An Analysis of DC Eviction Filings: June Through October 2025

Each year, tens of thousands of District of Columbia residents are threatened with eviction. This profoundly destabilizing experience can lead to displacement, homelessness, job loss, adverse health and educational impacts, and downward economic mobility—and it disproportionately affects Black and Latino families, as well as families with young children. As the city’s rents continue to climb—the National Low Income Housing Coalition estimates that a DC resident earning minimum wage in 2025 would need to work 90 hours a week to afford a modest one-bedroom apartment—housing stability feels out of reach for many DC residents.

Meanwhile, 2025 has not been kind to the nation’s capital.

The Trump administration’s layoffs and buyouts of tens of thousands of federal workers have caused DC’s unemployment rate to rise to the highest in the nation in recent months. The nation’s longest-ever federal government shutdown, which lasted from October 1 through November 12, contributed to economic pain and uncertainty for DC residents. The impact of lost wages is having ripple effects across the District, causing sharp declines in consumer spending and particularly impacting the service industry.

Aggressive immigration enforcement across what is still purportedly a sanctuary city is further exacerbating this economic pain and traumatizing entire neighborhoods. Beginning this spring, but particularly since August 11 when the federal government compelled DC’s police force to cooperate with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security on widespread immigration arrests, thousands of DC residents have been detained by federal immigration agents. The disruption and fear caused by increased surveillance, harassment, and detainment has chilled immigrant communities’ ability to earn a living and pay rent.

As DC renters begin to absorb the impacts of these economic and policing upheavals, they face a changing housing policy landscape. In late September, the DC Council passed the RENTAL Act, which increases the speed with which landlords can evict tenants and weakens certain tenant protections. When this law goes into effect, likely in early 2026, it will shorten eviction notice and filing timelines (notably in households where someone is arrested or charged with a violent crime) and allow tenants with pending emergency rental assistance applications to be evicted.

For the past five years, the Future of Land and Housing Program (FLH) at New America has been supporting cities, counties, and states to collect and use eviction data to improve housing stability for their communities. Following the lead of our state and local partners, the FLH team, in partnership with January Advisors, is now doing the same in the city we reside in.

This brief provides an updated analysis on eviction trends in DC over the last nine years. It also provides a detailed analysis of eviction filings in DC for a five-month period—June through October 2025. We hope this data establishes a baseline from which to track the impacts on renters of these housing, economic, and security disruptions. We also hope that the insights surfaced will help city leaders make data-driven eviction prevention decisions and help identify critical questions that, if answered, can help drive down housing instability across the District.

A New Baseline

Prior to this analysis, the most recent publicly available data analysis on evictions in DC is from fall of 2020, when Georgetown University’s McCourt School of Public Policy published an influential report examining eviction filings between 2014 and 2018 (hereafter, “the Georgetown Report”). This comprehensive report provides a detailed analysis of eviction filings in DC, establishing a pre-pandemic baseline and a valuable point of comparison for the more recent eviction data analyzed in this brief.

Since that report came out, the DC Council has passed several tenant protections and eviction prevention policies that dramatically shifted the legal landscape for families facing eviction. This includes a prohibition of eviction filings for less than $600 in back rent and a required notice period of 30 days before most evictions can be filed. During the height of the pandemic, city leaders also instituted a temporary moratorium on eviction filings for non-payment of rent and distributed approximately $404 million in federal rental assistance through the Stay DC program. After the eviction moratorium was lifted, the city retained a pause on all eviction cases where the tenant had a pending application for rental assistance.

The next section discusses the data sources and methods used, followed by an analysis of yearly eviction trends in DC, from 2016 through 2025, assessing how changes to the city’s housing landscape have impacted renter communities.

The data analysis in this brief relies on a range of eviction data sources to establish as complete a record as possible to track eviction trends pre- and post-pandemic. Table 1 provides information on the data used in this analysis, including the stage of the eviction process the data describes, the time period, and the source.

The detailed analysis of eviction filings covering June through October 2025 leverages newly collected eviction data from the DC Superior Court. Starting in June, January Advisors began conducting automated collection of residential eviction case records from online portals available to the public, including the names and addresses of plaintiffs, case filing dates, and information related to legal actions taken during the case. January Advisors extracted key pieces of information embedded within forms that landlords file with the court, including the monthly rent of the tenant and total amount owed at the time of filing.

Annual filing and completed eviction counts for 2025 are estimates that account for the projected numbers of sealed records. For more detailed information on the methods, see the methodology section at the end of the brief.

The eviction process is complex and involves multiple stages, each with implications for landlords and tenants. The funnel in Figure 1 illustrates the stages of the eviction process.

An eviction case formally begins when a landlord files a complaint with the DC Superior Courts’ Landlord and Tenant Branch. This is called an eviction filing. It costs $15 to file an eviction in DC (one of the lowest filing fees in the country).

A subset of eviction filings result in an eviction judgment for the landlord, meaning that a judge has determined the tenant has violated the lease terms and the landlord can move forward with removing the tenant from that unit. Historically, judgments in favor of a tenant are rare in DC (in 2018 they represented less than one percent of non-payment of rent cases). Though we did not analyze data on eviction judgments for this analysis, we know that not all eviction filings get to the judgment stage. Between a filing and a judgment, eviction cases can be dismissed or settled through an agreement between the tenant and landlord.

If an eviction judgment is rendered in favor of the landlord, the court sends the case to the U.S. Marshals Service, the law enforcement agency that carries out evictions in DC, to schedule the eviction (these are called scheduled evictions).

A completed eviction is recorded once U.S. Marshals visit a tenant’s address on their scheduled eviction date and ensure the tenant has left their home. Not all eviction judgments are scheduled, and not all scheduled evictions are completed. For example, some tenants leave before their final court-ordered date of eviction or enter into a repayment plan with the landlord that allows them to stay.

While a completed eviction represents a case that ended in displacement, it does not capture the true volume of families harmed by the eviction process. First, since some families move out after receiving an eviction filing or judgment but before their eviction is scheduled, we can assume that far more displacements occur than are indicated by the number of completed evictions. Second, while some eviction filings are sealed by DC law, unsealed and even some sealed filings may appear in a tenant’s rental record, which landlords commonly use as a basis for screening out rental applications.

To track annual trends in eviction filings and completed evictions over time, we combined historical data from existing analyses with estimates we produced to fill in missing data.

Putting filing and completed eviction trends in conversation with one another raises a multitude of questions, many of which we are unable to address with the data we currently have. For now, we’ll break down what we know and suggest directions for future exploration.

Eviction Filings

A projected 12,565 District households will receive an eviction filing in 2025. (For more information, see our methodology section below.) This eviction filing rate of 6.8 percent—or about 7 for every 100 renter households—puts DC at around the midpoint of the 34 cities Eviction Lab regularly tracks. Eviction filings across the District have dropped nearly 60 percent from before the pandemic to 2025, as shown in Figure 2.

Between 2016 and 2019, there were an average of 30,455 evictions filed each year, impacting around 16 for every 100 renter households annually.

Completed Evictions

By contrast, the number of completed evictions District-wide has climbed to a six-year high. An investigative report by The 51st, Street Sense Media, and American University’s Investigative Reporting Workshop (IRW) found that in fiscal year 2024, DC saw 1,869 completed evictions, up from 1,493 in fiscal year 2019. We project that in 2025, the total number of completed evictions will be around 2,031, which would be a seven-year high. (For more information, see our methodology section below.)

Discussion

DC phased out its COVID-19 eviction moratorium in 2021, after which landlords resumed filing evictions. However, even years later, filings have not returned to pre-pandemic levels. Legal aid providers and tenant advocates point to two policies enacted during the pandemic that likely explain the drop in filing levels: a ban on filings for less than $600 in back rent, and the requirement that DC landlords wait at least 30 days after a missed rent payment before filing for eviction. Advocates and legal aid groups have observed, and research has shown, that prior to these policies, landlords frequently filed cases once the tenant was a few days behind on rent, as a means of accelerating rent collection. The ban on filings under $600 and the longer notice period likely allow tenants to catch up on rent after temporary financial setbacks and reduce frivolous filings by landlords. It is likely that these protections accounted for a fall in eviction filings during and post-pandemic.

By contrast, monthly completed evictions, which fell to nearly zero during the eviction moratorium in 2021, have surpassed pre-pandemic numbers, as shown in the analysis from The 51st, Street Sense, and American’s IRW.

While further investigation is needed, there are several potential explanations for why completed evictions have increased even amidst a nearly 60 percent drop in filings. It is possible we are seeing a temporary spike from the court working through a pandemic-era backlog. It could be that the combination of dwindling rental assistance and rising rents is making it harder for landlords and tenants to work out a payment plan post-filing. Or, rapidly rising rental prices leave fewer tenants with the option to relocate after a filing, causing them to stay in place until a court-ordered eviction.

Over the last year, an average of 1,053 eviction cases were filed and 161 evictions were completed in a given month, as shown in Figure 3.

We do not have enough data to derive a precise “eviction displacement rate”—which looks at the proportion of eviction filings that result in a completed eviction—because the data accounts for different time periods (in other words, completed eviction cases from 2025 likely correspond to eviction filings from 2024, 2023, or even 2022). However, if current trends hold, we can estimate that somewhere between 85 and 90 percent of filings do not result in a completed eviction.

There are several reasons why an eviction filing may not end in a completed eviction, including:

• The case is dismissed (as when a tenant pays the rent owed, there are not sufficient grounds for the case to move forward, or the landlord does not show up to court).
• The landlord and tenant reach a settlement agreement.
• An eviction case is decided in favor of a tenant.
• A tenant leaves their home after a filing, but before a completed eviction.

However, just because a case does not result in a completed eviction does not mean a tenant has not been displaced from their home. As the Georgetown Report notes, “many tenants leave the home before the writ is executed, making this an undercount of eviction.”

Our data does not show the distribution of these possible outcomes; knowing this would have major implications for how we understand displacement within the District.

We began collecting detailed data on eviction filings from the DC Superior Court in June of 2025. This section provides a deep dive into what we’ve learned so far about the 5,292 evictions filed in DC between June and October of 2025 (see Figure 3).

Where Are Eviction Filings Happening?

Hardest-hit wards: Between June and October of 2025, Ward 8 had by far the highest number of eviction filings(1,472 filings), followed by Ward 7 (826 filings), Ward 5 (822 filings), and Ward 6 (817 filings), as shown in Figure 4.

Figure 5 also displays the number of eviction filings by ward over this time period, as well as filings in each ward as a percent of the monthly total.

Comparing eviction filings with the size of the renter population in each ward gives us a better sense of where evictions are being disproportionately filed. The shares of eviction filings in Wards 4 and 6 were proportional to their shares of DC’s renter population (7 percent and 16 percent, respectively). Wards 1, 2, and 3 have undersized shares of filings compared to their share of renters. Wards 5, 7, and 8 have a disproportionately large share of eviction filings District-wide. In particular, Ward 8 accounted for 29 percent of the District’s eviction filings during this time period, despite only comprising 16 percent of the renter population.

Eviction filings in Ward 7 have fallen significantly, from 22.6 percent of the District’s filings in 2018 to approximately 16 percent in 2025, while eviction filings in Ward 6 have risen sharply, from 10.3 percent of the District’s filings in 2018 to 15.8 percent in 2025. It is important to note that the geographic boundaries of wards (particularly Ward 7) have shifted over this time period, though the overall number of renter households has stayed similar.

Hardest-hit neighborhoods: Between June and October of 2025, as shown in the map in Figure 6 and in Table 2, the Southwest Waterfront (Ward 6) had the highest number of eviction filings in the city, followed by Columbia Heights (Ward 1) and Shipley Terrace (Ward 8).

Just five DC neighborhoods accounted for 22.8 percent of the city’s eviction filings between June and October of 2025. And while evictions tend to be concentrated east of the Anacostia River, the city’s hardest-hit neighborhoods cover all four of the city’s quadrants and span Wards 1, 5, 6, and 8.

Many of the neighborhoods with high filing counts, including both Southwest Waterfront and Columbia Heights, are dense, gentrifying neighborhoods with mixes of subsidized and non-subsidized housing. Without knowing the number of renter households in each neighborhood, our ability to compare the scale of eviction filings across neighborhoods is limited. Nevertheless, understanding eviction hotspots by volume of filings can help target outreach and prevention efforts by service providers working with constrained resources.

We plan to track the impact of renter housing stability as we see increases in immigration enforcement and other law enforcement activity and arrests, notably in predominantly Latino neighborhoods such as Columbia Heights.

Who Are the Biggest Evictors?

Between June and October of 2025, five management companies were responsible for approximately 20 percent of the city’s eviction filings. Several of these companies manage or own multiple large apartment buildings in DC, and the volume of filings in part reflects their large portfolios.

Understanding that just a few property management companies account for a large share of eviction filings city-wide means that entering into an eviction prevention dialogue with just a handful of players could reap major benefits for DC renters.

Certain apartment buildings across the District had notably high eviction filing levels over this five-month period, the top five of which are luxury buildings. The Westerly, a 449-unit (including 136 affordable units) luxury apartment building in the Southwest Waterfront neighborhood, filed 61 eviction cases between June and October of this year. If the Westerly continues filing at its current rate, it will end the year with a 33 percent eviction filing rate, nearly five times the city average. The Westerly is managed by Bozzuto Management, one of the three largest evictors over this time period.

Figure 7 below maps the location of the 20 buildings with the highest number of evictions filed during this time period.

How Much Do Tenants Owe?

Tenants facing eviction tend to pay lower rents than the average DC renter. From June through October 2025, the median rent for tenants with an eviction filing was $1,443 per month, substantially lower than the city’s median rent of $2,600.

The median amount owed by tenants at the time of an eviction filing between June and October was $4,502, meaning that most tenants are approximately three months behind on rent. (We calculated median back rent owed only on evictions filed for non-payment of rent and excluded the less than 1.6 percent of non-payment of rent cases with more than $50k in back rent owed.) As illustrated by Figure 8 below, half of tenants with a filing from this time period owed less than $4,502 at the time of filing, and three-quarters owed less than $8,750.

By contrast, the average amount owed by tenants at filing in 2018 was $1,207. The increase in back rent owed is partially explained by rising rents (in 2018, the median rent citywide was $1,487). However, legal aid providers and tenant advocates point to the legal change prohibiting filings for back rent of under $600 and a 2022 law requiring landlords to provide tenants with 30 days notice prior to filing an eviction. These policies allow tenants to catch up on rent during the notice period (partially explaining the large drop in eviction filings in recent years), but for those tenants who do not manage to catch up, the result is a filing amounting to at least two months of back rent.

The RENTAL Act, which is likely to go into effect in early 2026, shortens the notice period from 30 days to 10 days for non-payment of rent cases. Tracking the impact on filings will be critical.

DC Needs Better Eviction Data

Evictions are a crucial indicator of a city’s housing stability and of its overall economic and social health. Tracking this key indicator is always important, but especially during periods of upheaval and change.

As we write, Washington, DC is experiencing rapid changes to its economy and its housing policy landscape, including three major developments: (1) Thousands of federal employees have been fired or forced out of government, causing the District’s unemployment rate to spike to the highest in the nation; (2) aggressive immigration enforcement raids have swept up thousands of immigrants and have left tens of thousands more fearful of leaving their homes to go to work; and (3) the RENTAL Act stands to curb tenant protections and make it easier for landlords to evict tenants.

However, like many cities across the country, Washington, DC publishes very little eviction data, leaving local leaders mostly in the dark as they attempt to understand, track, and prevent evictions.

Bulk data on eviction filings and eviction judgments is not accessible in DC, and the Office of the Tenant Advocate’s monthly data only includes aggregate numbers of scheduled and completed (or “executed”) evictions. We worked with January Advisors to build an automated tool to collect this data from tens of thousands of individual court records that are available inside online court dockets. But doing so requires technical expertise and financial resources not available to many in the eviction prevention community. The result is that local leaders cannot access and analyze crucial data that could help them stem evictions, and the public can’t hold city leaders accountable for failing to keep evictions down.

We invite DC Courts to follow the lead of peers in New York City and Franklin County, Ohio and make this data more accessible for all who want to understand displacement in the District.

Next Steps and Questions for Future Analysis

We hope to replicate this analysis regularly and to build out more interactive tools that allow researchers, journalists, policymakers, and members of the public to explore DC eviction data for themselves. We also hope to dive deeper into why certain neighborhoods like Southwest Waterfront and Columbia Heights, which did not see large eviction filing numbers in 2018, are now experiencing large numbers of eviction filings. And we’d like to understand why certain buildings, many of them luxury buildings with significant allocations of subsidized apartments, are filing evictions at disproportionately high rates.

In the meantime, here are the questions we are most eager to answer in the future:

1. What is causing the sharp decline in eviction filings while completed evictions increase? Multiple pandemic-era tenant protection policies have likely contributed to this drop. But further unpacking the relative impact of these factors will help policymakers sustain the relatively lower filing levels we’ve seen in recent years and ideally drive them even lower. Further, some tenant protections are being rolled back through the RENTAL Act, and tracking its impact on filings will give us a better sense of which policies are effective and which are not.
2. What happens in cases that don’t result in a completed eviction? Somewhere between 10 and 15 percent of eviction filings move all the way through the legal system and result in completed evictions. What happens to the rest? How many are dismissed, reach a settlement agreement, or are decided in the tenant’s favor? In how many cases does a tenant move out during the process? Understanding these outcomes is crucial to fully understanding the impact of eviction filings District-wide.
3. What is the impact of legal aid on DC tenants facing eviction? We have collected data on the percentage of plaintiffs and defendants with legal representation at the time of an eviction filing. However, this data provides a limited window into the actual scope of legal support that tenants receive, and how this support impacts outcomes (starting with the fact that at the time of filing, few tenants will have retained legal counsel). As DC experiments with right to counsel and community justice worker programs, it is crucial to understand the impact and scope of legal representation to aid tenants facing eviction.
4. Are evictions disproportionately impacting tenants receiving rental subsidies or living in rent-stabilized properties? Service providers hypothesize that landlords may be discriminating against housing voucher holders and targeting evictions towards subsidized units via junk fees and unequal enforcement of lease violations. Digging into court records on why evictions were filed, and which defendants receive some form of housing assistance, may be able to shed light on this question.
5. How will the three major shocks to DC’s economic and housing landscape mentioned above impact eviction rates in the coming months and years? This data analysis hopefully establishes a baseline for capturing the city’s eviction landscape prior to the full impact of the three major events discussed in the introduction of the brief.

About the Data

There were three data sources used in this analysis:

1. Completed evictions were provided by the DC Office of the Tenant Advocate. The data used in this analysis includes data published on that office’s website, as well as data obtained via FOIA request and shared with the authors by The 51st.
2. Annual landlord-tenant case filing numbers, available from the DC Courts annual reports.
3. Individual case observations taken from the DC Courts public portal for cases filed between June 1 and October 31 of 2025.

Adjusting for Commercial Evictions and Foreclosures

Our goal in this analysis is to represent residential household eviction trends. In our individual case observations, we found that 3 percent of cases were classified as commercial evictions or residential foreclosures. Using this as a benchmark, we applied this reduction to filing numbers reported in the DC Courts annual report and any other estimates used in this report.

Using Filing Data to Estimate Case Volume and Impute Sealed Cases

DC Courts use the “Landlord Tenant” designation to classify eviction cases. These cases are organized by year, court, and case number (e.g. 2025-LTB-000001). The case numbers are sequential, allowing us to impute sealed cases based on missing case numbers from the DC Courts public portal. In other words, if case number 001 exists, and case number 003 exists, we estimate that case number 002 exists and has been sealed.

For the years 2016-2023, we used the annual landlord tenant case filings reported by DC Courts in their annual report, and reduced the number by 3 percent to estimate residential evictions.

There is currently no DC Courts annual report for the calendar year 2024. To fill this gap, we went through the portal and identified all cases in 2024 that have not been sealed. This provided us with enough information to estimate the total number of cases for the year, as well as for each month in the year.

In order to project the total number of cases filed in 2025, we used a combination of observed and estimated cases for January through May 2025, individual observations for June through October 2025, and estimated projections for November and December based on 2024 estimates. Taken together, they represent the best possible information available at the time of publication.

Collecting Filing Data

All individual case observations represent data that was available on the DC Courts public webpage at the time of observation. This includes information available directly on the website, as well as information contained in the complaint.

Information was parsed from both the website and the complaint PDF to construct the dataset. Each complaint PDF was parsed using a paid Anthropic account and we used a custom prompt to locate each field. The data was subjected to quality control measures, such as removing duplicate case numbers and unrelated cases, and undergoing random quality checks.

Aggregating and Mapping Data

All cases filings were geocoded using the defendant address in the court document. Those coordinates were used to determine the property’s Census Tract, neighborhood, and ward.

Data for top plaintiffs and top addresses were transformed in order to account for variations in the way court documents are filed. For example, “1 Main Street Apartments, LLC” and “One Main Street Apts” undergo text transformation to standardize into “1 MAIN STREET APARTMENTS.” The text standardization process includes data transformations for property names, abbreviations, and suffixes, as well as street numbers, street suffixes, and directionals.

Estimating Completed Evictions

The DC Office of the Tenant Advocate publishes reports of completed evictions periodically. The most recent data available for 2025 goes through June. In order to estimate the 2025 full calendar year, we used the data published by OTA for the first half of the year, then derived a case completion ratio of cases filed to cases completed for those months of the year. Then we applied that ratio for the months of July to October 2025, where we have filing data but not completed evictions data. Lastly, for November and December, where we have neither filing nor completed evictions data, we used actuals from those months from FY2024. This amounts to 1,118 completed evictions between January and June, an estimated 723 for July through October, and an estimated 120 for November and December.

The authors would like to extend their thanks to local and national housing advocates and researchers who helped inform and contextualize the findings in this analysis, including Brian McCabe, Eva Rosen, Adam Marshall, Adam Jacobs, Brian Rohal, Elena Bowers, Alex Samuels, Catherine Quinn, Peter Tatian, Leah Hendey, Susan Jacobs, Sunny Desai, Cynthia Houser, and Carl Gershenson.

We would also like to extend our gratitude to New America colleagues Tim Robustelli, Liz Cory, and Elena Gooray for their invaluable feedback, data visualization expertise, and editorial support.