The Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) on September 30, 2025 made public plans, in a notice issued by the agency’s Real Estate Assessment Center (REAC), to extend a current, temporary policy that exempts certain new safety standards from receiving a negative score during an inspection.

LeadingAge supports the decision to extend the current score-delay policy; we’d previously advocated for HUD to establish a longer “on-ramp” for certain new standards by exempting them from scoring until 2027. Currently, certain standards were exempt from scoring until October 1, 2026, but the extension pushes the deadline to October 1, 2027.

The extension gives more properties the chance to undergo a “phased-in” inspection and better understand and fix deficiencies before receiving negative scores on certain new standards that were recently introduced by HUD through the National Standards for the Physical Inspection of Real Estate (NSPIRE) protocol.

Despite not impacting the overall score a property receives during an inspection, the property will still be notified of–and be required to quickly fix–the specific deficiencies subject to the score delay policy. The score delay only applies to the following new standards:

• Fire labeled doors
• Ground-Fault Circuit Interrupters (GFCIs)
• Guardrails
• Heating, Ventilation, and Air Conditioning (HVAC)
• Interior Lighting
• Minimum Electrical and Lighting

The non-score extension applies to inspections performed on both Public Housing Authorities and Multifamily Housing providers.

More info about each standard is available here; access LeadingAge’s NSPIRE inspection protocol updates here.