Acute care utilization and housing hardships in American children

•We use longitudinal data from about 3,000 families in the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study to examine the association between acute healthcare utilization – emergency room visits or hospitalizations – and subsequent housing hardships, such as being evicted for financial reasons.•Using lagged dependent variable regression models, we find that families that visited the emergency room or were hospitalized, regardless if it was a child or parent with this experience, were five percentage points more likely to experience any housing hardship than families that did not use acute care.•Among families in which a child utilized acute care, perceived social support buffered the impact of using acute care.•In the face of economic precarity, informal safety nets may be insufficient to reduce the impact of acute care utilization on housing hardships.