FHA Approved Condo List: How to Look Up Any Project

Searching for an FHA approved condo list is one of the few condo financing questions with a real answer. HUD publishes the list, it is free, and it takes about a minute to use. This guide walks through the lookup step by step, then covers what the result means, why approval expires, and what to do when a building is not on the list.

What “FHA approved” means for a condo project

FHA approval is a decision about the whole condominium project, not about the buyer and not about the individual unit. It means the project has cleared the requirements HUD sets in Single Family Housing Policy Handbook 4000.1, so a lender can write an FHA-insured mortgage on a unit inside it.

Your credit score, your down payment, and your income are a separate question entirely. A borrower can be flawless on paper and still lose the loan because the association’s reserves, insurance, or delinquency rate fail HUD’s standards.

That is why the search matters before you write an offer. HUD insures condominium loans for up to 30-year terms on a unit in an FHA-approved project, or on a unit that meets the Single-Unit Approval requirements. Everything else is out of reach for an FHA borrower.

How to search the FHA approved condo list

HUD’s public Condominiums search is the FHA condo approved list, and no login is required. Work the steps below in order.

1. Open the Condominiums page. The tool is hosted at entp.hud.gov and linked from HUD’s own FHA Condominiums page. There is no account, no fee, and no lender gatekeeping.
2. Pick the state first. If you enter a city, a condo name, or a partial Condo ID, HUD requires a state selection alongside it. ZIP code searches work on their own.
3. Enter one search term, not five. HUD’s guidance is blunt about this: the less information you enter, the larger the list, and over-filtering is the usual reason a real building appears to be missing. Start with a partial condo name or the ZIP code.
4. Set Status to All. This is the step most buyers skip. Leaving the status filter on a single value can hide a project whose approval has expired or been withdrawn, which is exactly the situation you need to see.
5. Set Search Type to Both. Projects and submissions are tracked separately. A project can have several submissions — 001, 002, 003 — each covering a distinct set of units, and “Both” returns all of them.
6. Click Send and read the list page. If nothing matches, HUD returns “No Records Matched Your Selection Criteria” rather than an empty page. Shorten your search term and try again.
7. Open the project by clicking its name. The Condominium Project Maintenance Results page shows the Condo Project ID, the legal name, the jurisdictional Homeownership Center, the address, and the current status with the date it took effect.

One small orientation trick. The first character of the seven-character Condo ID identifies the HUD Homeownership Center with jurisdiction over the project: A for Atlanta, D for Denver, P for Philadelphia, and S for Santa Ana. That tells a board which office will handle its filing.

How to read the result

Four fields decide what the answer actually is, and they have to be read together. HUD’s field descriptions define each one.

Field	What it tells you
Status	Approved, Expired, Rejected, or Withdrawn. Only Approved lets a lender process an FHA case on a unit in the project.
Status Date	The date that status took effect.
Expiration Date	The date the Approved status expires, based on the approval date of the project’s first submission.
Approval Method	HRAP if HUD approved the project, DELRAP if a lender did.
FHA Concentration	The share of units in the project carrying active FHA-insured mortgages or FHA-assigned case numbers.

Two of those fields carry traps worth naming.

“Rejected” does not always mean rejected. HUD’s published field description for the Status column gives that value two meanings: a project or submission that was not approved, or a single-unit approval condominium project. When a lender gets one unit approved in an unapproved building, HUD establishes a project record for it, and that record can show up under Rejected. Buyers read that as a verdict on the building. It frequently is not one.

FHA Concentration moves on its own. HUD notes the percentage fluctuates as case numbers are assigned, cases are cancelled, and insurance terminates. A number you read in March is not the number your lender sees in June.

HRAP vs DELRAP: who actually did the approving

Every FHA-approved project was approved through one of two paths, and the Approval Method column tells you which. Both produce the same result on the list.

• HRAP — HUD Review and Approval Process. HUD reviews the application package itself, through the jurisdictional Homeownership Center. HRAP is mandatory for newly converted projects, manufactured home condominium projects, and any project that resolved a financial distress event within the past 36 months.
• DELRAP — Direct Endorsement Lender Review and Approval Process. An FHA-approved lender with DELRAP authority reviews and approves the project itself, then lists it. DELRAP cannot be used for the project types above.

There is a practical wrinkle for boards. A DELRAP recertification or phasing review must be completed by the same lender that approved the project originally. If that lender has exited the business or dropped its DELRAP authority, the association is filing through HRAP the next time around, on a different timeline.

Approval expires — and that is the failure mode nobody plans for

FHA project approval is not permanent. It runs from the approval date of the project’s first submission to a stated expiration date, and it has to be renewed through a Recertification Review.

Handbook 4000.1 sets the window precisely. Recertification is performed no earlier than six months before the expiration date and no later than six months after it. If the association misses that window, the project is no longer eligible for recertification and must re-apply through a full Full Review. The 2019 final rule extended the recertification cycle from two years to three.

Here is where buyers get burned. The building still appears in the search. The name is there, the address is there, the Condo ID is there. What has changed is one date in one column — and HUD does flag it, with “nearing expiration” or “expired” displayed inside the Expiration Date field itself. A buyer skimming for their building’s name finds it, assumes approval, and discovers the lapse at underwriting instead.

For a board, the cost of the lapse is the six-month cliff. Recertify one month late and you file a short package. Recertify seven months late and you file everything, including documents the association may not have touched since the developer turned over control. Put the expiration date on the board calendar with a nine-month warning.

Single-Unit Approval: an FHA loan in a building that is not approved

Single-Unit Approval, or SUA, lets FHA insure a mortgage on one unit in a project that is not FHA approved. It exists precisely for buildings where no one has ever filed, or where the approval lapsed.

The project must meet these conditions:

• Not currently FHA approved at the time the case number is assigned. SUA also covers projects whose prior approval now shows as Expired, Rejected, or Withdrawn.
• Complete and ready for occupancy, with a certificate of occupancy issued at least one year ago, or already occupied.
• At least five dwelling units. Four-unit buildings do not qualify.
• Not manufactured housing, and not inside the Coastal Barrier Resources System.
• No ineligible characteristics — no condotel, no mandatory rental pooling, no cooperative or timeshare ownership.

Then come the numbers that do most of the disqualifying:

• FHA insurance concentration of 10% or less for projects with ten or more units. Above that, HUD may suspend the issuance of new case numbers, so treat it as a live ceiling rather than a fixed cap. For projects with fewer than ten units, the limit is absolute: no more than two units may carry FHA-insured mortgages.
• Owner occupancy of at least 50% of the total units.
• No more than 15% of units in arrears, meaning dues or special assessments more than 60 days past due.
• A reserve account funded with at least 10% of aggregate monthly unit assessments, unless an acceptable reserve study justifies less.

The borrower side has its own gate. The application must receive an Accept from the TOTAL Mortgage Scorecard, or the loan is capped at 90% loan-to-value. The lender files Form HUD-9991 when requesting the case number, and HUD reviews it.

The concentration cap is what makes SUA fragile. Ten percent of a 40-unit building is four loans. In a building where FHA buyers are already the natural market, the fifth buyer gets turned away by a rule that has nothing to do with them.

What disqualifies a condo project from FHA approval

The full-approval standards are stricter than the SUA subset. These are the ones associations fail on, straight from Handbook 4000.1.

Requirement	Threshold
Owner occupancy, existing construction	At least 50% of total units
Owner occupancy, HRAP exception	35%–50% allowed for projects over 12 months old, if no more than 10% of units are in arrears
FHA insurance concentration	FHA may suspend eligibility above 50% of total units
Units in arrears (60+ days past due)	No more than 15% of total units
Replacement reserves	At least 10% of aggregate monthly unit assessments, unless a reserve study justifies less
Commercial / non-residential space	No more than 35% of total floor area, extendable to 49% if residential character is maintained
Individual owner concentration	10% or less for projects with 20+ units; one unit maximum in smaller projects
Liability insurance	At least $1 million per occurrence
Hazard insurance	Master or blanket policy at 100% of insurable replacement cost
Fidelity insurance (20+ units)	Greater of three months of aggregate assessments plus reserve funds, or the state minimum
Operating income stability	Stable over two years, with decreases no greater than 15%

Litigation is handled separately and more narrowly than most people expect. HUD disqualifies a project for pending litigation relating to safety, structural soundness, habitability, or functional use, and for any other litigation risk not covered by insurance or exceeding the coverage amount. Foreclosure actions and assessment-collection suits the association files as plaintiff do not count.

The reserve rule has a real escape hatch. A project can fund below 10% if it produces a reserve study that is 36 months old or less, includes a site visit, was prepared by an independent third party with demonstrated experience, and shows funded reserves that meet or exceed its own recommendations. A current reserve study is the cheapest way out of a budget fight the board would otherwise lose.

The investor problem boards should treat as a governance issue

Owner occupancy is not just an application-day test. Even in an already-approved project, a lender must determine at case-number assignment that the project still has an owner occupancy percentage of at least 35%, and units owned by the builder or developer do not count as owner-occupied.

Read that alongside the 10% individual owner concentration cap for projects with 20 or more units, and the shape of the risk is clear. One investor quietly assembling units — or a wave of owners converting to rentals — can push a building past a threshold and shut off FHA financing for every other owner, with no notice and no filing involved. Boards that track rental percentage monthly catch it. Boards that do not, hear about it from a listing agent.

How a board gets its condo project FHA approved

Someone submits a Full Review application package to the jurisdictional HUD Homeownership Center. Full Review is required for any project FHA has never approved, and for any project whose approval has been expired for more than six months.

Boards routinely assume they need a lender to sponsor the filing. They do not. HUD accepts submissions from any of the following:

• a mortgagee
• a builder or developer
• the condominium association itself
• the management company
• a project consultant
• an attorney acting as agent for the developer, builder, association, or management company

The package must be assembled in HUD’s stacking order, which runs through recorded documents, financial documents, contracts, insurance, flood insurance and related documentation, special flood hazard area material, commercial and non-residential space, live/work units, litigation, and other required documents. It is filed as a single PDF, in English, using Form HUD-9992. Incomplete packages are not processed, and HUD does not pay any of the costs.

Practical sequencing beats speed here. Fix the disqualifier before you file — bind the right master policy, clear delinquencies, get the reserve study done — because a rejection costs the association the same work plus a restart.

FHA approval vs conventional warrantability vs VA

These are three separate programs producing three separate answers about the same building. Do not let one result stand in for another.

• Fannie Mae does not publish project eligibility decisions to buyers at all. A lender checks Condo Project Manager, and boards use Condo Status Finder. A project that fails is what the market calls non-warrantable.
• VA runs its own condo approval, focused heavily on the recorded governing documents, and keeps its own list.
• FHA is the only one of the three with a genuinely public, consumer-usable lookup — and the only one that caps its own share of the building.

We keep the full side-by-side, including which lookup exists for whom and what each program asks of the HOA, in the condo loan approval comparison. Check the loan type you actually intend to use.

Bottom line

The FHA approved condo list is real, public, and worth ninety seconds of your time before you write an offer. Search HUD’s Condominiums page by state plus name or ZIP code, set Status to All, and read the status and the expiration date together rather than stopping at the name.

If the building is not approved, Single-Unit Approval is the fallback, and the 10% FHA concentration cap is the thing most likely to close that door. If you are on the board, put the expiration date on the calendar and watch the rental percentage. Confirm anything that affects your own closing with your lender or the jurisdictional HUD office before you rely on it.