Washington State · The Court Record, 2016–2026
July 2026 set a new state record in filing counts. For the past 38 months, 1 in 44 renter households in Washington faced an eviction filing, roughly 52% above the pre-pandemic normal, with every month exceeding pre-pandemic levels since August 2023.
Below is the monthly count of statewide filings. The moratorium cut them to as few as 47 in May 2020, but since August 2023 every month has run above the pre-pandemic average (the dashed line). July 2026 closed at 2,413, the single highest month in the data. August and September came in lower, as they did last year, but all three months were busier than the prior year: together, 17% above July through September 2025.
The dashed line is the Jan 2017 – Feb 2020 monthly average; the shaded block is the pandemic moratoria; the most recent month is highlighted. The projection buttons extend the line 3, 6, or 12 months with the same seasonal model behind Figure 2's year-end estimate: the red dashed line is the expected count and the band the range the real count should fall in four times out of five. It assumes no change in policy or the economy. Rising costs and federal cuts to housing assistance, some already under way and others proposed, could push the actual count toward the top of that range.
Each bar is one year of statewide filings. The horizontal dashed line marks the pre-pandemic average. Washington passed 2019's full-year total in July 2026 and stands at 19,643 filings through September, nine months in. By the end of 2026 it is projected to close on the highest count on record, between 25,554 and 27,131 cases.
Hover or tap any bar for its total. 2026 is a partial year through September; the solid part of its bar is the count so far. Pick a county to see its own bars and pre-pandemic pace; a county's projected 2026 is its share of the statewide projection (its share of the past 12 months' filings), so it carries no range of its own.
Each line is one county. The red lines are the 21 counties whose busiest full year was 2024 or 2025; the muted blue lines peaked earlier. In the yearly view, 2026 is dashed: each county's count so far plus its share of the statewide projection. King County files by far the most cases because it has the state's largest renter population, and its March and July 2026 counts (1,066 and 995) are the two highest any county has filed in a single month. But counts and rates are not the same. Measured against the number of renters, King falls to ninth in the state. The highest rates are in the suburbs and mid-size counties. The map below shows where those rates are highest.
Rates (the number of filings per 1,000 renter households) show which counties are hit hardest regardless of how many renters they have. A higher rate in one county than another points to conditions there that raise the risk of eviction, such as a cost burden that wages cannot meet. The map below shows those rates. The heaviest burden falls on the suburbs and mid-size counties, among them Clark, Pierce, Snohomish, Thurston, and Spokane. King County ranks ninth of 39 even though it files the most cases, more in the past year than Pierce, Snohomish, and Clark combined.
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 2016 on.
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 22.7 filings per 1,000 renter households, and the counties range from the suburban leaders at the top down to rural courts with a handful of filings a year. Find your county: filter by name or sort any column. Counties marked † have fewer than 1,500 renter households, so a few filings swing their rate.
| County | Filings (12 mo.)selected window | Renter HH | Rate / 1,000per 1,000 renter HH, annualized | Change in ratestart to end of window |
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Washington's statewide count comes from one place: the Administrative Office of the Courts, which keeps the records of all 39 superior courts. That is the source behind this page. We receive the counts through the Office of Civil Legal Aid, which gets them from the AOC and shares them with us. It is a count of cases, not a file of them.
Washington has less independent eviction data collection than a state its size might suggest. The two efforts that went deepest, King County's and the University of Washington's, have both ended; what they produced is history now rather than a live feed.
That gap is one we are working to close. The Eviction Research Network, in collaboration with the University of Washington, is rebuilding case-level collection county by county, working with superior court clerks to obtain the filing records the statewide counts leave out. Those records carry the party information the statewide feed does not, which is what makes demographic estimation possible. We expect to publish the first demographic estimates for Washington at the beginning of 2027, bringing this profile in line with our Minnesota and Indiana pages.
Filing counts are the Washington Administrative Office of the Courts' unlawful-detainer counts from all 39 superior courts, January 2016 through September 2026, shared with us by the Office of Civil Legal Aid until our own AOC data agreement is in place. Renter-household denominators come from the American Community Survey (2020–2024 five-year estimates). 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. The full methodology, including the projection model and every caveat, comes with the report.
Profile rendered: 2026-10-22.
This page shows what the court record counts. A fuller report is in preparation on why filings have risen, what has changed in Washington eviction policy and the courts over the past year, and which measures have documented effects on the number of filings. The data behind this page is available now.
Download the data (ZIP, 26 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 county ACS figures behind the map card.