The national count
Landlords filed more than 1.23 million eviction cases across the ten states and 38 city areas tracked by Princeton University's Eviction Lab in calendar year 2025, according to a preliminary analysis published April 16, 2026. That was slightly below the 1.25 million filed in 2024.
The average filing rate across tracked locations was 7.9% — roughly one filing for every 13 renter households in the areas covered.
Filings rose in 13 of 48 tracked sites relative to the 2023-2024 baseline. The largest increase, 30%, was in greater Austin, Texas.
The metro spread
Four tracked areas recorded filing rates at least double the national average: Atlanta at 25%, Richmond, Virginia at 24%, Charleston, South Carolina at 17% and Indianapolis at 14%. Atlanta alone recorded 144,000 filings in 2025, itself a 4% drop from prior years.
At the other end, New York City's filing rate was 5%, which the analysis attributes to universal right to counsel and other tenant protections.
Analysis: a fivefold spread between Atlanta and New York City in the same year cannot be explained by rent levels, since New York's are far higher. It reflects legal process — filing costs, required notice periods, the availability of counsel, and whether filing is used as a routine rent-collection tool rather than a last resort.
Who is named
The analysis found Black renters significantly overrepresented among defendants: 39% of filings named a Black defendant against 28% of the renter population in tracked areas. White renters were 37% of filings against 45% of the renter population.
An eviction filing is not an eviction. Many cases are resolved when the tenant pays, and a filing can be dismissed or withdrawn. But the filing itself creates a court record that appears in tenant screening reports, which affects access to housing regardless of outcome.
That is why the filing rate rather than the judgment rate is the figure the tracker publishes. It measures exposure to the process, which is the part that follows a tenant into future applications.
Coverage and currency
The Eviction Tracking System covers ten states and 38 city areas in the 2025 analysis — a large sample, but not the whole country. National totals cannot be extrapolated from it, because the tracked jurisdictions were selected for data availability rather than representativeness.
The project's live dashboard, updated August 1, 2026, reported 1,210,186 filings over the trailing twelve months across 11 states and 43 cities, with 81,751 filings in the most recent tracked month. The coverage differs slightly from the annual analysis, so the two totals are not directly comparable.
Read against the rental market data for 2026 — national rents down slightly year over year and vacancy easing from its February peak — the eviction figures describe a different population than the one asking rents capture. Filings concentrate among renters already in place and behind, not among households shopping for a new lease.