VOCA, VAWA, and FVPSA Reporting in 2026: What's New

If you run a domestic violence shelter, a rape crisis center, or a family justice center, you probably report to VOCA, VAWA, and FVPSA every year, often all in the same busy stretch. A few things changed in 2026: VAWA moved to a new web-based reporting tool, VOCA's pandemic match waiver ended for many programs, and a federal executive order changed how demographic data is collected. FVPSA reporting, for its part, looks about the same as last year.

Here at StriveDB, we work to keep our reports up to date so you don't have to. Here's a friendly rundown of what changed across all three programs in 2026, and what stayed the same.

The changes this year are concentrated in a few places

VAWA reporting moved to a new tool and simplified its forms. VOCA's pandemic match relief ran out, which puts the 20% match back on the table for many programs. FVPSA reporting looks the same as last year. And one change cuts across programs: an executive order changed how demographic data is collected on federal reports. We report to these same funders alongside you, so the rest of this walks through each program in the order it's likely to affect your year.

Key Reporting Facts for 2026

VAWA deadlines

January 30 and July 30 for discretionary and coalition semiannual reporting (OVW / VAWA MEI).

VOCA match

The federal victim-assistance match is generally 20%, subject to exemptions and state-approved waivers (OVC).

FVPSA deadlines

December 30 for state and tribal Performance Progress Reports; December 29 for coalition reports (ACF).

VAWA system

Prepare through the IMPACT Tool and submit through JustGrants.

VOCA system

Performance Measurement Tool (PMT).

FVPSA system

GrantSolutions OLDC.

What changed with VAWA reporting in 2026?

VAWA performance reporting moved from the old fillable-PDF forms to a web-based system called the VAWA IMPACT Tool. The Office on Violence Against Women (OVW) and the VAWA Measuring Effectiveness Initiative (VAWA MEI) built it to prepare and submit performance data. If you've been doing this a while, the form you knew as the STOP Formula Subgrantee Reporting Form, the one many people just called the "Muskie" report, is what the IMPACT Tool replaced.

Discretionary grantees first got access on March 3, 2025. To give everyone time to adjust, OVW pushed the July-through-December 2024 report deadline from January 30, 2025 to March 31, 2025. That was a one-time extension tied to the transition.

The forms themselves were adjusted. OVW describes the changes as standardizing reporting across its programs and reducing the reporting burden, and says the changes are mostly reductions that simplify the work. Some variables were realigned and some questions reworded, so a few data points may be ones you couldn't report on right away. If a field is new to you, OVW's guidance is to report what you can, use the narrative box to explain any gap, and plan to track it going forward.

The workflow is straightforward once you know the shape of it. You prepare and check your data inside the IMPACT Tool, and then you submit the finished report in JustGrants, which remains the official system of record. The IMPACT Tool is a place to enter and generate the report. It isn't a database that stores your program's records for you, so the numbers still come from whatever you use to track services all year.

When are our VAWA reports due in 2026?

VAWA discretionary and coalition reporting is semi-annual, on the same two dates every year. January 30 covers activity from July through December. July 30 covers activity from January through June. Final performance reports use the same program-specific form and are submitted in JustGrants.

STOP and SASP formula subgrantee data works differently. It covers the full calendar year and is generally due in early spring, with the exact link and date coming from your state administering agency. If you're a subgrantee, watch for that email and confirm your due date in JustGrants rather than assuming last year's date carries over.

A note on demographic data reporting in 2026

The demographic questions on federal reports are changing. Here's what's confirmed and what's still unsettled.

On the VAWA side, the change is confirmed. Under Executive Order 14168, issued in January 2025, and accompanying guidance from the Office of Management and Budget, OVW amended the demographic questions on the performance report. The term "gender" was changed to "sex," and the response categories are now limited to male and female. OVW's guidance also notes that survivors are never required to share demographic information to receive services.

The executive order applies across the federal government, not just to VAWA. It directs federal agencies to collect data on sex as male or female and to stop collecting information on gender identity. The Williams Institute, which tracks federal data practices, estimates that a few hundred federal data collections were affected between January 2025 and January 2026. The order has been challenged in court, and how it applies in specific programs is still developing.

For FVPSA, the picture is less settled. The FVPSA Performance Progress Report doesn't appear to have changed its demographic fields, and FVPSA's own regulations still include nondiscrimination and equal-access provisions that reference gender identity. So FVPSA-funded programs are, in effect, working between an unchanged FVPSA framework and a federal directive that points a different way. If you report under FVPSA, this is a place to watch for guidance from the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) rather than assume.

For any of this, the safest move is to check the current wording and instructions with OVW, VAWA MEI, and ACF directly, and with your SAA and coalition. These are exactly the details that get revised, sometimes without much notice.

Do we still have to document our VOCA match now that the waiver ended?

Yes, for most subrecipients, the answer in 2026 is that you're back to documenting your match. Here's why.

VOCA victim assistance carries a 20% match requirement under 28 CFR 94.118. Federally recognized tribes and projects on tribal lands are exempt. The match can be cash or in-kind, and in-kind includes things like the value of volunteer hours and donated space. During the pandemic, that requirement was waived automatically. The Office for Victims of Crime (OVC) tied the waiver to the national emergency, which ended on May 11, 2023, followed by a one-year grace period. New VOCA subawards or continuations made on or after May 11, 2024 no longer qualify for the mandatory waiver.

State administering agencies can still grant full or partial waivers under their own published policies, an authority the VOCA Fix Act gave them. So a waiver is still possible. It just isn't automatic anymore, which means many programs that hadn't thought about match in a few years need to again. Because each state runs its own match-waiver policy, this is one to confirm with your SAA rather than assume from what a program in another state is doing. OVC's expectation is that you keep records showing the source, amount, and timing of every match contribution, and that you document the value of any in-kind match.

The mechanics of VOCA performance reporting didn't change. You still report through the Performance Measurement Tool (PMT), and the Subgrant Award Report and performance measures work the way they did last year.

There's a larger question hanging over all of this, which is the health of the Crime Victims Fund itself. The fund's balance has been unstable, and allocations have swung with it. We're not going to put a dollar figure here, because those numbers move month to month. If you want the current picture, the National Association of VOCA Assistance Administrators (NAVAA) tracks the fund balance and publishes updates.

What's changing with FVPSA reporting this year?

FVPSA reporting doesn't appear to have changed. The Performance Progress Report (PPR) and its deadlines are the same as last year, and ACF has said the reporting process and the form instructions have not changed. The one open question is on the demographic fields, which we covered above.

State and tribal grantees submit their PPR by December 30. Coalitions submit by December 29. Both go through GrantSolutions OLDC. The current forms are the 2024 through 2027 set, approved under OMB control number 0970-0280, which runs through June 30, 2027.

What's worth watching with FVPSA is the program's footing, not the report. FVPSA's authorization of appropriations lapsed after fiscal year 2015, and it has run on annual appropriations since, with a reauthorization pending. The Congressional Research Service has noted uncertainty around recent appropriations and staffing changes at HHS. None of that changes your December deadlines. It just means guidance from the FVPSA program may come with less lead time than it used to.

2026 reporting at a glance

What ties all three together: confidentiality and the 2024 Uniform Guidance changes

Underneath the program-by-program details, two sets of rules govern how every VSP handles and reports survivor data. Neither is new in 2026, but both are where the database you use either helps you or gets in your way.

The first is confidentiality. VAWA, FVPSA, and VOCA all restrict the disclosure of a survivor's personally identifying information (VAWA at 34 U.S.C. 12291(b)(2), FVPSA at 42 U.S.C. 10406(c)(5), and VOCA at 28 CFR 94.115). The National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV) puts the key point sharply:

Grantees must not release identifying information "regardless of whether the information has been encoded, encrypted, hashed, or otherwise protected."

National Network to End Domestic Violence (NNEDV)

In other words, encryption alone doesn't satisfy the requirement. NNEDV also notes that VAWA regulations ask grantees to make reasonable efforts to prevent inadvertent disclosure, and to be especially careful with any third-party database or an internal database managed by an outside company.

A few practical consequences follow. You share only aggregate, non-identifying data with funders, never individual records. Any disclosure of a survivor's information needs that survivor's informed, time-limited, written consent, and you can't make signing a release a condition of service.

And if you take HUD Emergency Solutions Grants or Continuum of Care funds, you can't enter survivor PII into HMIS. You use a separate Comparable Database instead and give the Continuum of Care only aggregate numbers. NNEDV's guidance on what makes a Comparable Database secure starts with a simple test: the provider controls who can access and see client information.

The second set of rules is the 2024 update to the federal Uniform Guidance (2 CFR Part 200), which applies to awards issued on or after October 1, 2024, with the audit changes applying to fiscal years that begin on or after that date. A handful of the changes matter for VSPs:

• Single Audit threshold rose from $750,000 to $1,000,000, so a center expending less than a million in federal funds in a fiscal year is no longer subject to a Single Audit.
• De minimis indirect cost rate rose from 10% to 15%.
• Equipment capitalization threshold rose from $5,000 to $10,000.
• Cybersecurity controls are now an explicit expectation. The guidance asks recipients to maintain reasonable controls, without mandating a specific framework, which sits naturally alongside the confidentiality obligations you already carry.

This is where the tool matters. A database built for victim services should make the confidentiality rules easy to honor by default. StriveDB uses layered, role-based access, so people see only what their role should see. A restricted-client flag narrows a sensitive case to only the highest access level. A hotline volunteer can log calls without being able to browse any client history at all. Two-factor authentication is required for every user, and each center's data is fully isolated from every other center's. That's the "provider controls who can access" test, built into how the product works.

How StriveDB fits

The reporting seasons above are easier when the data is already organized before the deadline. That's the whole idea behind how we built StriveDB.

StriveDB produces VOCA, VAWA, and FVPSA reports and keeps them closely aligned to the forms you submit, so the numbers line up with what each funder asks for. You can click into any number to see who is counted and why, which matters when a monitor asks how you arrived at a figure. And you can export any report to Excel and work with it in the tool of your choice.

Since the IMPACT Tool and the PMT are manual-entry systems, you still key the numbers in yourself. What StriveDB does is make sure that when you sit down to enter your data, it's accurate, it's traceable, and it's ready, rather than something you're reconstructing from scattered spreadsheets the night before it's due.

For match, StriveDB captures the volunteer and staff hours logged against your grants, which is the record you draw on when you document in-kind match. And the role-based access and restricted-client controls described above are there to support the confidentiality obligations every VSP works under.

Frequently asked questions

Getting ahead of the next deadline

Reporting is far easier when the data is organized long before the report is due. Every program's situation is a little different, so your SAA and coalition are the right first call on how these rules apply to your awards. If you'd like to see how StriveDB keeps your VOCA, VAWA, and FVPSA data ready year-round, schedule a call with us.

Related reading: how StriveDB supports victim services confidentiality requirements, the true cost of case management software for shelters and crisis centers, and Bonterra Apricot alternatives for DV and SA centers. For the current Crime Victims Fund outlook, see NAVAA.