Understanding Bed Night Reports

Bed nights reports are designed to allow agencies and CoCs to monitor how many nights of stay a project is providing during a reporting period. Bed nights, or nights of stay, is one of the outcome measures frequently used by housing projects to monitor use of their beds. The Bed Nights by Project Report was built by the ICA Missouri reporting team. It is not one of HUD's System Performance Measures.

Report need-to-know
Who runs this report?	ICA, as the HMIS Lead Agency, when run at a CoC-level.
Can agencies run this report?	Yes, the report can be run by individual agencies for their own projects. Click here to go to the report guide.
Who gets this report?	Upon request, ICA provides this report at the CoC-level to committees and task forces that oversee program performance. ICA typically needs at least one to two weeks notice to provide the report, but this can vary based upon current reporting workload.

Frequently Asked Questions

How are bed nights calculated?

The report calculates bed nights in different ways depending upon the project type:

Entry/Exit Emergency Shelters (ES-EE), Transitional Housing (TH) & Safe Havens (SH)

The report counts the number of nights between the client's project start date and the client's project exit date, then filters out any nights that took place outside the report period.

Night-by-Night Emergency Shelters (ES-NbN)

The report counts the individual nights of stay that have been recorded which fall on or between the client's project start and project exit dates, then filters out any nights that took place outside the report period. If a project start date has not been recorded, the client will be excluded from the report entirely.

Rapid Rehousing (RRH), Permanent Supportive Housing (PSH), and Other Permanent Housing (OPH)

The report counts the number of nights between the client's housing move-in date and the client's project exit date, then filters out any nights that took place outside the report period. If a housing move-in date is not properly recorded, the report will indicate that the client has zero bed nights during the report period.

Other project types

The report will not pull in data for any other project types (i.e., homelessness prevention, street outreach, services only, coordinated entry), as bed nights are typically not reported for other project types.

What can I do if my project's bed nights are incorrect?

If your project's bed night count appears to be incorrect, please contact the helpdesk. The most common causes of incorrect bed night counts are clients who should have been entered or exited.

What if I have questions that haven't been answered?

If you still have questions that haven't been answered above, we encourage you to reach out to our helpdesk.