Extended-use period
The extended-use period is the second half of a LIHTC property's affordability commitment — rent and income restrictions that continue after the 15-year federal compliance period, generally through at least year 30.
Congress added the requirement in 1989 (it applies to allocations from 1990 onward), recording it as a restrictive covenant — the extended use agreement or LURA — on the property's title. Many state housing agencies negotiated longer periods as a condition of awarding credits: 40, 55, or even 99 years in some states. That variation matters for anyone reading expiration data:
- The 30-year figure is a federal floor, not a fact about each deal. Public data (HUD's LIHTC database) reliably supports "placed in service + 30"; the state-specific longer periods live in state agency records that are only partially public.
- Counts of "affordability expiring in the next five years" built on the 30-year floor therefore overstate near-term expirations. Our own reconciliation against the NLIHC/PAHRC Picture of Preservation quantifies this bias and we exclude it from figures we publish as levels.
The extended-use period can end early through two doors — the qualified contract process and foreclosure — both subject to a three-year tenant-protection period. Otherwise it runs to its scheduled end, at which point the property faces the same fork as year 15, but with the restrictions themselves now expiring: preserve (resyndicate, re-restrict) or convert toward market.
The wave is large: on the order of half a million low-income units in properties still in the program reach year 30 between 2020 and 2029.