The Hey Prescott Down Payment Assistance Index — Professional Edition

June 2026 · National Snapshot

Prepared by Prescott, Senior Lending Analyst, Hey Prescott

Hey Prescott currently tracks 1,580 homebuyer assistance programs across all 50 states and the District of Columbia. This is the baseline edition of the index: it establishes the reference point against which next month's and next quarter's movement will be measured, so there are no period-over-period deltas to report yet. Every figure below is drawn from a live, field-by-field verification pass in which each program is checked against its administering agency's published guidelines — links, funding status, eligibility rules, and benefit amounts. Where a number is still being confirmed, this report says so rather than estimating.

One point of method belongs at the top, because it is the reason this index exists. Most national program counts are surveyed quarterly, against provider self-reports. The Hey Prescott index is rebuilt from a rolling monthly re-verification of every program in the catalog. The numbers here reflect what an agency is publishing today, not what it last reported a quarter ago — and the verification pass behind them is already surfacing data that was wrong in both directions, a point this report returns to.

Down payment assistance remains the central affordability lever

The economics have not eased. Buyers still face the same wall of upfront cash — down payment plus closing costs, escrow reserves, and inspection and appraisal fees — that stops mortgage-ready borrowers well short of the closing table. Assistance programs exist to move that wall.

Across the catalog, the average program offers up to $39,670 in maximum assistance, though that average is pulled upward by a handful of large shared-appreciation and high-cost-market programs. The median maximum is $20,000, the more honest figure for what a typical borrower can expect, and the ceiling reaches $500,000 in the most generous shared-equity structures. Critically, 1,504 programs (95 percent) carry no interest on the assistance — the help is deferred or forgiven, not lent at a cost. For a loan officer, that is the difference between a program that improves a debt-to-income ratio and one that worsens it.

Most programs are active — and most are delivered locally

Of the 1,580 programs tracked, the catalog currently records 1,576 as active. That figure carries a caveat this report will not bury: the verification pass is still in progress, and the near-total active rate is an artifact of how few programs have yet been re-confirmed against current funding status — not a genuinely 99-percent-active national stock. As lapsed and exhausted programs are deactivated through verification, this number will settle toward the 75-to-80 percent active range typical of the national inventory. Treat the active count as provisional until the sweep completes.

Delivery is overwhelmingly local. 548 programs (35 percent) are city-specific and 497 (31 percent) are county-level, while 280 (18 percent) operate statewide. The remainder span multiple counties or regions. By funding source — and these categories overlap, since one program often braids federal, state, and local money — 463 programs draw on federal sources such as HOME and CDBG, 402 are administered through state housing finance agencies, 369 run through municipal governments, and 93 through nonprofits and CDFIs. The operational takeaway: the densest assistance is hyper-local, which is exactly where a national directory goes stale fastest and where monthly verification earns its keep.

More flexibility for today's buyers

Support for first-time buyers remains the backbone of the catalog: 1,214 programs (77 percent) are open to buyers entering the market, where "first-time" generally means no ownership of a primary residence in the prior three years. That framing matters operationally, because it means roughly one program in four is open to repeat buyers — the segment most loan officers stop checking after the first decline.

224 programs (14 percent) carry no income limit at all. This is the single most actionable line in the report for a desk working the missing middle: borrowers who earn too much for traditional assistance but still cannot assemble cash to close. These programs qualify a wider band of the pipeline and are worth knowing by name in each market.

First-generation buyer eligibility is captured on only a handful of programs in the current data and is being expanded through the verification pass; that count is deliberately omitted here until it is confirmed, rather than reported low and misleading.

Program Spotlight — WHEDA Capital Access Advantage (Wisconsin). The Wisconsin Housing and Economic Development Authority pairs its Advantage first mortgage with a $7,500 down payment second that charges no interest and requires no monthly payment, deferred until the first mortgage is paid off. It carries no separate income limit beyond the first-mortgage program, which makes it a clean illustration of the no-income-limit segment. The program relaunched on January 15, 2026 with limited funding, so confirm availability before you commit a borrower to it. For a desk, this is the kind of statewide, no-monthly-payment second that quietly closes a cash-to-close gap without touching DTI.

Expanded property options

Assistance is increasingly written to follow how people actually buy. 1,342 programs (85 percent) allow condominiums, 358 (23 percent) permit manufactured housing, and 184 (12 percent) allow 2-to-4-unit properties. The last two are the categories routinely missed at intake. Manufactured housing remains one of the few inventory types still priced within reach in many markets, and 2-to-4-unit purchases let a borrower offset the payment with rental income while building equity in a single transaction.

Program Spotlight — El Paso First-Time Homebuyer Program (Texas). The City of El Paso offers a forgivable loan of up to $45,000 in designated Priority Housing Areas, or $25,000 elsewhere within city limits, at 3 percent interest, forgiven over a 10-year affordability period for buyers at or below 80 percent of area median income. The program permits manufactured homes, not only site-built houses — a meaningful detail for a borrower whose budget points toward manufactured inventory. The property must sit within El Paso city limits, the kind of geographic rule a city program lives by.

Program structures offer multiple pathways

The structure of assistance reflects the range of borrower needs, and the distribution is worth committing to memory because it drives how each program touches a file.

Deferred-payment loans are the most common structure at 720 programs (46 percent). These defer repayment until the home is sold, refinanced, or paid off, leaving the monthly obligation unchanged. Grants follow at 427 programs (27 percent) — nothing repaid, nothing recorded, the cleanest option operationally. Forgivable loans account for 356 programs (23 percent), retiring incrementally over a defined occupancy period; 510 programs (32 percent) carry some forgiveness feature by year count. Shared-appreciation structures, in which the borrower repays principal plus a share of the home's gain, total 46 programs (3 percent), and conventional repayable seconds just 16 (1 percent).

Viewed by lien, 704 programs (45 percent) record as a second mortgage behind the first, the standard DPA posture. And 357 programs (23 percent) size their assistance as a percentage of price or loan amount rather than a flat dollar cap, which means the benefit scales with the purchase — a detail that changes the math in higher-cost markets.

Program Spotlight — California Dream For All Shared Appreciation Loan. Dream For All provides up to 20 percent of the purchase price, capped at $150,000, for down payment assistance statewide through CalHFA-approved lenders, for borrowers up to 120 percent of area median income. At repayment the borrower shares a portion of the home's appreciation with CalHFA rather than paying interest. At least one borrower must be a first-generation homebuyer. It is the clearest example in the catalog of a shared-equity structure doing work a flat grant cannot in a high-cost market — and a reminder that "assistance amount" and "repayment terms" must be read together, not separately.

Incentives for key buyer groups

431 programs (27 percent) extend an enhanced benefit or dedicated eligibility to a specific group. Veterans and active or reserve military are reached by 365 programs (23 percent), Native American and Alaska Native buyers by 132 (8 percent), educators by 122 (8 percent), law enforcement and firefighters by 123 (8 percent), healthcare workers by 118 (7 percent), and buyers with disabilities by 111 (7 percent).

These are the programs that convert a cold outreach into a warm one. A loan officer who can tell a teacher, a firefighter, or a veteran exactly which program adds to their assistance has a concrete reason to make the call. This section also carries the clearest data-integrity story in the index: the verification pass is finding occupation and population flags set inconsistently — frontline-worker and military flags left blank on FHLBank set-aside products that clearly qualify, and several tribal down payment programs carried without a working link or a stated maximum. Those gaps are precisely the matches a borrower-facing search would otherwise miss, and closing them is the line between a directory and a tool.

Program Spotlight — Florida Hometown Heroes. Administered by Florida Housing, Hometown Heroes provides up to $35,000 — 5 percent of the first mortgage — as a zero-interest, non-amortizing deferred second for eligible frontline workers buying a primary residence in Florida. The deferred structure means no monthly payment on the assistance, and the statewide footprint makes it a default first check for an eligible Florida borrower across military, education, and first-responder professions.

Loan-product compatibility

A section the quarterly surveys tend to omit, and the one a desk uses most. Conventional financing is eligible on 1,479 programs (94 percent), FHA on 1,392 (88 percent), VA on 1,132 (72 percent), and USDA on 1,052 (67 percent). Homebuyer education is required by 1,414 programs (90 percent) — a near-universal condition worth setting borrower expectations on early, since the certificate is a common closing-table bottleneck. The practical read: nearly any agency-approved first mortgage can be paired with assistance, but the education requirement should be started at application, not discovered at clear-to-close.

What this means for the desk

The catalog skews toward no-monthly-payment structures, first-time buyers, and locally administered programs — which is where most assistance demand sits. The opportunities most often left on the table are the 224 no-income-limit programs, the roughly one-quarter of the catalog open to repeat buyers, and the 431 occupation-based programs. Each is a reason to re-engage a borrower a desk may have set aside as over-income or otherwise ineligible.

Next month's edition will report movement: programs added, programs deactivated as funding lapses, benefit amounts revised, and population flags corrected. Because the underlying data is re-verified monthly rather than surveyed quarterly, that movement should arrive here earlier than in any quarterly index — and the month-over-month comparison begins with the next cycle.

Methodology. The Hey Prescott Down Payment Assistance Index is rebuilt from a continuous, field-by-field re-verification of every program in the Hey Prescott catalog — state and local housing finance agencies, municipalities, nonprofits, and CDFIs. Each program's links, funding status, eligibility rules, benefit amounts, property and product eligibility, and occupation- and population-based incentives are checked against the administering agency's current published guidelines and, where available, the program's own guideline PDF. Figures in this edition reflect the catalog as of June 7, 2026, during an active verification pass; the active-status count is provisional and the first-generation figure is omitted until confirmed. This is a baseline edition, so no month-over-month or quarter-over-quarter comparisons are shown; they begin with the next cycle.

This report is for professional and educational use. It is not a commitment to lend or a guarantee of eligibility; program terms are set by each administering agency and change with funding.