Washington State · The Court Record, 2016–2026
Over the past year, about 1 in 47 renter households in Washington faced an eviction filing. Filings have stayed above the pre-pandemic normal for 33 straight months, and now run roughly 45% above it, with no return toward that normal in sight.
The 2020–2021 moratoria cut monthly filings to roughly a tenth of the pre-pandemic average; by mid-2023 they had climbed back through the baseline and have stayed there. April 2026 closed at 2,209 filings, and the 33-month run above baseline (since August 2023) is the longest stretch on record in the OCLA series. One policy turned filings off; another let them back on.
Each point is one month of statewide eviction filings. The dashed line marks the Jan 2017 – Feb 2020 monthly average; the most recent month is highlighted.
2025 closed at 23,968, about 45% above the pre-pandemic annual average. The dashed line on the 2026 bar is the expected full-year count, about 26,314 (a new high), and the red band shows the range, roughly 22,874 to 29,754. The most likely outcome is a record; even the low end of the band would still clear the pre-pandemic norm by a wide margin. The level itself is firm: 2024 and 2025 each ran far above the old normal, and nothing in the trend points back toward it.
Washington recorded 23,913 eviction filings in the 12 months ending April 2026, about 45% above the pre-pandemic pace of roughly 1,378 filings a month, or 16,532 a year (its 2017–2020 average). Filings have stayed above that pre-pandemic level for 33 months straight, since August 2023. These are the courts' own counts, not a model or an estimate, compiled by the Washington Office of Civil Legal Aid from all 39 superior courts, with renter-household figures from the U.S. Census American Community Survey. If the post-2023 pattern holds, 2026 is most likely to set a new high, about 26,314 filings statewide. Even the low end of the likely range (about 22,874 to 29,754) would still stand far above the pre-pandemic normal.
Washington's eviction moratorium ran from March 2020 through October 31, 2021, with a partial "bridge" afterward for tenants with rental-assistance applications pending; it cut filings to a small fraction of normal. Two forces drove the climb back. Rent outran incomes: typical asking rents across metro Seattle are up about 38% since 2017 (Zillow Observed Rent Index), and filings run highest in the counties where rent burdens are heaviest. The guardrails came down: federal emergency rental assistance and Washington's mandatory pre-filing mediation (the Eviction Resolution Pilot Program) held filings low through mid-2023. When that program ended on July 1, 2023 and rental aid ran out, filings surged that fall. Calendar 2024 passed 23,000, and 2025 edged up to 23,968. The moratorium-era floor is gone.
The pattern is mechanical: filings respond to policy, in both directions. That is the empirical floor under everything that follows, and the reason this is a problem government can actually move. After the steep 2022–2024 climb, filings have leveled off — the past year's total is down about 1% — but at a high plateau, roughly 45% above the old normal, and on current trends 2026 is more likely than not to set a record. This is not a spike that passes on its own.
Total filings each year. The dashed line marks the pre-pandemic 12-month-equivalent baseline. 2026 highlighted in red, a partial year through April.
Each line is one county's annual filing count, 2016 – 2026. Red lines mark the 21 counties whose record year was 2024 or 2025; muted steel-blue lines are counties whose peak years pre-date the pandemic. King leads by volume, 1,066 filings in March 2026, the highest single month for any Washington county, because it is the largest county. By rate, as the next map shows, King is not even in the top five; the heaviest per-capita burden sits elsewhere.
Find your county or address on the map below. Drag the slider under the map to pick any window from January 2016 on; the map and the stats card update as you go. (Washington's court feed reports county-level counts only, so the map stays at county scale.)
By rate (filings per 1,000 renter households), the heaviest burden falls on the fast-growing suburbs and the mid-size counties of eastern and southwest Washington: Clark (33.2), Pierce (29.9), Snohomish (25.3), Thurston (25.2), and Spokane (23.7). Spokane and the Tri-Cities (Benton–Franklin) sit at or above King County. (Counties under ~1,500 renter households are kept out of this ranking, where a handful of filings can swing the number, but they remain on the map and in the table.)
King tells the other half of the story. The state's largest county and home to Seattle, it files by far the most cases of any county, and its filings are still rising: 1,066 in March 2026 set a single-month record for the state. So the burden is both broad and deep: heaviest per person around the metro fringes, largest in sheer volume in King. This pattern is the suburbanization of eviction that researchers have documented across U.S. metros (Rutan, Hepburn & Desmond, 2023), and it means almost every legislator, urban or rural, has constituents somewhere in this data.
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 two factors the statistical model identified as most strongly tied to higher eviction-filing rates. The other is a county's Black population share, a structural signal of where disinvestment and segregation concentrate, not a statement about individuals. Affordability is shown as rent burden, not AMI.
The statewide rate is 21.5 filings per 1,000 renter households; the 39 counties range from the suburban leaders at the top down to rural courts with only a handful of filings a year. Find your county: filter by name or sort any column to see exactly where a district stands.
Type a county name to filter; click a column header to sort. Scroll to see all 39. Each row's rate is shown as a horizontal bar (scale 0–45 per 1,000 renter HH); the leader is highlighted in red. Counties marked † have fewer than 1,500 renter households, so their rates swing on a handful of filings; they're held out of the headline top-five rankings.
| County | Renter HH | Filings (12 mo.) | Rate / 1,000 |
|---|
The fixes are known, and none works alone. Eviction responds to a handful of well-studied tools, and the research is clear on which act fastest. Building affordable housing is the durable cure, but it takes years; rental aid and tenant protections work now, and each leaks without the others. The strongest record belongs to the steps that keep a household housed and make the landlord whole in a single move — paying the rent that's owed and settling before the case reaches court. Below, each lever is paired with what the evidence shows and where Washington stands.
Why a one-time check so often works. Most of these filings are for nonpayment of rent (Humphries et al., 2024), and for households living close to the edge a missed payment is almost always a cash-flow problem rather than a choice — the money is not there that month. That is why a targeted, one-time payment can save a tenancy and pay the landlord the rent owed. The fuller county-level analysis, with methods and the other drivers the model identified, is in the eviction-determinants report.
The pieces fit together. The eviction debate is usually cast as landlords against tenants, yet the best-supported steps are the ones where those interests align rather than collide. Targeted rental assistance settles the actual debt and pays the housing provider directly. Mediation and diversion are well-tested too: Texas ran a statewide program through its Supreme Court that paid landlords what they were owed and cleared the case. And more supply is the long-run fix everyone can name. None of these asks a landlord to absorb a loss, and each works better alongside the others than on its own.
The evidence points to four kinds of fixes, the four P's: prevent the filing before court, protect tenants in it, preserve the low-cost homes that exist, and produce more. The last three are the Urban Displacement Project's anti-displacement framework (Cash & Zuk, Investment Without Displacement); prevention is the lever the court data puts first. The graphic ranks each by documented effect (Tier 1 = largest and fastest). The four work as a sequence, not a menu: the fast levers — emergency aid and pre-court mediation — hold families in place during the years it takes new affordable housing to come online. The entries below pair the national evidence with where Washington stands, strongest documented effect first.
Tier 1: the largest documented effect, and the most cross-partisan. Emergency Rental Assistance during the pandemic prevented an estimated 673,000 evictions nationwide across studied counties (about 45% below what pre-pandemic trends would have predicted) and cut the odds of street homelessness 60–65% (Keeping People in Their Homes; Aiken & Reina, 2022). The money clears the arrears the landlord is owed, and the National Apartment Association lobbied for it to be paid directly to owners. Washington's Eviction Rent Assistance Program distributed federal ERA through the Department of Commerce. After the federal money ran out, filings climbed back above the Jan 2017 – Feb 2020 pre-pandemic average within a year. The priority is a permanent, state-funded program.
The math. At roughly $6,000–$10,000 a household, assistance offsets the shelter and turnover costs a completed eviction sets in motion, and a landlord recovers rent instead of writing it off and re-leasing. The published effect sizes are transported from other cities and carry ±50% uncertainty; the direction is not in doubt.
Tier 1: Washington ran one and let it expire. Before a nonpayment case could be heard, Washington's Eviction Resolution Pilot Program (RCW 59.18.660, statewide from November 2021) required a landlord to seek dispute-resolution mediation first. The state's own evaluation (Administrative Office of the Courts, July 2022) found a 78% settlement rate and most cases diverted from court. The program ended on July 1, 2023, and filings surged that fall, the upturn visible in the trend at the top of this page. The model is well-tested beyond Washington: through pandemic-era emergency orders, the Texas Supreme Court ran a statewide eviction-diversion program (2021–2023) that paused cases while landlords were repaid through federal rental aid. Before that funding ran out, it cleared more than $243 million in rent for over 25,000 households, stopping the evictions and sealing the court records (Texas Office of Court Administration, 2023). Reinstating Washington's is among the clearest near-term levers.
The math. Mediation is inexpensive next to a contested court case and the vacancy that follows. A 78% settlement rate is 78% of disputes resolved without a courtroom, a direct saving to the judiciary and to both parties.
Tier 1: Washington led the nation. Washington became the first U.S. state to guarantee tenants a lawyer in eviction court (SB 5160, 2021; RCW 59.18.640), administered by the Office of Civil Legal Aid. Where it reaches tenants, it works: the agency's own outcome data show represented tenants are markedly less likely to face a writ of restitution, and more likely to win a dismissal or keep the case off their screening record. But a 2025 University of Washington study finds it still reaches fewer than half of eligible tenants, as demand has outrun funding (von Geldern & Martin, Stanford Law & Policy Review). The highest-leverage fix needs no change in law: proactive outreach and automatic referral at the notice or summons stage. A lawyer does not pay the rent, so counsel works best paired with assistance that clears the debt.
The math. In New York City's universal-access program, tenants who got a lawyer were about 62% less likely to face a possessory judgment (Cassidy & Currie, 2022), at a few thousand dollars per case. In a high-shelter-cost metro like Seattle, avoided shelter and emergency spending offset much of that cost; read the ratio with ±50% uncertainty.
Tier 2: the structural floor. Washington holds several lasting protections the literature names: just-cause eviction (RCW 59.18.650), which ends no-cause terminations; and source-of-income protection (RCW 59.18.255), which roughly halves landlord voucher-denial rates and unlocks public dollars already committed (Cunningham et al., 2018). In 2025 it added statewide rent stabilization (HB 1217), capping annual increases at 7% + CPI (10% max). Economists warn that rent control can chill construction, but that evidence comes mostly from rigid laws with no exemption for new building; HB 1217 instead exempts new construction for 12 years — the same kind of carve-out Oregon and California use (theirs run 15), for the same reason. Whether a high cap with that exemption affects supply is genuinely contested and too new to read against the trend — we flag it as enacted, not settled. These protections hold the floor; on their own they do not stop a nonpayment filing, which is why the first three levers carry the largest documented effect.
The math. Just-cause is essentially zero fiscal cost; source-of-income protection makes vouchers the public already funds actually usable. Both work without asking a landlord to forgo owed rent.
The long-run fix, and the slowest. Nothing lowers rents durably except more homes, and especially homes reachable below market. Washington has among the fewest housing units per household of any state and needs about 1.1 million more by 2044, the largest share for its lowest-income households (WA Dept. of Commerce). The market will not reach them on its own: there are only 28 affordable, available homes for every 100 of the state's lowest-income renters (NLIHC, The Gap). Supply reforms work (after a building surge, Austin's rents fell about 19% after inflation; Pew, 2026), but they take years, which is why they must be paired with preserving the low-cost homes that already exist (curbing serial filings, keeping naturally affordable units in place). Supply and protections pull in the same direction: building is the long-run cure, and the first four levers keep families housed until it arrives.
The math. New affordable homes are expensive and slow, but they are the only lever that ends the shortage rather than managing it, and every household held in place meanwhile is one that does not need a far costlier new unit, or a shelter bed, tomorrow.
The causal evidence here is unusually clean. Using eviction cases assigned at random to harsher or more lenient judges, economists at Notre Dame, Yale, and the Federal Reserve, drawing on restricted U.S. Census Bureau records, isolated what an eviction itself does: in the two years after, it raises the chance of entering a homeless shelter more than threefold, cuts earnings about 14%, and damages credit and health (Collinson et al., Quarterly Journal of Economics, 2024). Eviction is a cause of hardship, not merely a symptom of it — and a documented on-ramp to homelessness.
That is why the arithmetic favors prevention. Averting one instance of homelessness through emergency help costs on the order of $10,000 per household (Evans, Sullivan & Wallskog, Science, 2016), while a person who becomes chronically homeless costs the public roughly $35,000 a year in shelter, hospital, and jail costs (National Alliance to End Homelessness). One careful study puts the return on prevention at about $2.47 for every $1 spent (Phillips & Sullivan, Santa Clara County randomized trial, 2023). A completed eviction doesn't erase that cost; it moves it downstream, to a shelter bed, an emergency room, or a classroom a child changes mid-year, and the landlord still isn't paid.
Two of the tools that bent the curve are no longer operating. Washington's statewide pre-filing mediation program ended in July 2023, and the federal emergency rental aid that held filings down has been spent. With those supports gone and filings near record highs, restoring prevention is both the most effective step and the cheapest.
Federal support is also uncertain. As of June 8, 2026, HUD has proposed, but not finalized, a rule that would let housing agencies place work requirements and two-year time limits on rental assistance (the public comment period closed May 1, 2026), and the pandemic-era Emergency Housing Voucher program is winding down with no permanent replacement; a proposed FY2027 federal budget would also cut HUD funding (Congressional Research Service), though Congress has not adopted it. A time limit or work test moves a household toward independence only if there is housing it can afford once the aid ends, and the evidence shows there usually is not: the affected households are working-age and low-income, many already working, market rents already run above what they earn, and the lowest-cost homes are roughly 183,000 short (NLIHC, The Gap). Ending assistance in that setting tends to produce eviction, not self-sufficiency. For Washington, the lesson is that it cannot count on current federal support holding, which makes the state levers above matter all the more. The wider tract-by-tract picture is in ERN's Housing Precarity Risk Model; the drivers, in the eviction-determinants report.
Aggregate eviction filings are sourced from the Washington Office of Civil Legal Aid (OCLA), which compiles monthly unlawful-detainer (UD) case counts from each of Washington's 39 superior courts. The OCLA series covers January 2016 – April 2026; charts end at April 2026. The feed reports court-side counts only: no defendant identifiers, addresses, party-level fields, or filing reasons, so the race-disparity analysis featured on other ERN state profiles is not run here. Renter-household denominators come from the American Community Survey 5-year estimates (table B25003) at the county and state level; cost-burden shares (renters paying 30% or more of income on rent) come from ACS table B25070.
A note on counts. The numbers above reflect counts reported by each superior court to the Washington Office of Civil Legal Aid. The series is reasonably complete back to 2016, but the most recent month or two may still be settling as smaller-county clerks file their monthly reports. A filing is the start of a case, not a removal or a judgment; most resolve short of a lockout, so we report it as a leading indicator of housing distress. The rate counts filings rather than distinct households, so a renter household taken to court more than once in a year is counted each time. King County's UD case-number format historically differed from the other 38 counties; OCLA's compilation harmonizes them upstream, so the counts here are directly comparable across counties.
Figure 2 projection. The dashed extension on the 2026 bar is a year-end estimate from a seasonal ARIMA model fit to monthly statewide filings from January 2023 onward (the post-recovery plateau). The auto-selected order on this release is SARIMA(3,1,0)(1,0,0)[12] (forecast::auto.arima in R). We forecast the eight months remaining in 2026, sum them with the year-to-date actual (8,655 filings through April 2026), and report the expected count (~26,314) plus an 80% range of 22,874–29,754. It does not account for policy or economic shocks (a new moratorium, a court-system backlog, an enforcement change), which would shift the trajectory in ways the model can't see. As a robustness check, a longer-window SARIMA and an exponential-smoothing (ETS) model both land within about one percent of this estimate. In plain terms: the dashed line is the expected count, but the real 2026 total could come in anywhere across that range, and because the bottom of it falls below 2025's 23,968, a flat or slightly-down year is not ruled out.
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; labels stay constant, numeric thresholds float to the data on screen.
For ERN-wide methodology see the methodology page. Code at github.com/evictionresearch/washington. Prior Washington research is archived at the State of Evictions in Washington, 2020 report.
On the structure. Each chart is numbered and titled with a claim sentence, followed by a short interpretive description: the finding stated plainly, then the evidence behind it. The data, the methods, and the conclusions are the Eviction Research Network's.
Data delivered: 2026-06-05. Profile rendered: 2026-06-05.