NSPIRE vs REAC scores: which one your building has

How to tell which score you are looking at

• A bare number (92) is NSPIRE, the standard in force since 2023. This record holds 28,933 NSPIRE inspections, the newest from April 2026.
• A number with a letter (86c) is REAC-era, scored under UPCS, the Uniform Physical Condition Standards. The letter encodes which kinds of deficiencies inspectors logged. 300,991 of the inspections here are from that era, which ran from 1998 until late 2023.
• A star after the letter (33c*) means at least one health or safety deficiency was observed on that REAC inspection. NSPIRE dropped the notation; its weighting bakes health and safety into the number itself.

The switch happened program by program: public housing moved to NSPIRE on July 1, 2023, and HUD-assisted multifamily followed on October 1, 2023. That is why a building's history can end its lettered scores mid-2023 and pick up bare numbers right after.

What NSPIRE changed

UPCS spread its points across the site, the building systems, common areas, and units. NSPIRE reweighted toward the places residents actually live: a defect inside a unit, such as an inoperable smoke alarm, exposed wiring, or no heat, costs a property far more than it did under UPCS. Curb appeal items that used to move scores, like a cracked parking lot, now barely register. The inspection also became harder to stage-manage: NSPIRE samples units the inspector chooses, not a route the owner prepares.

What happened to the numbers, measured

We compared every property in this record that was inspected under both standards, 26,070 of them as of HUD's April 2026 file, pairing each property's last UPCS score with its first NSPIRE score:

• The typical property barely moved. The average change was +3.0 points, and the median score went from 88 under UPCS to 92 under NSPIRE.
• Individual properties moved a lot, in both directions. 1,291 properties that were passing under UPCS failed their first NSPIRE inspection, and 1,013 that were failing crossed back over 60 and passed.

So the standard change did not systematically depress scores, but it did reshuffle which properties fail: buildings whose problems were concentrated inside units fell, and buildings dinged for site-level items recovered. A pre-2023 score is a real data point about the era it was issued in and a weak prediction of the next NSPIRE number.

Why this site keeps one 0–100 meter

Every score here sits on the same meter with the same 60 and 80 lines, and every score is labeled with the standard that produced it. Measured across the whole record, the two eras land close enough that separate scales would add confusion without adding honesty, and we deliberately do not apply any conversion factor. The thing to actually watch for is score age: HUD inspects on a one-to-three year cycle, so the question to ask about an old score is not which standard produced it but when the next inspection is due.

Look up a property

Search a building by name from the home page to see its full history across both eras, or start with what an NSPIRE score is and what failing means.