Minnesota State Profile
Eviction filings have risen above the 2017–2019 baseline for four straight months, and the rolling 12-month total is up 13.3% year-over-year. The Black-vs-white filing-rate disparity has widened to 1.52×.
Minnesota saw 14,921 eviction filings in the 12 months ending March 2026 — 1.7 percent above the 2017–2019 monthly average of 1,222 filings. The state has been above that pre-pandemic baseline for four consecutive months (since December 2025). April 2026 is held out: the month's filings are still moving as expungement clears, so trend numbers cut at March 2026 (see methodology).
Pandemic-era moratoria suppressed filings sharply through 2021 — Minnesota's own state moratorium ran from March 2020 until June 1, 2022, when the last protections (for tenants with pending COVID-19 housing-assistance applications) expired. The 2022–2023 recovery briefly overshot the prior norm before settling. Since January 2024, filings have climbed steadily and the rolling 12-month total is now up 13.3 percent year-over-year, back above the 2017–2019 pre-pandemic monthly average.
The 2020–2022 moratoria cut monthly filings to as little as a quarter of the pre-pandemic average; by late 2023 they had climbed back through the baseline. March 2026 closed at 1,482 filings, and the four-month run above baseline (since December 2025) is the longest stretch since 2019.
Each point is one month of statewide eviction filings. The dashed line marks the 2017–2019 monthly average; the most recent month is highlighted.
The 2022–2023 rebound briefly overshot the prior norm, then settled. 2025 closed at 14,101 — about 4% below the 2017–2019 annual average. Q1 2026 is tracking on a similar pace.
Total filings each year. The dashed line marks the pre-pandemic 12-month-equivalent baseline. 2026 highlighted in red — partial year through March (April 2026 held out, still in expungement clean-up).
Ramsey, Dakota, and Anoka counties post the highest 12-month filing rates per 1,000 renter households (40.1, 34.8, 33.7). Scott (27.6) and Hennepin (26.2) round out the top five.
Hennepin — the state's largest county by population — has moved into the top tier this cycle but still trails its suburban neighbors materially. The pattern is consistent with the suburbanization of eviction documented across post-2015 metros.
The county view shows the suburban leaders. Zoom past level 8 and the map switches to census tracts, revealing sub-county variation that the county aggregate masks.
The map defaults to the last 12 months ending March 2026. Drag the slider beneath the map to pick any time window from January 2017 onward — both the choropleth and the stats card below update live. Hover for a quick read; click any polygon for its full profile (filings, rank, monthly trend, race breakdown) in the card. Click a legend tier to isolate it. Counties show at lower zoom; census tracts emerge as you zoom past 8, and the bin thresholds reweigh accordingly.
If the map appears blank or stuck, refresh the page — it resets the slider, the legend, and the map state.
filings per 1,000 renter HH (annualized), by defendant race. Tract-level race bars require county-or-state granularity — zoom out for race breakouts.
Drag the handles to resize the window, or grab the connecting bar to slide it through time while keeping the same length. Pick exact dates below if you want a precise edge. The map and stats card update with the window.
Twelve Minnesota counties exceed the statewide rate of 23.9 filings per 1,000 renter households; the other 75 sit below. Filter by county name or sort any column to interrogate the rest.
Type a county name to filter; click a column header to sort. Scroll to see all 87. Each row's rate is shown as a horizontal bar (scale 0–45 per 1,000 renter HH); the leader is highlighted in red.
| County | Renter HH | Filings (12 mo.) | Rate / 1,000 |
|---|
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.
The Black/white disparity is 1.52×, and filing rates rose across 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 methodology. Note: Asian renters are folded into the "Other" category for reliability reasons; see methods for the rationale.
Across Minnesota, Black renters face an estimated 33.5 filings per 1,000 renter households per year; Latine renters 27.5; the “Other” group 23.4; white renters 22.1. The 2020–2022 moratorium suppressed every group's rate; since early 2024 all four lines have climbed back above their pre-pandemic baselines and moved up together. Lines are smoothed with a 12-month rolling mean.
Each line is the ratio of that group's 12-month filing rate to the white rate; 1.0 = parity. The Black–white ratio has climbed from 1.41× in early 2024 to 1.52× in March 2026 — its widest point in the post-moratorium era. The Latine–white ratio is 1.24×; the “Other” group sits within 6% of the white rate.
Filing rates are not a fixed natural rate. Minnesota's own 2020–2022 eviction moratorium cut filings to roughly a quarter of the prior norm — proof of concept that the system responds to policy. Beyond moratoria, a research literature now documents specific, scalable interventions that lower the filing floor or limit the downstream damage of a filing that does happen.
For each lever, this section names the seminal evidence and Minnesota's current status — what's in law, what's funded, what's partial, and what's in motion. Minnesota's record offers other states both useful precedents and unfinished work.
Four levers consistently show up in the post-2015 research literature as reducing filings or their displacement cost. Each item below pairs the national evidence with Minnesota's current status: what's in law, what's funded, what's partial, what's in motion.
MN, 2021–2022 (large scale), continued at smaller scale in 2024. Emergency Rental Assistance during the pandemic prevented roughly 673,000 evictions across studied counties — about 45% below what pre-pandemic trends would have predicted — and produced large reductions in moves and homelessness where it reached families. The ERN / Housing Initiative at Penn working paper, Keeping People in Their Homes: The Impact of Emergency Rental Assistance on Evictions (Deshpande et al., 2026, under review), is the comprehensive empirical study, combining Legal Services Corporation court data, Treasury ERA payment records, and Census demographics across 700+ counties in 21 states; see also the synthesis at the Housing Initiative at Penn / NLIHC (Aiken & Reina, 2022). Minnesota's RentHelpMN distributed $428 million to 58,600 households between April 2021 and January 2022. Statewide filings stayed at roughly a quarter of the pre-pandemic norm through 2021, then rose above the 2017–2019 average within a year of the program's closure. In 2024, the Minnesota legislature appropriated $50 million in emergency rental assistance through the Family Homelessness Prevention and Assistance Program (FHPAP); MN ERASE continues to push for a permanent emergency-rental-assistance program.
MN, partial — public housing only. Right to counsel rebalances a court process in which landlords have historically been represented and tenants typically have not, helping tenants navigate a complex legal system and understand the rights already on the books. Minn. Stat. § 504B.268 guarantees this right for tenants in federal Section 9 public housing facing eviction; the 2024 legislature expanded coverage to Rental Assistance Demonstration (RAD) housing. Most Minnesota counties lack the legal-aid capacity to extend counsel to private-market tenants at scale; Minneapolis is moving toward universal access for all low-income renters. Cross-jurisdictional evidence: New York City's universal-access program reduced default judgments and improved tenant outcomes (Cassidy & Currie, NBER WP 29836, 2022); national tracking at the National Coalition for a Civil Right to Counsel.
MN, mandatory sealing on tenant-favorable outcomes. Automatic sealing prevents an eviction filing — even one dismissed or won by the tenant — from following a renter into the next housing search, where tenant-screening companies routinely use such records to deny applications. Minn. Stat. § 484.014 subd. 3 (effective January 1, 2024) automatically seals dismissed, foreclosure-only, and tenant-prevailing eviction cases without requiring a tenant motion — flipping the burden off the household. The 2024 statute places Minnesota in a group of recent reform states (alongside Arizona, Maryland, Massachusetts, DC, and others) that seal records on tenant-favorable resolutions; California and Colorado go further by sealing at filing, and Utah and Idaho add time-based sealing. MN Courts publishes the official forms packet for tenant-initiated expungement of older records; HOME Line's 2024 legislative-changes summary walks through the statute's reach.
MN, baseline since 1973 — strengthening in motion. Source-of-income protection bars landlords from refusing to rent to tenants who pay with Section 8 vouchers or other rental assistance — a fundamental anti-discrimination protection that determines whether voucher-holders can find housing at all. The Minnesota Human Rights Act has prohibited this form of discrimination for half a century. A 2024 effort to strengthen enforcement and statutory clarity ran out of time; SF 2097 in the 2025 session reintroduces and clarifies the protections. Cross-state evidence on the policy lever itself: Cunningham et al., A Pilot Study of Landlord Acceptance of Housing Choice Vouchers (Urban Institute, 2018).
Eviction is one pressure point in a larger displacement system. A single filing rarely sits alone: it joins the longer story of who is priced out of which neighborhoods, who carries the record into the next housing search, and who is pushed into precarious housing or homelessness downstream. The Eviction Research Network's Housing Precarity Risk Model (HPRM) maps that wider pressure tract-by-tract; the filings on this page are one input into the broader picture.
Beyond the courtroom levers above, the displacement literature converges on three reinforcing strategies — production of affordable housing, preservation of existing affordable stock, and tenant protections. The right mix is context-dependent: hot-market metros need preservation and protections most urgently; weak-market regions need production paired with anti-displacement guards as investment returns. For the framework see Cash & Zuk, “Investment Without Displacement: From Slogan to Strategy” (Urban Displacement Project, 2019); for a peer-reviewed literature review see Chapple, Loukaitou-Sideris, Miller, & Zeger (Journal of Planning Literature, 2023).
Case-level eviction filings are sourced from the Legal Services Corporation, covering January 2017 – April 2026 in the underlying data file; charts and rates end at March 2026 — April 2026 is held out because its expungement / dismissal clean-up is still in progress, so the published April 2026 count will keep falling for months (see methodology brief). Defendant addresses were geocoded by ESRI; race is estimated by combining WRU fBISG (Bayesian Improved Surname Geocoding with first names + tract priors) at the individual level with the birdie ecological inference model at the tract level. Rethnicity fills in for WRU-ineligible names. Renter-household denominators come from the American Community Survey 5-year estimates (table B25003).
A note on Asian estimates. WRU's surname dictionary is trained predominantly on Southern-state voter files, which underrepresents Asian households and conflates Asian with MENA names. Rather than report unreliable Asian-specific numbers — especially material for Minnesota's Hmong population — we collapse Asian, AIAN, and residual-other into a single "Other" category at every level. The collapsed share was validated against ACS at Hennepin County (within 1.4 percentage points); we don't make tract-level Asian-specific claims.
A note on counts. The numbers above reflect what LSC carries — cases that persisted on the public court record at the time of the May 2026 data drop. Minnesota's automatic-expungement statute (Minn. Stat. § 484.014 subd. 3, effective 2024) removes dismissed, foreclosure-only, and tenant-prevailed cases from the public-access channel that LSC consumes. As a result, LSC's count for any given month shrinks as court cleanup runs — about 1.5% per drop for older years, and roughly half for cohorts within the last twelve months. For that reason we hold out the most recent month of data (April 2026 in this release): its dismissals and expungements are still being processed, so its published count is the highest it will ever be and will keep dropping over the next 6–12 months. Charts, stats, and the map all end at March 2026; April 2026 will be added back once the cohort settles. Eviction Lab and HOME Line pull from MCRO and report filings as initially recorded, before cleanup; they show ~30–46% more cases for recent years. The two views answer different questions: LSC ≈ evictions that stuck; EL/HOME Line ≈ tenants who got sued. See the full methodology brief for the comparison and supporting CSVs.
Map bins (Lower / Moderate / High / Extreme). The four-tier choropleth uses Jenks-equivalent natural breaks computed with the ckmeans algorithm. Each polygon's value is the annualized rate — filings in the active window, scaled to a 12-month equivalent and divided by renter households — so a 3-month window and a 5-year window are directly comparable. Bins recompute every time the slider moves and every time the user crosses the county↔tract zoom boundary: county-fill (zoom < 8) reads thresholds from the 87 county rates; tract-fill (zoom ≥ 8) reads thresholds from the ~1,500 tract rates, clustered on tracts with at least 50 renter households so single-tract small-N noise can't widen the bins. Labels stay constant; numeric thresholds float to the data on screen.
For ERN-wide methodology see the methodology page. Code at github.com/evictionresearch/minnesota.
On the plate framing. The numbered-plate structure and chapter naming on this page draw on W. E. B. Du Bois's data plates for the 1900 Paris Exposition (see also Nightingale on the craft and design). Du Bois and his team — including Booker T. Washington, Thomas Calloway, Daniel Murray, and Atlanta University students — built the original plates in six weeks, by hand, to present African American life as quantified evidence to an international audience. The data, the methods, and the conclusions on this page are ours; the plate framing is in lineage.
Data delivered: 2026-05-27. Profile rendered: 2026-05-27.