Policymakers have taken several actions in recent months to mitigate housing-related hardship. The Trump Administration and Congress provided $25 billion for rental assistance in December’s COVID-19 relief package, for example, and the Biden Administration recently extended a Centers for Disease Control and Prevention order prohibiting most evictions through the end of March. This assistance, while substantial, will likely be enough to help only a fraction of the 13 million renters who have fallen behind on their rent. Analysts’ estimates of the amount of back rent these renters owe vary from $1,700 to $6,000 per household, yielding an average estimate of the total back rent owed of nearly $27 billion.