Sacramento County now has nearly 9,000 homeless people, new data show
Nearly 9,000 homeless people are now living in Sacramento County, according to new data from a local nonprofit.
That data point, which is for September, is 50% higher than it was in June, and also higher than at any point since at least 2022, said Trent Simmons, chief program officer at nonprofit Sacramento Steps Forward, which published the data.
However, the increase may not be because there are significantly more homeless people than three months earlier — just more who are being tracked in the confidential online system used by city, county and nonprofit staff.
“More people are engaging with the system. It’s not necessarily that homelessness has increased,” Simmons said. “We also have better data quality than we did three years ago.”
To be counted in the 8,996, the homeless person had to come into contact with a worker within the last 90 days, proving they are still homeless, Simmons said.
The data comes from the Homeless Management Information System, which is different from the Point in Time count data. For the federally mandated biennial Point in Time count, hundreds of volunteers dispatch across the county to physically count how many homeless people they see, then a firm crunches the numbers and estimates the total population.
In June 2024, Sacramento’s elected officials held a news conference to share the new PIT count results — the homeless population had decreased by 29% since two years prior, landing at an estimated 6,615.
The news was good for public relations — Sacramento no longer had more homeless people than San Francisco — but bad for budgets. The state sent the city and county millions less to address the crisis than it had been under the higher PIT count data.
Despite those funding cuts, the city and county are both moving forward with new shelters.
The county’s 275-bed Watt Avenue Safe Stay shelter is set to open early next year. The county got the $64 million to open the shelter mostly from federal American Rescue Plan Act funds, from the COVID-19 pandemic. The city is moving forward with opening 160 new tiny homes for seniors in four so-called micro-communities.
However, even with those new projects, there will still not be enough shelter beds for everyone who wants one. The wait list for a Sacramento shelter bed on any given night is around 4,000, director of the county’s Department of Homeless Services and Housing Emily Halcon has said.
While the smaller numbers are a snapshot, throughout the course of a year, about 20,000 people will experience homelessness in Sacramento County, Halcon told the Board of Supervisors during an October meeting.
On Jan. 26-27, volunteers will again canvas the county for the Point in Time count. Sacramento Steps Forward will again hire Simtech Solutions to crunch the numbers to come up with the final number. From 2017 to 2022, that work was done by Sacramento State, but then the nonprofit switched to Simtech, leading some to question the decrease.
In the meantime, Sacramento Steps Forward is working to improve the monthly public data.
“The next thing is to assess what proportion of newly identified bucket is truly new to homelessness,” Simmons said. “That’s what everyone’s question is.”
This story was originally published November 26, 2025 at 1:29 PM.
