34 years on, Nigeria's housing fund still collects billions but delivers few mortgages
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The National Housing Fund has collected worker contributions for 34 years, yet the Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria books fewer than 500 mortgages a year against six million contributors and N120-N150 billion in annual inflows.
Nigeria has spent 34 years building a pool of housing finance, yet the workers paying into it still struggle to access the homes it was created to finance. The National Housing Fund (NHF) has collected mandatory contributions from workers for more than three decades but is still struggling to convert those savings into affordable homeownership at the scale envisaged by its original mandate.
The Federal Mortgage Bank of Nigeria (FMBN), which administers the fund, currently offers contributors mortgages at 6 percent interest for up to 30 years and up to N50 million. Housing minister Muttaqha Rabe Darma said recently that about six million Nigerians contribute to the NHF, generating between N120 billion and N150 billion annually, while FMBN books fewer than 500 mortgages a year.
That disparity highlights the central weakness of a policy designed to make housing finance more accessible. With about six million contributors and fewer than 500 mortgages reportedly booked each year, fewer than one in 12,000 contributors receives a mortgage annually. BusinessDay has also reported that fewer than 20,000 Nigerians access NHF-backed loans annually, depending on the product definitions used.
The NHF was established under Act No. 3 of 1992 to mobilise long-term funds for affordable housing. Nigerian workers were required to contribute 2.5 percent of basic monthly salary, with the Act also providing for contributions from banks, insurance companies and the Federal Government, on the logic that commercial banks were poorly suited to provide the long-tenor mortgages needed for homeownership.
The gap is widening as Nigeria's housing market remains severely under-financed. The Federal Government's National Housing Data Technical Committee estimated the country's 2025 housing deficit at 14.925 million units, while the mortgage-to-GDP ratio remains below 1 percent in available industry estimates, including NIESV's 2025 assessment.
FMBN has expanded products around the fund, including home-renovation finance, construction finance and rent-to-own arrangements, and launched a Diaspora NHF Mortgage Loan in August. In Nasarawa State, the bank says it has financed more than 1,590 housing units, provided more than N9.5 billion in home-renovation loans to over 10,600 civil servants, and handed over 129 three-bedroom bungalow units to NHF beneficiaries at Nasarawa Technology Village in August 2026, with 251 of 651 originally profiled beneficiaries left awaiting allocation.
The bank announced in July that its National Mortgage Registry was ready for deployment, an attempt to improve transparency around mortgage activity. BusinessDay's assessment scored the fund 5.5 out of 10, arguing that the next phase of the policy should be judged less by the amount collected and more by a transparent chain of outcomes, from applications and approvals to disbursements and completed homes.