Washington leads in overshoot above pre-pandemic normal (+49%); Minnesota is climbing fastest year-over-year — but no single national tracker ranks all 50 states this way

Summary

There is no single, comprehensive national dataset that ranks all 50 states' eviction filings against a pre-pandemic baseline — eviction filings are court records, not a federal statistical series, and are tracked state-by-state (often incompletely) by independent research groups. Among the small number of states with a tracker that explicitly measures against a pre-pandemic baseline, Washington shows the largest overshoot: filings in the 12 months ending July 2026 ran 49% above its Jan 2017-Feb 2020 monthly average, with July 2026 the single highest month ever recorded and 2026 on pace to be the highest full year on record. Minnesota is the state climbing fastest right now in relative terms — its rolling 12-month filing count is up 13.3% year-over-year, having crossed back above its pre-pandemic baseline for four straight months after years below it — though how far above "normal" it now sits depends heavily on which of two competing datasets you use (see caveat below). Massachusetts has been persistently elevated, roughly 25% above its pre-pandemic monthly average, but essentially flat rather than accelerating.

Washington: furthest above pre-pandemic normal, and still rising

The Eviction Research Network (ERN, UC Berkeley), using Washington's Office of Civil Legal Aid statewide court-filing feed (all 39 superior courts, Jan 2016-Jul 2026), reports:

• 24,572 eviction filings in the 12 months ending July 2026, against a pre-pandemic (Jan 2017-Feb 2020) pace of 16,532/year — +49%.
• Every month since August 2023 has run above the pre-pandemic average.
• July 2026 (2,413 filings) was the highest single month in the state's recorded history.
• 2026 has already surpassed 2019's full-year total (15,190) after just seven months, and is projected to close the year between 25,202 and 28,595 filings — a new annual record.

Filing-rate increases are concentrated in suburban and mid-size counties (Clark, Pierce, Snohomish, Thurston, Spokane), not the urban core; King County files the most cases in absolute terms but ranks only 7th of 39 counties by rate.

Minnesota: climbing fastest in relative terms, but the magnitude depends on which dataset you read

ERN's Minnesota profile (sourced from Legal Services Corporation court data, cleaned for automatic-expungement removals under a 2024 state statute) reports 14,921 filings in the 12 months ending March 2026, only 1.7% above its 2017-2019 monthly average of 1,222/month — but that modest overshoot follows four straight months back above baseline (since December 2025) after running below it since 2023, and the rolling 12-month total is now up 13.3% year-over-year, the fastest relative acceleration of any state-level series found for this answer.

Important caveat: Eviction Lab and the Minnesota tenant-advocacy nonprofit HOME Line, which both pull from the state's raw MCRO court-filing feed rather than ERN's LSC-sourced, expungement-cleaned feed, report 30-46% more cases for recent years. A BiggerPockets summary of HOME Line's reporting cites >23,000 filings by late November 2025, described as up roughly 30% from a ~15,000/year pre-pandemic baseline. ERN's own methodology notes explain the gap explicitly: the LSC data reflects "evictions that stuck" on the public record after Minnesota's automatic-sealing law removed dismissed and tenant-prevailing cases, while the Eviction Lab/HOME Line raw count reflects "tenants who got sued," before that cleanup runs. Both are legitimate measures of different things; neither is simply wrong. This means Minnesota's overshoot above pre-pandemic normal is genuinely between roughly 2% and 30% depending on which measurement convention is used — a wider band of uncertainty than for Washington.

Massachusetts: elevated but not accelerating

MHP's Center for Housing Data (May 2026 Housing Stability Monitor, using MassLandlords Inc. court data) reports an estimated 19,419 eviction filings statewide between July and December 2025 (about 3,237/month), against a stated pre-pandemic average of 2,600/month — about +24.5%. The report explicitly characterizes this level as "well above the pre-pandemic average... but consistent with filing levels since late 2022," i.e. elevated but roughly flat rather than climbing. Randolph (45.7 filings per 1,000 renter households), Holyoke, Springfield, Stoughton, Braintree, and Framingham have the highest municipal rates; Hampden County leads all counties.

Why not a full 50-state ranking

Two structural facts limit any answer to this question:

• The AskAmerica corpus carries no eviction data at all. A catalog search for "eviction" across every schema (SEC, Census, BLS, HUD/housing, disasters, etc.) returned zero matching tables or columns — this is a genuine, permanent coverage gap in this connector, not a query that needed refining.
• No external source fills that gap comprehensively either. Princeton's Eviction Lab is the closest thing to a national tracker, but as of its own site (evictionlab.org), it currently covers only 11 states (Arkansas, Connecticut, Delaware, Indiana, Minnesota, Missouri, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, Virginia, Wisconsin) plus ~38 metro areas — leaving 39 states with no tracked state-level series at all. Critically, in May 2025 Eviction Lab switched its own default comparison baseline from pre-pandemic years to a 2023-24 "post-pandemic" baseline (explained in their post "A New Baseline"), specifically because they judged the pre-pandemic comparison less relevant going forward. Their April 2026 report on 2025 filing patterns ("Preliminary Analysis: Eviction Filing Patterns in 2025") is therefore built on the 2023-24 baseline, not the pre-pandemic one this question asks about — Travis County TX (Austin) +27%, Oregon sites, Charleston SC, and Tacoma WA all ran above that 2023-24 baseline, but those percentages are not directly comparable to "pre-pandemic normal" and are city/metro figures in any case, not state-level.

Given that, this answer relies on the handful of independent state-level trackers (ERN for Washington and Minnesota, MHP for Massachusetts) that still explicitly compute a pre-pandemic comparison, supplemented by press coverage (BiggerPockets, citing Eviction Lab and HOME Line) for context on other states (Virginia, Tennessee/Nashville, Texas, Indiana, Missouri) where filings are reported as elevated but without a comparably precise, sourced pre-pandemic percentage.

Method note

No AskAmerica warehouse computation was possible for this question (zero eviction data in the corpus, confirmed via search_catalog). All figures above are read directly from each named primary source's own published statistics (ERN's Washington and Minnesota state profile pages, MHP's Housing Stability Monitor, Eviction Lab's own site pages and reports) via live web fetch — not recomputed from raw case-level data, since none of the underlying case-level files were fetched. The bar-chart comparison and the Washington trend line in the dashboard are built directly from the headline figures each source itself reports; the Washington trend line's intermediate-year values (2023-2025) are visually illustrative interpolations between ERN's stated anchor points (the 2021 moratorium low and the record July 2026 month) rather than independently verified monthly counts, and are labeled as approximate in the chart caption.

What This Report Does Not Answer

• Provide a comprehensive/ranked answer across all states: No source — including this AskAmerica corpus, which has zero eviction data — publishes a comprehensive 50-state ranking of eviction filings vs. a pre-pandemic baseline. The answer is built from the handful of states with an independent tracker that explicitly computes a pre-pandemic comparison (Washington, Minnesota, Massachusetts) plus Eviction Lab's 11-state Eviction Tracking System, which as of May 2025 shifted its own default baseline from pre-pandemic to a 2023-24 'post-pandemic' baseline, limiting its usefulness for this specific question.