Though Utah’s rate of homelessness remains below the national average, a new report shows the state’s homeless population is continuing to rise — and the start of 2025 marked a significant uptick.
“It’s a big jump,” Wayne Niederhauser, Utah Gov. Spencer Cox’s state homeless coordinator, told Utah News Dispatch ahead of the report’s release Wednesday. “We haven’t seen that kind of jump for years.”
The annual 2025 Point-in-Time Count — which is a national tally of sheltered and unsheltered people on a single night in January — showed 4,584 Utahns were experiencing homelessness in January 2025, up by 715 people from last year, an 18% increase.
Utah’s homelessness rate is now 13 per 10,000 people, up from 11 per 10,000. But even though Utah is one of the fastest-growing states in the nation and has faced skyrocketing housing prices over the past five years, its rate of homelessness is still well below the 2024 national rate, which was 23 per 10,000.
Though Niederhauser said it’s concerning to see an 18% jump, he said there is a “silver lining.”
“The silver lining is that 95% of those extra individuals were in shelter and not unsheltered,” he said.
In the past several years, Niederhauser said Utah has typically seen only a 4% or 5% rate increase, but about 80% of those people were unsheltered. This year, he said, “the good part about that data point is that most of those individuals were sheltered.”
Of the 715 additional people experiencing homelessness during the 2025 Point-in-Time Count, 677 (95%) were sheltered and 38 (5%) were unsheltered, which the Utah Office of Homeless Services described in the report’s key findings as a “dramatic shift” from 2023, when that year’s count rose by 131 people, but only 23 (18%) were sheltered while 108 (82%) were unsheltered.
“This year’s dramatic increase in sheltered individuals compared to unsheltered is largely attributed to the expansion of winter shelter capacity, which allowed more individuals experiencing homelessness to access shelter,” the report says.
This year’s Point-in-Time Count took place during Code Blue temperatures, which prompted expansion of shelter capacity. Volunteers also questioned whether increased anti-camping enforcement, along with the frigid temperatures, could have factored into seeing fewer people on the streets.
Read the full report at UtahNewsDispatch.com.
