, not a description. There are three ways to meet it.

The first is for a person the McKinney-Vento Act calls a "homeless individual with a disability". That is a defined term in its own right, and this section does not restate it. Two further things then have to be true at once. The person has to be living now in an emergency shelter, a safe haven, or a place not meant for human habitation. That list is closed, and transitional housing is not on it. And the person has to have been homeless, and living in one of those three places, either continuously for at least 12 months or on at least four separate occasions in the last three years that add up to at least 12 months. On the four-occasions route, each break between the occasions has to include at least seven nights in a row of not living that way. Time in transitional housing does not count toward those 12 months. The same federal rule still treats transitional housing as homelessness; it is just not one of the three places this test reaches. Time doubled up in someone else's home does not count either.

A stay of fewer than 90 days in an institutional care facility, such as a jail, a hospital, or a treatment facility, does not break the run, and those days count toward the 12 months. Both of those hold only if the person was in an emergency shelter, a safe haven, or a place not meant for human habitation immediately before going in.

The second way is for a person who is in one of those facilities now, has been there fewer than 90 days, and met the whole of the first test before going in.

The third is for a family, which qualifies when the head of the household meets the first or second test. The head is an adult, or a minor if the family has no adult, and a family whose makeup changed while the head was homeless still counts.

Some permanent supportive housing beds are dedicated to people who meet it. A bed counts as dedicated when the Continuum of Care's housing inventory count and its permanent housing project applications record it that way. When a tenant in one of those beds leaves the project, the next one has to meet the test too, unless nobody in that Continuum of Care's area does. Watch the word dedicated. A DedicatedPLUS project also has all its beds dedicated, to a named group of individuals, households with children and unaccompanied youth including pregnant and parenting youth, and it admits people through six doors of which this test is only one. Every admission has to come through one of those six, so those beds are constrained too, just through a wider door. The exception above, for a region where nobody qualifies, belongs to the other rule.

North Carolina's SNAP manual uses the same phrase for something different: no disability requirement, no length of time attached, and an open list of places rather than a closed one; see chronic homelessness, the North Carolina SNAP sense.

24 CFR 578.3. The disability element is the McKinney-Vento Act's "homeless individual with a disability", section 401(9), which is not in our files. The dedicated-bed rule is HUD's Continuum of Care notice of funding opportunity for FY2024 and FY2025, FR-6800-N-25, which says the concept applies only to permanent supportive housing projects. The North Carolina comparison is NC FNS 260, section 260.01.

Unaccompanied youth

A homeless child or youth not in the physical custody of a parent or guardian. In school reporting they are part of the identified-student total, not an addition to it.

42 U.S.C. 11434a(6).

School of origin

The school a child attended before losing housing. Under McKinney-Vento a district has to keep the child there when that is in the child's best interest, and has to provide transportation to it when a parent asks.

42 U.S.C. 11432(g)(3), which requires a district to "continue the child's or youth's education in the school of origin for the duration of homelessness" where that is in the child's best interest, and to arrange the transportation.

Housing First

An approach that offers permanent housing without first requiring sobriety, treatment or program compliance, on the reasoning that housing is what makes the rest possible. Services are offered rather than required. Federal policy has moved back and forth on it.

Permanent supportive housing

Often shortened to PSH

Permanent housing with support services attached and no time limit. Usually aimed at people with disabilities who have been homeless a long time.

24 CFR 578.3: "Permanent supportive housing means permanent housing in which supportive services are provided to assist homeless persons with a disability to live independently."

Rapid re-housing

Short-term rental help plus housing search assistance, meant to move a household out of shelter quickly. Distinct from permanent supportive housing, which does not end.

24 CFR 576.104, which pairs "housing relocation and stabilization services and short- and/or medium-term rental assistance" to move a household out of homelessness quickly.

Public housing

Rental housing owned and operated by a local housing authority. What a household pays is called the total tenant payment, and it is not simply 30 percent of income. It is the highest of five amounts: 30 percent of monthly adjusted income, 10 percent of monthly income, the household's welfare rent where that applies, the minimum rent the housing authority has set, and in public housing an alternative rent the authority may charge instead. Adjusted income is income after deductions, so it is lower than what a household earns. In Asheville the authority is the Housing Authority of the City of Asheville.

24 CFR 5.628, which governs public housing and vouchers alike.

Operating Fund and Capital Fund

The two streams of federal money for public housing. HUD passes both to local housing authorities. The Operating Fund pays to run the buildings, which covers routine preventive maintenance, security and day to day management. The Capital Fund pays to fix and rebuild them, and reaches modernization, deferred maintenance, and demolition and replacement as well as ordinary repair.

42 U.S.C. 1437g(e) for the Operating Fund, 1437g(d) for the Capital Fund.

Housing Choice Voucher

Still widely called Section 8

A subsidy a household takes to a private landlord. The household pays its total tenant payment, calculated the same way as in public housing, and the voucher covers the rest up to a local limit called the payment standard, which the housing authority sets against HUD's Fair Market Rent for the area.

24 CFR 5.628 for the payment; 24 CFR 982.503(a)(2) for the payment standard; 24 CFR part 982 for the program.

Project-based Section 8

Formally, project-based rental assistance, or PBRA

A rent subsidy that belongs to a building rather than to a household. The owner signs a housing assistance payments contract, known as a HAP contract, and agrees to rent the units under it to low-income tenants. The owner is paid the difference between the rent the contract sets and what the tenant pays. The contract covers the units and not any particular tenant, so a household that moves out does not take the help with it. On the other side of that contract is HUD, a local housing authority, or a state housing agency.

Two other things carry similar names and are not this. A Housing Choice Voucher is tenant-based. The household picks the unit, and when the household leaves, the contract on that unit ends. A project-based voucher sits between the two. A housing authority takes part of its own voucher money and attaches it to particular units. The subsidy stays with the unit, as it does under project-based Section 8, but the household keeps a way out. After a year the household can end the lease, and the authority must then offer it tenant-based help instead.

24 CFR 982.1(b) for the split between tenant-based and project-based; 24 CFR 880.101 and 880.201 for the program and its contract; 24 CFR 883.101 for the state-agency version; 24 CFR 983.5 and 983.261 for project-based vouchers.

Community Development Block Grant

Often shortened to CDBG. CDBG-DR is the disaster-recovery version.

A flexible federal grant to cities and counties for housing and community development. Its formula also decides most of how federal homeless-assistance money is divided between regions: preliminary pro rata need goes two percent to the insular areas, then 75 percent of what remains by the CDBG formula to the cities and urban counties that have had Emergency Solutions Grants money at some point since 2004, and the rest by the same formula to everywhere else. That is why a region's point-in-time count is not what sets its share.

24 CFR 578.17(a)(3).

FEMA rental assistance

Rent help

Money from the Federal Emergency Management Agency that helps survivors a disaster has displaced cover the cost of rent for a time. After Helene, the first period for this help in North Carolina was set to end on March 29, 2026. In March 2026, FEMA extended it through September 30, 2026, for survivors who were already receiving it, as needed.

FEMA, “FEMA Approves Six-Month Extension of Direct Housing and Rental Assistance for Helene Survivors,” March 16, 2026: North Carolina requested an extension of rental assistance “to help displaced survivors temporarily cover the cost of rent”; “The original 18-month financial assistance period was scheduled to end March 29, 2026”; “The rental assistance extension allows survivors receiving rental assistance to continue receiving financial support to cover the cost of rent through September 30, 2026, as needed.”

Emergency Solutions Grants

Federal money for five things, each its own component in the regulation: street outreach, emergency shelter, homelessness prevention, rapid re-housing, and the local data system. Separate from the Continuum of Care grants that fund longer-term housing.

24 CFR 576.101 through 576.107.

Low-Income Housing Tax Credit

Often shortened to LIHTC, said "lie-tech"

The main way affordable apartments get built in this country. Developers receive tax credits and in exchange the rents are restricted. A unit is rent-restricted when its gross rent does not exceed 30 percent of the income limit assigned to that unit, and the project has to meet one of three tests, the common ones being at least a fifth of units at 50 percent of area median income or at least two fifths at 60 percent. Because the cap follows the income limit rather than the tenant's own income, this produces housing affordable to people earning a share of the area median, which is usually well above what someone leaving homelessness can pay.

26 U.S.C. 42(g)(1) for the tests, 42(g)(2)(A) for the rent restriction.

Notice of Funding Opportunity

Often shortened to NOFO

The document that opens a federal grant competition and sets out how applications will be scored. The homeless-assistance one is where the scoring criteria a region has to satisfy actually live, and they change from year to year.

HUD, FY2024-FY2025 Continuum of Care and YHDP Notice of Funding Opportunity, FR-6800-N-25.

Coordinated Entry

The single front door a region is required to run, so that someone seeking help is assessed once and referred to whatever is available, rather than applying separately to every agency. The regulation calls it a centralized or coordinated assessment system, and requires a separate written policy for people fleeing domestic violence.

24 CFR 578.7(a)(8).

SNAP

Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Still called food stamps.

The federal food-assistance program. Benefits load monthly onto a card and can be spent on groceries. The main rules are federal, and states decide a good deal within them. The office you deal with is a county one, because in North Carolina the counties administer SNAP for the state.

Washington has paid for the food and, through September 2026, split the cost of running the program with the states. The 2025 budget law changes both halves. The federal share of administrative cost falls from half to a quarter on October 1, 2026. And from October 1, 2027, a state whose payment error rate is 6 percent or higher pays a share of the benefits too, which North Carolina's 2026 budget recovers from its counties by withholding sales-tax distributions.

7 U.S.C. 2025(a) for the administrative match. The benefit cost share and its error-rate tiers are in the 2025 budget law, P.L. 119-21; North Carolina's withholding from county sales-tax distributions is Session Law 2026-41 (Senate Bill 257), Section 9J.14, which enacts G.S. 108A-52.2.

EBT

Electronic Benefit Transfer

The card SNAP benefits are loaded onto, and the system behind it.

Food and Nutrition Service

Often shortened to FNS. North Carolina calls SNAP itself Food and Nutrition Services.

The agency inside the U.S. Department of Agriculture that runs SNAP nationally. The similar state name is a genuine trap: in North Carolina, FNS usually means the benefit, not the federal agency.

ABAWD

Able-Bodied Adult Without Dependents

A SNAP category, not a medical judgment. In North Carolina it covers applicants and recipients aged 18 to 64. An adult in it can receive benefits for no more than three countable months in any three-year period. A month counts only if the person drew a full month of benefits while not exempt, not covered by a waiver, and not meeting the work requirement. So months spent working or exempt do not use up the three, and neither does a first part-month, which is prorated. Those three need not be consecutive. Someone who regains eligibility and then stops meeting the hours again can draw three more, consecutive this time, once in that period.

The state chooses whether that three-year period runs on a fixed clock or a rolling one. North Carolina uses a fixed clock, currently January 1, 2025 through December 31, 2027, so someone who spent their three months in 2025 waits until January 1, 2028.

The 2025 budget law rewrote who is in the category. The age exemption moved from 55 and older to 65 and older, so adults aged 55 through 64 are now covered. The exemption for living with a child moved from a child under 18 to a child under 14. The exemptions for veterans, people experiencing homelessness, and former foster youth, added in 2023, were repealed. Exemptions were added for Indians, Urban Indians and California Indians.

7 CFR 273.24(b) for the three-month rule, (b)(1) for what makes a month countable, (b)(3) for the state's choice between a fixed and a rolling clock, and (e) for the additional three months: “An individual who regained eligibility under paragraph (d) of this section and who is no longer fulfilling the work requirement … is eligible for a period of three consecutive countable months.” NC FNS 260 sec. 260.05.B says the same of bonus months. The regulation as published still carries the pre-2025 age limit and the repealed exemptions, so the 2025 changes are cited to the law itself, P.L. 119-21, as North Carolina implements them in its Food and Nutrition Services Manual, FNS 260, Change #02-2025, effective December 1, 2025.

Categorical eligibility

A rule that lets a household count as eligible for SNAP because it already receives, or is authorized to receive, benefits from another assistance program, without the usual income and asset tests being applied separately. On the main route, cash assistance or SSI, every member of the household has to be a recipient. Which programs confer it is set by rule, and a state may ask the federal agency to rule on one that is not already listed.

7 CFR 273.2(j).

Food insecurity

A measured condition, not a synonym for hunger. It means a household lacked consistent access to enough food for an active, healthy life at some point in the year. It is measured by survey rather than by counting who asked for help, so it covers people who never used a food pantry and never applied for SNAP.

The yearly report that measured it for thirty years is gone. On September 20, 2025 the USDA announced the termination of future Household Food Security Reports, calling them redundant. The report covering 2024 is the most recent, and no further editions are planned. The Census Bureau still asks a shorter set of questions about whether a household had enough to eat, and still publishes them, but it is a different instrument and its answers cannot be lined up against the thirty-year series.

USDA press release, "USDA Terminates Redundant Food Insecurity Survey", September 20, 2025. The 2024 report is the most recent listed by USDA's Economic Research Service. The continuing shorter questions are the Census Bureau's Household Trends and Outlook Pulse Survey.

Thrifty Food Plan

The government's estimate of what a week of groceries costs for a healthy diet on a tight budget. It is not advice about what to eat. It sets the maximum SNAP benefit, so the plan's cost is the ceiling on what any household can receive. It is adjusted each October for what food cost the previous June. The 2021 re-evaluation raised it about 21 percent, the first increase beyond inflation in about forty-five years, and the 2025 budget law bars any future re-evaluation from raising what the plan costs.

7 U.S.C. 2012(u), as amended by P.L. 119-21: "The Secretary shall not increase the cost of the thrifty food plan based on a re-evaluation under this paragraph."

SNAP household

Not everyone under one roof

The people who buy and prepare food together. Two people sharing a kitchen but shopping separately can be two SNAP households at one address. Three rules override the food test, whether or not the people share food: spouses are one household, so is a person under 22 living with a parent or step-parent, and so is a child under 18 who lives under the parental control of an adult who is not their parent.

The distinction decides real things. The work-rule exemption for living with a child under 14 turns on being in the same SNAP household as that child, so someone on a friend's couch buying their own groceries is a household of one and the friend's children do not exempt them.

7 CFR 273.1.

Net income and deductions

How the monthly benefit is figured. SNAP subtracts certain allowed costs from a household's income to reach its net income, then pays the maximum allotment for the household's size minus 30 percent of that net income. Two things follow. Only a household with no net income receives the maximum. And narrowing a deduction trims benefits without touching the income limits, which is how the 2025 law lowered monthly amounts without moving a single threshold. It can still cost a household its eligibility, because net income is itself a test for any household that is not categorically eligible, and a smaller deduction raises net income against a limit that never moved.

7 CFR 273.10(e): "the household's monthly allotment shall be equal to the maximum SNAP allotment for the household's size reduced by 30 percent of the household's net monthly income."

Standard utility allowance

Often shortened to SUA

A flat figure a state uses for a household's heating, cooling and utility costs instead of adding up the actual bills. It matters because utility costs feed the shelter deduction, so a larger allowance means a larger deduction and a larger benefit. Receiving heating assistance of more than twenty dollars a year used to qualify a household for the higher heating-and-cooling figure automatically. The 2025 law limited that to households with an older or disabled member.

7 CFR 273.9(d)(6)(iii)(D)(3) for the heating-assistance route and its twenty-dollar floor. 7 U.S.C. 2014(e)(6)(C)(iv)(I), amended by P.L. 119-21 to insert "with an elderly or disabled member" after "households."

Shelter deduction

Formally the excess shelter expense deduction

The part of a household's shelter costs that can be subtracted from its income when the benefit is figured. The regulation allows five kinds and no others: rent or mortgage and other continuing charges toward ownership; property taxes, state and local assessments, and insurance on the building but not its contents; utilities; the cost of a home left empty for a time because of work or training away from home, illness, or a disaster; and repairs after a disaster that nobody reimburses. Only the amount above half of what is left after the other deductions counts, which is what "excess" means. A household with no older adult and no disabled member also runs into a ceiling on the deduction, set for the area and adjusted each year. The 2025 law removed internet service fees from what may be counted in it.

7 CFR 273.9(d)(6)(ii): "Monthly shelter expenses in excess of 50 percent of the household's income after all other deductions." The same paragraph caps it: "If the household does not contain an elderly or disabled member ... the shelter deduction cannot exceed the maximum shelter deduction limit established for the area." The list itself is closed by the same paragraph: “Only the following expenses are allowable shelter expenses…” P.L. 119-21 sec. 10104 excludes internet service fees.

Recertification

The fixed stretch of time is the certification period

SNAP is approved for a set period, and at the end of it a household has to apply again, interview again, and prove its circumstances again. Nothing renews on its own. Households are normally given at least six months, but a household containing an adult under the work-rule time limit is carved out of that floor and given a period matched to its circumstances.

7 CFR 273.14 for the process; 7 CFR 273.10(f) for the periods.

Household Food Security Report

The USDA's yearly measurement of how many households could not consistently afford enough food, published for thirty years and built on questions the Census Bureau asked every December. It is the series that long-run claims about American hunger rest on. On September 20, 2025 the USDA announced the termination of future editions, calling them redundant. The report covering 2024 is the most recent. The Census Bureau still asks a shorter set of questions and still publishes them, but it is a different instrument.

USDA press release, "USDA Terminates Redundant Food Insecurity Survey," September 20, 2025.

The three-year window, and bonus months

The three countable months an adult under the work rule may use are counted inside a three-year window, and the state decides whether that window is fixed or rolling. North Carolina's is fixed: January 1, 2025 through December 31, 2027. Someone who used their three months in 2025 waits for the next window to open on January 1, 2028, unless they meet the hours or qualify for an exemption first.

Separately, a person who regained eligibility and then stops meeting the hours can draw three more consecutive months, once per window. Those are called bonus months. The three start on the date the person tells the agency they are no longer meeting the requirement, unless they had been in a work or workfare program, in which case they start when the agency tells them.

7 CFR 273.24(b)(3) leaves the choice of clock to the state; NC FNS 260 section 260.03 sets the current fixed window, and the same manual sets the bonus months at section 260.05.B, including their start dates. 7 CFR 273.24(e) is the federal text: the three run “starting on the date the individual first notifies the State agency that he or she is no longer fulfilling the work requirement, unless the individual has been satisfying the work requirement by participating in a work or workfare program, in which case the period starts on the date the State agency notifies the individual.”

Good cause

A month in which someone was meeting the hours and then missed some of them does not automatically count against the three. If something outside the person's control got in the way, and the absence was temporary, the month is not supposed to count. The rule gives examples rather than a closed list: the person's own illness, an illness in the household needing their presence, a household emergency, no transportation. North Carolina adds child care falling through, and tells its caseworkers to apply good cause liberally.

7 CFR 273.24(b)(2); NC FNS 260 section 260.04.D.

Self-attestation

Your own word, given as verification

When someone claims an exemption from the SNAP work rule, North Carolina's manual says self-attestation must be accepted unless it is questionable. The one exemption it does not reach is receiving disability benefits, which still has to be shown some other way. It also bars a verification standard that singles out a group of claimants, such as requiring every time-limited participant to prove an exemption, or treating every self-attestation as questionable. Being believed is not the same as being found exempt. The caseworker still decides whether what you describe meets the standard.

NC FNS 260 section 260.01.A.1: "Self-attestation must be accepted for verification of ABAWD exemptions, unless questionable." The disability-benefit exception is at 260.01.A.1.b, the bar on group-wide verification standards at 260.01.A.1.a. The federal regulation the manual builds on, 7 CFR 273.24(l), goes only this far: where a claim is questionable the agency must first try the information it already holds before asking the household for documents.

Obviously unfit for work

SNAP has never applied its work rule to a person who cannot work, and the 2025 law kept that exemption. What makes it reachable is the "obviously unfit" finding. When the barrier is plain to the caseworker, no medical documentation may be requested. When it is not plain, a short statement is needed, and it has to come from someone on the state's list of acceptable sources. The statement needs no letterhead and no particular wording, and can be given by phone. Whether a condition prevents twenty hours of work a week is the caseworker's judgment.

NC FNS 260: "When unfitness is obvious, workers must not request medical documentation."

Chronic homelessness, the North Carolina SNAP sense

The same phrase the federal housing department uses, meaning something different, in the document that decides SNAP cases here. North Carolina's manual defines a person experiencing chronic homelessness as someone who lacks a fixed and regular nighttime residence, and gives examples rather than a closed list: shelters, outdoor and makeshift places, vehicles, RVs without utilities, and any other place not designed or ordinarily used for sleeping, including anywhere with no toilet or no way to keep clean. There is no disability requirement and no length of time attached, which is what separates it from the housing department's meaning at chronically homeless.

The manual then lets this homelessness establish that a person is obviously unfit for work, when the housing situation is what keeps them from working twenty hours a week. That is how a homeless adult can still be exempt after the 2025 law repealed the exemption written for them. A couch in someone else's home and a paid motel room are not named, and whether either one counts is left to the caseworker.

NC FNS 260 section 260.01: "A person experiencing chronic homelessness is an individual who lacks a fixed and regular nighttime residence."

Area waiver

Of the SNAP three-month time limit

A state could ask Washington to suspend the three-month time limit across a whole area, on the ground that the area did not have enough jobs to go around. The 2025 law struck that ground, leaving, outside Alaska and Hawaii, only an area unemployment rate above 10 percent. The waiver never depended on anything about the individual, which is why removing it reached people no change to the exemptions touched.

USDA FNS implementation guidance on the 2025 law: "The OBBB removed the criterion allowing for approval of waivers for areas where States identify that there is a lack of sufficient jobs."

One Big Beautiful Bill Act

H.R. 1, signed July 4, 2025. Public Law 119-21. We usually call it the 2025 budget law

Its nutrition subtitle cut about $187 billion over ten years, by the Congressional Budget Office's estimate, close to a fifth of the program. It is the source of nearly every SNAP change described on this site: the wider work rules, the narrowed exemptions, the two shrunken deductions, the cap on future Thrifty Food Plan increases, the narrowed eligibility for noncitizens, and both cost shifts onto states and counties.

P.L. 119-21. NC FNS 260 records the signing: "On July 4, 2025, H.R. 1, the One Big Beautiful Bill Act of 2025 (OBBB) was signed into law." The $187 billion is the Congressional Budget Office's estimate of the law's nutrition subtitle over federal fiscal years 2025 through 2034, reported by the Congressional Research Service in R48552; that subtitle is the SNAP provisions plus a small Emergency Food Assistance Program grant. The share of the program is the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities' figure of about 20 percent through 2034.

Farm bill

The multi-year law that reauthorizes agriculture and nutrition programs together, SNAP among them. It is the vehicle most SNAP changes ride, so the timing of the next one usually sets when a change can be revisited.

Payment error rate

How often a state paid a household the wrong amount, too much or too little. It is not a fraud measure. It counts bookkeeping: a figure keyed wrong, an income change reported late. It is an estimate rather than a count, drawn from a sample of cases each year and published with a margin of error. And it counts only money paid to households that received benefits, so an eligible applicant a state wrongly turned away never enters this score. USDA measures those separately, in a case and procedural error rate that the new cost share does not use.

From October 1, 2027 the rate also sets what a state pays toward benefits: nothing below 6 percent, then 5, 10 and 15 percent of its food bill as the rate reaches 6, 8 and 10 percent.

7 CFR 275.12 for the sample; USDA FNS, SNAP Payment Error Rates, for what it measures; USDA FNS, SNAP Efficiency and Effectiveness Measures, for the separate case and procedural error rate; P.L. 119-21 for the tiers.

Administrative cost share

Washington and the states split the cost of running SNAP, the caseworkers, the computer systems and the phone lines, half and half through September 2026. From October 1, 2026 the federal share is a quarter. This is separate from the benefit cost share that starts a year later and is set by the payment error rate. Where counties run SNAP, as they do in North Carolina, most of the extra quarter lands on county budgets, and a smaller part on the state's.

7 U.S.C. 2025(a), as amended by P.L. 119-21: "through fiscal year 2026, 50 percent, and for fiscal year 2027 and each fiscal year thereafter, 25 percent." The split between county and state budgets in North Carolina is in Who Pays for SNAP Now, from state health officials' January 2026 presentation to the Joint Legislative Oversight Committee on Health and Human Services.

Churn

A household losing SNAP and reapplying soon after, usually over a missed form rather than a change in income. The case shows as closed and then newly opened rather than as continuous, and the household goes without food money in between.

Area median income

Often shortened to AMI

The midpoint income for a metropolitan area, set each year by the federal housing department and adjusted for household size. Affordable housing is usually described as a percentage of it, as in "60 percent of AMI." Because the figure covers the whole metro area, it can sit well above what local service-sector work pays.

24 CFR 5.603 defines the thresholds against the "median income for the area, as determined by HUD, with adjustments for smaller and larger families."

Fair Market Rent

Often shortened to FMR

The federal housing department's yearly estimate of what a modest local apartment rents for, counting rent plus utilities other than telephone. It sets the ceiling for voucher subsidies, so when it lags the real market, voucher holders cannot find a unit.

24 CFR 888.113: "Fair Market Rents (FMRs) are estimates of rent plus the cost of utilities, except telephone."

Housing wage

What someone would have to earn per hour, working full time, to afford a local apartment at Fair Market Rent without spending more than 30 percent of income on it. Published each year by the National Low Income Housing Coalition.

National Low Income Housing Coalition, Out of Reach, published annually.

Cost-burdened

Spending more than 30 percent of household income on housing. Severely cost-burdened means more than 50 percent.

The 30 and 50 percent thresholds are the federal affordability standard, and are how the Census Bureau tabulates rent burden in American Community Survey table B25070.

Federal poverty level

An income threshold published each year and used to decide eligibility for many programs. There is one table for the 48 contiguous states and the District of Columbia and separate, higher ones for Alaska and Hawaii. Below that it does not vary by local housing cost, which is why a household can be above it and still unable to make rent here.

HHS poverty guidelines, which publish a table for "THE 48 CONTIGUOUS STATES AND THE DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA" and separate tables for Alaska and Hawaii.

Single-room occupancy

Often shortened to SRO

A single rented room, usually with shared bathroom and kitchen. For most of the twentieth century it was the cheapest housing in American cities. Most of it is gone.

Average daily population

Often shortened to ADP

The average number of people held in a jail on a given day over some stretch of time. The stretch is the whole question: a figure "as of" one date and a year-to-date figure can differ by dozens of people and both be correct, so a number is only usable with the window attached. Buncombe County publishes a figure on a public dashboard; it released no written definition of the window that dashboard uses. The county's contract for inmate health care defines its own monthly version for billing, as a count taken at the same time each day, summed and divided by the days in the month.

Buncombe County jail dashboard (no written definition released under public records request 26-1247); the monthly definition is from the county's agreement for inmate health care effective July 1, 2026, released under the same request.

Presumed unhoused

Buncombe County's own measure of how many people booked into its jail have nowhere to live. It is an address test, not a judgment: a booking counts if the address on file is the AHOPE Day Center on North Ann Street or the jail itself on Davidson Drive. The county's page notes that people can also be flagged "homeless" in the jail system, but says an address is often the more reliable indicator. The test counts bookings rather than people, and it cannot see anyone who gives a relative's address.

Buncombe County, "Justice Involved Populations / Housing Status," November 2025, released under public records request 26-1247.

Asheville-Buncombe Continuum of Care

The Continuum of Care covering Buncombe County, coded NC-501 in federal data. It runs the county's point-in-time count and publishes the local results.

HUD Exchange per-CoC reporting lists the code as "Asheville/Buncombe County CoC" under NC-501.

North Carolina Homeless Education Program

Often shortened to NCHEP

The state office that supports school districts in identifying and serving homeless students, run out of UNC Greensboro for the state education department. It holds the district-level counts and publishes a statewide total.

Housing Authority of the City of Asheville

Often shortened to HACA

The public agency that owns and runs Asheville's public housing and administers its Housing Choice Vouchers.

Code Purple

The local cold-weather protocol. When temperatures are forecast to fall to a set threshold, shelters expand capacity and admission rules relax for the night.

North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services

Often shortened to NCDHHS

The state agency that writes the policy the counties administer, so it is the author of the manuals that decide SNAP and Medicaid cases here. It also publishes the county-by-county enrollment figures.

County Department of Social Services

Often shortened to DSS

The county office that takes SNAP applications, decides who qualifies, and manages cases. North Carolina is state-supervised and county-administered: the state agency stays legally responsible for certifying households and issuing benefits, and county administration does not shift that responsibility. In practice the person deciding your case works for the county, and the data they enter becomes the state's payment error rate.

7 U.S.C. 2020(a): "The State agency of each participating State shall have responsibility for certifying applicant households and issuing EBT cards." Local administration does not shift that responsibility, at 2020(a)(2).

FNS 260

Section 260 of North Carolina's Food and Nutrition Services Manual

The document county caseworkers work from on the SNAP work rule and its exemptions. Federal law and regulation set the floor; the manual says how North Carolina administers it, and on several points it is more permissive than the phrase "work requirement" suggests. Change #02-2025, effective December 1, 2025, is the revision that implements the 2025 law.

NC FNS 260, Change #02-2025.

Revenue hour

The federal term is vehicle revenue hours, often shortened to VRH

One hour a bus spends in revenue service, meaning out on its route and available to riders. The federal count includes layover and recovery time, the short wait at the end of the line. It excludes four things: deadhead, operator training, vehicle maintenance testing, and any other non-revenue use of the vehicle. It counts hours a vehicle is scheduled to travel or actually travels, so it is not purely a record of what happened.

National Transit Database glossary, Vehicle Revenue Hours (VRH). The four exclusions and the single inclusion are the glossary's own lists.

Deadhead

Time and distance a vehicle travels out of revenue service. It covers leaving or returning to the garage, changing routes, and any running with no expectation of carrying riders. It does not cover charter service, school bus service, operator training or maintenance. Deadhead is the largest of the things a revenue hour leaves out.

National Transit Database glossary, Deadhead (Miles and Hours).

Passenger trip

The federal term is unlinked passenger trips, often shortened to UPT

One boarding, not one person. A rider who changes buses once is counted twice. The word unlinked is doing the work: the count does not join the two boardings back into one journey. When a transit agency reports ridership, it is almost always reporting boardings.

National Transit Database glossary, Unlinked Passenger Trips (UPT): passengers “are counted each time they board vehicles no matter how many vehicles they use to travel from their origin to their destination.”

Automated passenger counter

Usually shortened to APC

Sensors on a bus that count riders getting on and off, recording each boarding and each exit against the stop where it happened. They are how a transit agency turns a day of driving into a table of boardings by stop, by route and by hour, without a person tallying riders by hand. Asheville's buses carry them. The city describes its own counters as counting “the number of passengers boarding and exiting at each stop.”

City of Asheville, Resolution No. 24-198, adopted 27 August 2024, on a sole-source purchase of counters from Urban Transportation Associates. The quoted description is the city's own.

Trips per revenue hour

Boardings divided by revenue hours. It is the standard measure of whether a bus is carrying people, and both numbers behind it are reported to the federal database every month. The ratio itself is not: it is published once a year on the agency's profile, and anyone can compute it from the monthly file in between. Calling it riders per hour is loose, because the top of the fraction counts boardings.

The monthly federal reporting form requires unlinked passenger trips, vehicle revenue hours, vehicle revenue miles and vehicles operated in maximum service. The annual agency profile publishes the ratio as UPT per VRH.

Cost per rider

Operating cost divided by boardings. It answers a narrower question than its name suggests. Because the bottom of the fraction counts boardings rather than people, a system with many transfers records more of them for the same journeys. And because the figure says nothing about who is carried or where, two systems with the same cost per rider can serve very different places.

Computed from National Transit Database operating expense and unlinked passenger trips. It is not itself a reported federal field.

Vehicles operated in maximum service

Often shortened to VOMS. Usually spoken of as vehicles in peak service

The number of buses an agency runs on the busiest day of its busiest season. Federal rules that scale with the size of a system often use a phrase like fifty or more fixed route vehicles in peak service, and this reported figure is what people reach for. The two are not defined together in any one document. The federal count excludes atypical days and one-time special events.

National Transit Database glossary, Vehicles Operated in Maximum Service (VOMS). FTA Circular 4702.1B uses “fixed route vehicles in peak service” without defining it and without referring to the database.

Demand response

The federal category most microtransit falls in

A transit mode of passenger cars, vans or small buses that go where they are asked to go. The vehicle is dispatched in response to calls from riders or their agents, and it may collect several riders at different points before taking each to a different destination. It does not run a fixed route or a fixed timetable, except sometimes temporarily to meet a special need. Vanpool and demand taxi are separate federal modes, so demand response is not the only category a van can land in.

National Transit Database glossary, Demand Response (DR). The non-rail mode list also carries Demand taxi (DT) and Vanpool (VP).

Useful life benchmark

Often shortened to ULB

The expected life cycle of a bus, or the acceptable period it can stay in service. A transit agency either sets its own or uses the default the federal transit agency publishes, which for a bus is fourteen years. It is a performance measure for asset management. It is not the same thing as federal minimum useful life, which is the grant rule about when a bus bought with federal money may be disposed of. So a fleet described as past its benchmark is being measured against whichever of the two figures its own agency filed.

49 CFR 625.5. FTA Circular 5010.1F says minimum useful life “is distinguishable from the Useful Life Benchmark, which is a TAM requirement used in performance measurement.” The fourteen-year bus default is in the National Transit Database policy manual.

Working life

What Asheville's bus roster calls “actual useful life”

The lifespan a transit agency's own records list for a bus. Asheville's bus roster lists 12 years for every bus in service. That is a separate figure from the useful life benchmark, the replacement age the city reports to the federal government, which the city sets group by group at 10, 12 or 14 years. So a count of buses past their working life and a count of buses past their benchmark can come out different.

City of Asheville Rolling Stock Status Report, updated 1 September 2026, column “Actual Useful Life (Yr)”, released under public records requests PRR-2026-905 and PRR-2026-906; the benchmarks are from the city's report-year-2025 National Transit Database revenue vehicle inventory, released with it. The roster does not say where its 12 years and 500,000 miles come from; they equal FTA's minimum useful life for a large heavy-duty bus in Circular 5010.1F.

Title VI Program

A compliance document a transit agency files with the federal transit agency, not a service plan. It carries the notice to the public, the complaint procedure and complaint form, a record of complaints and lawsuits, a public participation plan, a language assistance plan and several other items, and it goes to the agency's regional civil rights officer every three years. Most of it describes how the agency handles discrimination complaints and engages the public. Only a small part of it describes how service is spread across a place.

FTA Circular 4702.1B. The general-requirements checklist at Appendix A runs to eleven items, the last of which points to the additional requirements for transit providers, states and planning bodies.

Designated, direct, primary and sub recipient

Four words for how federal transit money reaches a body, and one body can be several of them at once. A designated recipient is the body chosen to receive and allocate the formula money for an urbanized area of 200,000 people or more. A direct recipient takes money straight from the federal transit agency. A primary recipient passes some of that money on to other bodies. A subrecipient receives it from one of those rather than from Washington. Which words apply decides who files a Title VI Program with the federal government and who files with the body upstream of them.

FTA Circular 4702.1B, chapter I definitions, and Appendix L, which says in terms that “One entity could be all four types of recipients, and therefore have many different reporting and monitoring requirements.”

Complementary paratransit

The door-to-door service an agency running fixed route buses has to provide for people whose disability prevents them using those buses. It is not a courtesy. Federal rules set its geography, its eligibility process, its response time, its fare ceiling, its hours and its capacity, across six sections of the regulation. The area it must cover reaches at least three-quarters of a mile either side of every fixed route, so changing a route also changes the ground the duty covers.

49 CFR 37.121 through 37.133. The comparability test at 37.121(b) names sections 37.123 to 37.133; the corridor is at 37.131(a)(1).

Service availability

One of four service standards every fixed route agency has to set and file, whatever its size. The federal circular describes it as a general measure of the distribution of routes within the agency's service area. It is the nearest thing to a written federal answer to whether a bus system reaches the places it should, which is why it is the part of a Title VI Program worth asking for.

FTA Circular 4702.1B, chapter IV. The four required standards are vehicle load, vehicle headway, on-time performance and service availability.

Article 43 quarter-cent transit tax

Enacted as the Local Government Public Transportation Sales Tax Act

A county sales tax North Carolina lets most counties levy for public transportation, at a quarter of a cent. It takes a referendum, and in the counties Part 6 of the Article covers that referendum is advisory: a majority yes lets the commissioners levy the tax, it does not oblige them to. A county cannot levy it at all unless it, or some unit of local government inside it, already runs or contracts for a transit system. The proceeds are split per head, and the county's own share counts only the people who live outside every incorporated municipality in it.

N.C.G.S. Chapter 105, Article 43, read directly. The referendum requirement is at 105-506, the advisory framing and the permission to levy at 105-511.2 and 105-511.3, the operating precondition at 105-511.1, and the per-capita split at 105-511.4(a).

North Carolina Utilities Commission

Often shortened to NCUC. We usually call it the commission.

The state body that sets the rates investor-owned power and water companies may charge. It has five members serving staggered six-year terms: two appointed by the governor, two by the General Assembly, and one by the state treasurer. It works much like a court, and its members are held to judicial standards of conduct and barred from other employment. It does not set rates for city-owned utilities or for electric cooperatives, which answer to their own boards.

WHQR, July 7, 2026: the commission "consists of five members who serve staggered six-year terms," with the appointment split as above, and "regulates private, investor-owned power and water companies, not public utilities like city-owned power and water."

Rate case

The proceeding a utility opens when it wants to charge more. It files the rates it wants, then makes its case through hearings: public sessions around the state, and expert testimony in Raleigh. The Public Staff and other parties can oppose it, and the commission can approve the request, cut it, or refuse it. State law limits how long the commission can hold the filed rates back, at most 270 days past the date they were noticed to start. If that period runs out with no order, the rates the utility filed take effect on their own, and the commission can still rule afterward.

N.C. Gen. Stat. 62-134(b): the commission may suspend a filed rate "not for a longer period than 270 days beyond the time when such rate or rates would otherwise go into effect," and "if the proceeding has not been concluded and an order made within the period of suspension, the proposed change of rate shall go into effect at the end of such period." The hearing structure is WHQR's account of the 2026 Duke cases.

Settlement

A deal some of the parties in a rate case reach among themselves and then ask the commission to approve, instead of arguing the case to the end. It is a proposal, not a decision: the commission can approve it, change it, or reject it. Parties who did not sign can still oppose it, so a settlement in the record does not mean everyone agreed.

WRAL, August 11, 2026: "The commission can approve or modify the proposed settlement." Blue Ridge Public Radio, July 20, 2026, quoting the NC League of Conservation Voters on a settlement that "has not been approved by the NC Utilities Commission or signed onto by all of the parties."

Public Staff

The independent state agency that represents utility customers in these cases, staffed by lawyers and energy experts. It is a party in its own right, separate from the commission that decides, and it can and does challenge a utility's spending line by line. The state Attorney General can also intervene, and the two do not always take the same position.

WHQR, July 7, 2026: "An independent state agency made up of lawyers and energy experts, called the Public Staff, represents consumers in these hearings." WRAL, August 11, 2026, describes it as representing "utility customers before the commission."

Customer Assistance Program

Often shortened to CAP. Duke Energy's program; the name is generic and other utilities use it for other things.

A credit of up to $42 a month, for up to 12 billing cycles, on the electric bill of a Duke Energy customer already approved for the state's heating or crisis help. There is no separate application: the state tells Duke who qualifies and the credit appears on the bill. It cannot take a bill below the $14 basic customer charge, and unused credit does not carry to the next month. The commission ordered the program as a condition of Duke's previous rate increases, and it was built as a three-year trial ending December 31, 2026.

Duke Energy's Customer Assistance Program page, read August 29, 2026, for the terms and the automatic enrollment. Duke Energy's February 2024 release: "The NCUC ordered Duke Energy Carolinas to establish a Customer Assistance Program." The scheduled end date is from Canary Media, August 20, 2026, and WFAE, July 14, 2026; Duke's own page carries no end date.

Heating and crisis help

Formally the Low-Income Energy Assistance Program (LIEAP) and the Crisis Intervention Program (CIP)

Two federally funded programs the state runs through county social services offices. The heating program makes one payment toward a winter heating bill, paid to the utility rather than to the household; applications open December 1 for households with someone 60 or older or receiving disability services, and January 1 for everyone else, closing March 31 or whenever the money runs out. The crisis program helps a household already in, or about to be in, a heating or cooling emergency. Approval for either one is what triggers Duke's Customer Assistance Program credit.

NCDHHS program pages, read August 29, 2026: the heating program is "a one-time vendor payment" with the application windows above, at or below 130 percent of the federal poverty level; the crisis program serves households "experiencing or in danger of experiencing a heating or cooling-related crisis."