Eviction Rates in America: 3.6M Filings a Year

Look at eviction rates in America and the first thing that stands out is the spread between two numbers. Millions of filings. Hundreds of thousands of actual removals. That gap is not evidence that the system works. It is evidence of what the filing itself does.

A filing is leverage. It is also a permanent mark. Most tenants never see a judge decide anything, and most of them get flagged anyway.

How many evictions happen each year?

Princeton's Eviction Lab built the first national database of eviction records, and its estimates hold up as the standard reference. In a typical pre-pandemic year, landlords filed roughly 3.6 million cases. Roughly 900,000 ended in a court-ordered eviction.

That works out to a national filing rate of about 6% of renter households annually and an eviction rate near 2%. Both figures conceal enormous local variation. Several Southern metros have run filing rates two to four times the national average, driven by fast court timelines, low legal-aid capacity, and landlord practices that use serial filing as a rent collection tool.

Why do filings outnumber evictions four to one?

Because the filing does most of the work before the hearing.

Once a case is docketed, the tenant faces court fees, missed shifts, and a countdown. Many pay whatever they can scrape together. Many settle on terms they would never accept with a lawyer beside them. Many pack and leave, which ends the case without a judgment and without a record of what happened.

In some jurisdictions landlords file the moment rent is late, every month, as a matter of routine. The court becomes a billing department. Each of those filings enters the public record.

Sources: Princeton Eviction Lab; ACLU / National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel.

What happens to a tenant who wins?

They carry the record anyway.

Tenant screening companies scrape court filings and sell the results to landlords. Their reports frequently show the filing without the outcome: no dismissal noted, no ruling, no context. A tenant who paid in full and had the case dropped shows up in the same database as one who was removed by a sheriff.

The next landlord sees a flag and moves to the next application. In a market with low vacancy, that is the end of it. The record does more lasting damage than the individual case, which is why sealing and expungement laws have become the main tenant-side legislative fight in several states.

Why is representation so lopsided?

Because eviction is civil, and there is no constitutional right to counsel in civil court.

Criminal defendants get a public defender. A tenant facing the loss of their home does not. Landlords, especially large ones, keep counsel on retainer and appear in the same courtrooms weekly. The tenant appears once, usually alone, often having taken unpaid time off to be there.

Cities that funded right-to-counsel programs in New York, San Francisco, Cleveland and elsewhere reported sharp drops in the share of represented tenants losing their homes. The programs work because most tenants have defenses they never raise: improper notice, habitability violations, miscounted payments, retaliation. A defense needs someone to make it.

What drives the filings?

Nonpayment, and nonpayment is arithmetic.

About 45 million U.S. households rent (Census). Roughly half spend more than 30% of income on housing and about 12 million spend more than half (Harvard JCHS; HUD). The National Low Income Housing Coalition's Out of Reach report puts the wage needed for a modest two-bedroom near $32 an hour nationally. The federal minimum wage has been $7.25/hour since 2009 (U.S. Dept. of Labor).

A household at severe cost burden has no buffer for a reduced schedule, a car repair, or a medical bill. The Federal Reserve's Survey of Household Economics and Decisionmaking has found roughly one in three adults could not cover a $400 emergency expense in cash. One bad month produces a missed payment, and a missed payment produces a filing.

The pressure behind the rent numbers is unpacked in why rent is so high, and the household-level exposure in how many Americans are one paycheck from homeless.

What does eviction do afterward?

It compounds.

Job loss follows, because the disruption of moving, storing possessions, and finding shelter costs shifts. Health outcomes worsen, with published research linking eviction to increased emergency department use and to poor birth outcomes among pregnant women. Children change schools mid-year, and the academic cost of a mid-year move is well documented.

Then the record blocks re-entry. Households pushed out of the regulated rental market land in extended-stay motels, informal sublets, doubled-up arrangements with family, or vehicles, none of which show up in HUD's January point-in-time count, which recorded more than 770,000 people homeless on a single night in 2024. The pathway from filing to that count is short, and its regional pattern tracks rent rather than personal behavior, as covered in homelessness and housing costs.

What reduces eviction rates in America?

Three levers, with different evidence behind each.

Right to counsel has the cleanest short-run results. Represented tenants stay housed at far higher rates, and the programs pay for themselves against shelter and emergency service costs in the cities that have measured it.

Record sealing stops a dismissed case from following someone for years. It does nothing about the underlying shortfall but removes a penalty the tenant did not earn.

Emergency rental assistance works when it arrives before the filing. It usually does not, because most programs are underfunded, slow, and exhausted by mid-year. Federal rental assistance reaches roughly one in four eligible households. How housing vouchers work explains the cap.

None of the three touches the cause. Eviction volume in this country is the visible output of a rental market where the price of shelter outran the price of labor and stayed there. Rents more than doubled since 2000; the wage floor has not moved since 2009; the country underbuilt for a decade after 2008 and never caught up. Courts are processing that gap one household at a time, 3.6 million times a year, and calling it a housing dispute. It is a wage and supply problem being litigated as a personal failure, the same substitution running through the broken American Dream.