Minnesota · The Court Record, 2017–2026
Over the past year, Minnesota courts recorded about one eviction filing for every 42 renter households. Filings crossed back above the pre-pandemic average in December 2025 and are rising, with the past year’s total up 13.3% from the year before. Black renters face filing rates about 1.5 times those of white renters.
Below is the monthly count of statewide filings. The 2020–21 moratorium cut them to less than a tenth of the pre-pandemic average. Filings rose above that average in 2022 and 2023 as emergency rental assistance wound down, eased through 2024, and crossed back above it in December 2025. March 2026 closed at 1,482 filings, the second-highest March in the series. The series ends in March because the newest month of each court-data delivery is still shrinking as cases are expunged, so we leave it out until it settles.
The dashed line marks the Jan 2017 – Feb 2020 monthly average, the shaded block is the moratorium, and the most recent month is highlighted.
Each bar is one year of statewide filings, and the dashed line marks the pre-pandemic average. 2025 closed at 14,101 filings, just under that average, but filings crossed it in December and have stayed above it every month since. The first three months of 2026 (4,123 filings) are running about 25% ahead of the same months of 2025. Because Minnesota's automatic expungement keeps removing dismissed cases from the record, the recent bars undercount the households that were sued.
Hover or tap any bar for its total. 2026, in red, is a partial year through March. Pick a county to see its own bars and pre-pandemic pace.
Each line is one county. The red lines are the three counties (Carver, Roseau, and Kittson) whose busiest year since 2017 was 2024 or 2025; the gray lines peaked earlier, 20 of them in 2017 and 38 in the 2022–23 rebound. The recent rise is broad. 44 of 87 counties filed more in the 12 months ending March 2026 than in the year before, including Hennepin (up 19 percent), Ramsey (up 13), and Anoka (up 32), and 5 counties, led by Anoka and Scott, opened 2026 at their highest January–March on record. Hennepin files the most (516 cases in March 2026, its third-highest month in the series) because it is the largest county. Measured against the number of renters, it trails Ramsey, Dakota, and Anoka, as the map below shows.
Rates (the number of filings per 1,000 renter households) show which counties are hit hardest regardless of how many renters they have. The map below shows those rates. The heaviest burden falls on the counties around Minneapolis: Ramsey (40.1), Dakota (34.8), and Anoka (33.7) post the highest 12-month rates, with Scott (27.6) and Hennepin (26.2) rounding out the top five among counties with at least 5,000 renter households. Hennepin County, the state's largest and home to Minneapolis, files by far the most cases, 5,135 in the past year. Researchers have documented the same suburbanization of eviction across U.S. metros (Rutan, Hepburn & Desmond, 2023).
Find your county or address on the map below. Click any county for its filings, its rate, and who rents there; drag the slider under the map to pick any window from January 2017 on. Zoom in past 8 and the map switches to census-tract detail (the tract layer shows the latest 12 months).
If the map appears blank or stuck, refresh the page; it resets the slider, the legend, and the map state.
Drag the handles to resize the window, or grab the bar to slide it through time. Or type exact dates. The map and stats card follow.
ACS 5-year, 2020–2024. The ▲ marks severe rent burden, one of the factors most strongly tied to higher filing rates in ERN's cross-state analysis. Affordability is shown as rent burden, not AMI.
The statewide rate is 23.9 filings per 1,000 renter households, and the 87 counties range from the metro counties at the top down to rural courts with a handful of filings a year. Find your county by filtering by name, or sort any column.
| County | Filings (12 mo.)selected window | Renter HH | Rate / 1,000per 1,000 renter HH, annualized | Change in ratestart to end of window |
|---|
Across Minnesota, Black renters are filed against at an estimated 33.5 per 1,000 renter households per year, compared with 22.1 for white renters. Latine renters face an elevated rate of 27.5. Black renters make up about 14 percent of Minnesota's renter households but about 19 percent of the estimated eviction filings in the past year.
The Black-white disparity has widened since the pandemic. The ratio is now 1.52, up from 1.41 a year ago, and filing rates rose for every group. Defendant race is estimated from surname and tract-level demographics, combining WRU (fBISG) at the individual level with the birdie ecological inference model at the tract level (see the methodology note).
Annualized rate per 1,000 renter households of each race-ethnicity group, smoothed with a 12-month rolling mean.
The same rates as Figure 5, each divided by the white rate, so 1.0 is parity and the distance from that line is the disparity itself. Before the pandemic the Black rate ran 1.06 to 1.14 times the white rate. It sat below parity for 18 months while the moratorium held filings to about 611 a month, roughly half their normal volume, then climbed every year after, reaching 1.52 in March 2026, up from 1.41 a year earlier. The gap is wider now than it was before the pandemic.
The counts on this page come from case records that the Legal Services Corporation compiles from Minnesota's district courts and shares with us. Each case is a filing on the public record, and we estimate the race of the defendant from name and neighborhood, which is what makes the rates by race possible.
Minnesota's court records change after a case is filed. Dismissed and tenant-prevailed cases are expunged and leave the public record, so a count taken months later is smaller than a count taken as cases are filed. Trackers that read the courts' public access system as cases arrive report more filings than this page does; the two answer different questions, and both are listed below.
Filing counts are eviction cases from Minnesota's district courts, January 2017 through March 2026, from the Legal Services Corporation's May 2026 delivery. Defendant addresses were geocoded by ESRI. Race is estimated by combining WRU fBISG (surname, first name, and tract) at the individual level with the birdie ecological inference model at the tract level; rethnicity fills in for names WRU cannot score. Renter-household denominators come from the American Community Survey 5-year estimates (2020–2024, table B25003). Minnesota's automatic expungement statute (Minn. Stat. § 484.014) removes dismissed and tenant-prevailed cases from the public record LSC draws on, so each month's count shrinks for about a year after filing. The newest month of each delivery is therefore left out (the May 2026 delivery runs through April; this page reports through March). Trackers that count cases as first filed show roughly 35 to 46 percent more for 2020 to 2023 and about 80 percent more for 2024 and 2025 (methodology brief). A filing is the start of a court case, not a removal, and the court record understates displacement: national survey data finds about 5.5 informal evictions (moves forced without a court case) for every formal one (Gromis & Desmond, 2021), so a low filing rate is not by itself evidence of housing security. For ERN-wide methods see the methodology page.
Data delivered: 2026-05-01. Profile rendered: 2026-10-30.
This page shows what the court record counts. A fuller report is in preparation on what has changed in Minnesota eviction policy and the courts, and which measures have documented effects on the number of filings. The data behind this page is available now.
Download the data (ZIP, 42 KB)
Everything behind this page, in four CSVs with a README: statewide filings by month, filings by county and month, the same by year with rates, and the statewide rates by race behind Figures 5 and 6.