The widow and her four children gave up on the public housing list after two frustrating years and were forced back into Canberra's inflationary private rental market.

The Armstrongs were busy yesterday moving into their new Tuggeranong home.

They love the new four-bedroom house but the rent is going to eat up almost half of the Armstrongs' meagre weekly income.

Mrs Armstrong was forced to take up more hours in her nursing job to put a decent roof over her children's heads and still struggles to make ends meet.

''On the Housing ACT website, they have average waiting times,'' she said. ''But I don't know why they put them up there because I think it just disappoints people.''

The family has just moved to Richardson from Kambah, where they spent two years living in a cramped private rental waiting for their number to come up on the Department of Housing and Community Services waiting list.

''Where we were living before wasn't very good at all: there was no space, no storage and it was just all wrong for the kids,'' Mrs Armstrong said. ''The time came to sign a new lease and I rang the housing people and they told me to go for another 12 months because that was how long I would be waiting, at least.''

After taking on more hours as a Canberra Hospital nurse, Mrs Armstrong earns about $900 a fortnight and receives Centrelink benefits of about $1000 every two weeks. The rent on her new house is $840 a fortnight.

''We'll manage, but it won't be easy,'' she said. ''The rent we would have been paying on a government house would have been maybe half what I'm paying here, and that extra $200 a week is huge, especially with everything getting so expensive.''

The mother of four said she asked housing authorities if her family could be reclassified as a priority case, but was knocked back.

''I told the housing people all of this, I said that I was really doing it tough and could I be reassessed and they did, but they told me, 'No, you're not eligible for higher need, you're just standard needs,''' she said.

The family will need to pull together if it is going to get by in Canberra's rental market.

''It's a lot of juggling,'' Mrs Armstrong said.

''It puts more strain on [eldest son] Elliott, because he's got to drop the kids to school sometimes and pick them up, whereas before I could have done that.

''My mum and dad now tend to help out as well on the days when I'm working, so it means that we have to go further afield for support.''