What Court Eviction Data Could Tell Us, But Doesn’t Always

In this section, we explore six stages of the formal eviction process. Before delving into each stage of the process, we provide an overview of how formal evictions typically unfolds, despite the wide variation in court processes and procedures that exists across the country.

The formal eviction process begins when a landlord notifies a tenant in writing of a missed rental payment or lease violation (eviction notice). If the tenant does not remedy the issue within a certain number of days (by paying the rent owed, for example), a landlord can file an eviction lawsuit in court, asking the court to formally order the tenant to move (eviction filing). Once an eviction lawsuit is filed, a tenant must be notified of the lawsuit and any scheduled proceedings, via a summons (summons to appear). A tenant must then either appear at any scheduled eviction proceedings or submit a response to the lawsuit (eviction proceedings). There are several possible outcomes of an eviction court case, but ultimately a tenant either will be forced to move from their home (through an eviction order) or will be allowed to remain in their home (eviction case outcomes). Following an eviction order issued by the court, landlords are able to pursue a formal eviction through a writ of eviction (post-judgment actions).

For each stage of the process, we note what kind of information is typically collected and shared by courts and the documentation that generates this information. We also highlight missed opportunities, or information that may be collected in court documents, but is typically not shared or made accessible (suggesting that changes to court processes could change this). We also note which stages of the process for which we currently have little or no information, as they occur before the formal eviction court process has begun or after it has concluded.

In most states, notifying a tenant of their intent to file an eviction in court (often called a “notice to vacate,” “notice to quit,” or “pay-or-quit notice”) is the first step a landlord must take in pursuing a formal eviction. In theory, an eviction notice allows a tenant the opportunity to remedy the issue (by paying the rent owed, for example) before a landlord can file a lawsuit with the court. In reality, however, the time a tenant has to remedy the issue before a landlord can file an eviction in court is short–between five and ten days–and in several states, the right to be notified of an eviction filing can be waived in a tenant’s lease.

Because eviction notices are delivered prior to a landlord filing an eviction in court, there is typically no real-time information gathered on who receives these notices. While landlords are sometimes required to submit a copy of the eviction notice when filing an eviction lawsuit, relevant information from notices, like the date it was posted and whether its delivery and contents comply with state and local laws, is not included in the court record.

Despite a lack of information related to eviction notices, these documents are often the first indicator that a household is at risk of eviction. A lack of real-time information impedes the ability of legal aid and other service providers to intervene with legal resources, emergency rental assistance, and information about eviction diversion programs, all of which could avoid an eviction lawsuit from being filed in court.

While not a forced removal, an eviction filing on a tenant’s record has serious and negative consequences for future housing stability.¹ Tenant screening companies routinely access and repackage eviction filing data and sell it to landlords, who then use it in making decisions about who to rent to, regardless of whether a tenant was ever evicted or not.² Given the widespread use of eviction filing data by tenant screening companies, preventing an eviction filing before it can happen, through the use of pre-filing eviction diversion programs, for example, is an important goal.³

Indeed, an irony of our current system is that communities seeking to prevent evictions often find the necessary information difficult to access, while this same information is widely used and routinely available to those who use it—intentionally or not—in ways that perpetuate housing insecurity.

A lack of information on eviction notices also makes it impossible to know how many tenants move before an eviction has been filed in court. Studies show that tenants often vacate their home at the first sign of an eviction, due to a lack of information about the process, fear of engaging with the court system, and a lack of information about their rights.⁴ When tenants move after receiving an eviction notice, but before an eviction is filed in court, displacement is invisibilized, not because it is happening outside the court system (in the case of an informal or illegal eviction), but because it is occurring before any official information is documented.

In most jurisdictions, an eviction filing submitted by a landlord to the court marks the beginning of an eviction data trail. Information generated and shared from a filing (or "complaint") commonly includes: the date of filing; the address of the property where the defendant lives (or another geographic identifier, such as a zip code); and the name and address of the plaintiff (landlord) and the defendant (tenant), depending on state and local tenant privacy laws. Eviction filing documents may also include the reason for the eviction filing (e.g., whether for non-payment of rent or another other lease violation).

While eviction filings do not necessarily result in a court-ordered eviction, understanding where filings are concentrated, who is filing them, and who they are being filed against is critical for intervening to help tenants navigate the court process, and also to prevent filings from occurring in the future.⁵

For one, interventions provided at the point of filing—in the form of legal aid, emergency financial assistance, and other services—can increase a tenant’s chance of avoiding a court-ordered eviction.⁶ Further, it is well-documented how court processes can work against tenants facing eviction, and how the gap between the resources people need to navigate the court system and the assistance people receive is growing.⁷

Eviction filing data is the most commonly collected and tracked metric on eviction currently, but there is additional information on filings that are either collected and not commonly shared, or not collected at all by courts. These missed opportunities include tenant demographic information, the amount of unpaid rent claimed by a landlord, and landlord characteristics.

Demographic information: Court eviction records do not commonly include demographic information, such as tenant’s race and ethnicity, age, gender, source of income, employment status, and household demographics (e.g., number of children living at the address).⁸ In cases where demographic information is documented in court records, it is either manually entered by a court clerk or by self-identification, and is not systematic or reliable. Without associated demographic information, we must rely on approximation methods, which can be useful for understanding which populations disproportionately face eviction.⁹ Indeed, Eviction Lab’s use of these methods find that Black and Hispanic tenants, and women in particular, disproportionately face eviction. But not having associated demographic information limits the ability to understand the full range of eviction risk factors, including the disparate impacts along race, class, and gender lines.

Amount of unpaid rent being claimed by a landlord: Not all courts document information on the amount of rent landlords are claiming a tenant owes in an eviction filing. This is in part because not all formal eviction processes are designed to ensure landlords receive unpaid rent from a tenant; some formal eviction processes are primarily intended for a landlord to regain possession of their property, and the amount of unpaid rent has to be claimed separately or in addition to the lawsuit for possession. Regardless, it has been well-documented that landlords commonly file eviction lawsuits as a means to enforce rent collection, and not necessarily as a means to remove a tenant from a property.¹⁰ Knowing this information has been critical to informing minimum thresholds for eviction filing in places such as Washington, DC, where recent legislation bans eviction filings for unpaid rent less than $600, and in Los Angeles County, California, where proposed legislation would require unpaid rent to equal at least a month’s rent before an eviction can be filed.¹¹

Landlord characteristics and ownership data: The name of the plaintiff (landlord) is documented in court records, but this does not necessarily provide useful information for identifying who is filing evictions. Large landlords, in particular, often use multiple LLCs such that their name (or their company name) cannot be easily linked to the evictions filed. The challenges in identifying landlords across court records impedes our ability to understand which landlords are filing for and executing a disproportionate number of evictions in a jurisdiction. Access to this information has allowed for real-time intervention, as was the case in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, during COVID-19 when legal aid providers stepped in to address the city’s top evictor at the time: Berrada properties.¹² And as corporate landlords increasingly dominate rental markets, this kind of intervention aimed at a jurisdiction’s biggest evictors could have an outsized role on eviction filings and executed evictions.¹³

After a landlord files an eviction lawsuit in court, tenants must be notified and officially summoned to appear for any scheduled court proceedings or to respond to the lawsuit. Most courts require that a copy of the summons be included as part of the court record, but the information that would be most useful for housing entities is whether a summons complies with local laws, which is not reflected in court records.

Local laws specifying the content and delivery criteria for a summons vary across the country, but these laws typically dictate how a summons must be delivered (i.e., in-person or posted on the door), which household members can accept the summons, and what information they must include. Indeed, the information provided to a tenant in a summons can greatly contribute to their understanding of the eviction process, their rights, and the resources available to them.

But if a tenant never receives a summons, or if it is not delivered in a format or manner that can be easily understood, the information contained within the summons is besides the point. Research across the country has shown how common it is for tenants to never receive a summons, even when court records indicate otherwise.¹⁸ This is critical, because when a tenant does not show up for a hearing, the case typically results in a default judgment, allowing a landlord to formally pursue an eviction.

Over a four year period in Washington, DC, close to 20,000 tenants lost their eviction cases by not showing up to their eviction hearing, despite local investigative reporting illustrating how the companies delivering eviction summons routinely falsified accounts of their delivery.¹⁹ Without the ability to track summonses—including whether their delivery and content complies with local laws—formal evictions resulting from a tenant never having received proper notification will go unchecked, representing a fairly stunning violation of due process.

Eviction proceedings are intended to provide tenants the opportunity to argue their case and present counterclaims to the case filed against them. However, eviction proceedings have come to illustrate an imbalance between landlords and tenants,²⁰ reflecting a process built on procedural inertia that strongly favors landlords, in which tenants are commonly denied access to justice while landlords often do not need to meet the burden of proof to justify a court ordering an eviction.²¹

Information collected during eviction proceedings are either manually entered by court clerks, or taken from appearance forms filed with the court by attorneys. This information includes the date of hearings and whether a landlord has legal representation.

Missed opportunities to understand how tenants navigate court processes, and what resources are needed to avoid an unnecessary eviction include:

Tenant participation (or appearance) in proceedings: Tenants must appear at their scheduled hearing in order to win their case, and not appearing is typically automatic grounds for a landlord to win their case by default. Recent analysis of court records shows that anywhere from 30 to 50 percent of tenants lose their cases by default for not appearing at their hearing.²² Despite its significance in shaping the outcome of an eviction court case, whether a tenant appears in court or not is not commonly documented in court records. Default judgments are typically not based on any legal justification for eviction, but largely due to existing inequities that prevent tenants from appearing at their eviction hearing, including a lack of transportation, an inability to secure childcare or obtain time off from their job, and a lack of guidance on how to navigate court processes.²³ These inequities are all the more acute given that the formal eviction process unfolds incredibly fast for tenants: In most jurisdictions, the speed at which an eviction process unfolds does not allow tenants to seek out needed legal and/or financial assistance, or to adjust their schedules to accommodate a court hearing.²⁴

Tenant legal representation: Despite the fact that attorneys representing tenants or landlords in an eviction lawsuit are generally required to file an appearance with the court, landlord attorney representation is much more likely than tenant attorney representation to be officially documented. This is in large part because 90 percent of landlords in eviction court cases have legal representation, compared to 10 percent of tenants.²⁵ It is also difficult to discern discern what legal resources a tenant may have had access to because tenants may receive legal services or other legal resources to help navigate their court case via a help desk (sometimes at the court itself on the same day as the hearing) or a hotline. And while legal aid providers offer free or low-cost services to eligible tenants, the full spectrum of resources or services provided to a tenant is not likely to be reflected in court records, if it does not come in the form of formal attorney representation. And yet, legal representation has a big impact on outcomes on an eviction lawsuit: Tenants with legal representation are more likely to remain housed, owe less money, and experience fewer violations of their rights.²⁶

Ultimately, an eviction court case results in a tenant being ordered to move from their home or a tenant staying in their home, but there are several pathways that lead to one of these two outcomes. Information on eviction case outcomes is typically reflected in official court orders.

While information that courts typically collect and share on the outcome of a court case includes the date of the judgment, and whether the case resulted in a judgment in favor of a plaintiff (typically resulting in an eviction order) or a judgment in favor of a defendant, there are several other outcomes that vary based on state and local laws. These include:

• A dismissal: Eviction lawsuits can be dismissed if neither a landlord or tenant appear for their scheduled hearing; a landlord fails to properly notify a tenant of the lawsuit or made other procedural errors; or if a tenant has already vacated the property and the landlord decides to no longer pursue the case. A formal eviction cannot moved forward if a case is dismissed.
• A settlement or agreement: Landlords and tenants can enter into an agreement or settlement before a judgment is issued by the court (sometimes referred to as a “judgment by agreement”, “mediated agreement” or "stipulation"). These settlements spell out actions required by tenants and landlords, such as an agreed-upon repayment schedule, required repairs a landlord must make, or an agreement that the tenant will move out with certain stipulations (e.g., the eviction will be removed from a tenant’s record if they move out by a certain date). Because courts do not commonly document the details of settlement agreements, we know little about the nature of these agreements, who commonly enters into them, and how they impact future housing stability of tenants.
• A withdrawal: In some states, eviction cases can be withdrawn by landlords if a tenant pays the rent owed before the conclusion of the case. Withdrawals may be common in cases when landlords file evictions to enforce rent collection; a landlord files an eviction for non-payment of rent, the tenant pays the rent owed, and the landlord withdraws the case–a cycle that repeats itself each time that tenant falls behind on rent.
• A default judgment: Default judgments occur when a tenant does not appear for their scheduled court hearing, typically resulting in a judgment in favor of a landlord. In some jurisdictions, a tenant must not only show up to a court proceeding, but also answer the summons within a specified time period, where failure to answer also results in a default judgment.²⁷

Relevant information about eviction case outcomes, such as details about the settlement or whether a judgment in favor of a plaintiff is due to a default judgment, are not typically included in court records. This lack of information about outcomes limits the ability to understand the various pathways that lead to a tenant remaining in their home or facing a court-ordered eviction, as well as the impacts stemming from the different outcomes.

When a court issues an eviction order (typically following a judgment in favor of a plaintiff), tenants have a certain amount of time to move out. If a tenant does not move during this period, the court can order a writ of eviction or writ of possession, authorizing law enforcement to carry out the eviction.

While a judgment in favor of a plaintiff can tell us if a landlord won their case and has the right to pursue a formal eviction, there are several offramps between a judgment and an executed eviction, in which a family is displaced. For one, tenants can in theory appeal a judgment in favor of a plaintiff. While the process for filing an appeal is cost-prohibitive, opaque, and largely inaccessible to tenants, it is not clear from the information courts collect and share how often tenants pursue this option.²⁸

Some states, including Washington, DC, Maryland, and Virginia, have right to redemption laws, meaning that a tenant can avoid an executed eviction up until law enforcement carries out the eviction if they pay the amount ordered by the court.²⁹ Tracking information on the actions taken by tenants, landlords and law enforcement post-judgment is critical for understanding how many eviction judgments result in an executed eviction, and how prevalent an eviction is avoided through the use of other legal options.