Eviction Crisis 2026: Millions of Renters Are Getting Thrown Out — And Washington Is Making It Worse

The eviction crisis 2026 has reached levels not seen since before COVID-era protections, with millions of Americans — overwhelmingly renters under 40 — facing court filings, displacement, and a permanent black mark on their housing records. Metro Atlanta alone saw over 144,000 eviction filings in a single year, surpassing New York City. Phoenix recorded its second-worst eviction year on record. And Washington is responding by cutting the programs that kept people housed. This isn’t a market correction. It’s a policy choice.

Key Takeaways

• Metro Atlanta filed 144,000+ evictions in one year — more than NYC or the entire state of Virginia.
• Phoenix saw its second-worst eviction year ever in 2025 with 84,833 cases filed.
• Over half of all eviction filings nationally target Black renters, who make up only 19% of the renter population.
• The Trump administration’s FY2026 budget proposes a 44% cut to HUD rental assistance — $26.72 billion in reductions.
• DOGE has targeted an 84% staff cut to the HUD office that funds homelessness programs.
• Emergency Rental Assistance programs expired nationwide by September 2025.
• An eviction record follows renters for years, making it nearly impossible to find a new apartment.

Millennials are the most renter-heavy generation in American history — not by choice, but because homeownership was priced out from under them by the same generation that now benefits most from rental income. Today, 65% of Americans under 35 rent. And right now, in cities from Atlanta to Phoenix to Indianapolis, landlords are using a system designed to move fast and cheap to throw them out.

The rent burden crisis has been building for years — but 2025 and 2026 represent something new: the simultaneous expiration of pandemic-era safety nets, the gutting of federal housing assistance, and a court system that can process an eviction in 10 days for $100 in states like Indiana. The math is brutal and intentional.

How Bad Is the Eviction Crisis in 2026?

The Princeton Eviction Lab, which tracks court filings across major metro areas, has documented numbers that should be causing emergency legislative sessions. Instead, they’re barely making the news cycle.

Metro Atlanta: Over 144,000 eviction filings in a 12-month period from early 2025 through early 2026 — more than New York City and more than the entire state of Virginia combined. That’s 13,118 filings in a single month. Princeton Eviction Lab researchers called it “abnormal” and said rates were hitting “historic highs.”

Phoenix/Maricopa County: 84,833 eviction cases filed in 2025 — the second-worst year on record, barely behind 2024’s record of 87,130. In the Phoenix metro area, 50% of renters are already cost-burdened, paying more than 30% of their income in rent. The apartment concessions that do exist are concentrated in luxury units — not the stock that struggling renters actually live in.

Indianapolis/Marion County: Nearly 25,000 eviction filings in the past year — an average of 500 per week. That works out to a 14% filing rate: 14 eviction filings for every 100 renter households. Indiana can process an eviction in 10 days and charge landlords as little as $100 to file. It is one of only five states without rent escrow provisions, meaning tenants can’t withhold rent even for uninhabitable conditions.

Charlotte/Mecklenburg County, NC: More than 52,000 eviction filings in 2025, with 66% resulting in actual eviction orders. Two-thirds of people who walk into eviction court walk out with nowhere to live.

Nationally, the Eviction Lab estimated approximately 7.8 eviction filings per 100 renter households as a baseline in 2018. Multiple major metros are now running at double that rate. The pandemic moratoriums artificially suppressed this number — and now the backlog, combined with skyrocketing rents, is flooding housing courts nationwide.

Who Is Being Evicted — And Why It’s Not Random

The demographics of who gets evicted reveal a system that isn’t just an economic failure — it’s a structural one. Evictions don’t fall randomly across the rental population. They cluster with surgical precision on the most vulnerable renters.

Race: In Atlanta, Black residents make up 53% of renters but account for 71% of eviction filings — 77,249 cases in 12 months. White residents account for just 15% of filings. Nationally, more than half of all eviction filings target Black renters, who represent only ~19% of the renter population. In Indianapolis, 52% of the city’s Black residents faced an eviction filing in the past year, despite making up about 28% of the population.

Gender: Women renters are disproportionately targeted. In Central Indiana, women comprise over 60% of eviction cases but just over half of the renter population. Researchers note that landlords treat families with children as “liabilities” — women with children are more likely to be filed against than male renters without dependents.

Age: This is a Millennial and Gen Z crisis. The median renter age is 39. Over 65% of Americans under 35 rent rather than own. Decades of wage stagnation mean younger renters have no financial cushion to absorb even a single month of income disruption. One missed paycheck, one medical bill, one car breakdown — and suddenly you’re facing a $100 filing that will define your housing options for the next decade.

Corporate Landlords vs. Individual Renters: Large private equity firms and institutional investors have been systematically acquiring apartment complexes in Sun Belt cities and rapidly raising rents. In Indianapolis, some corporate landlords raised rents by 40% or more between 2019 and 2023. Renters who couldn’t absorb the increase became eviction statistics. The landlord’s profit margin and the tenant’s housing stability were placed in direct competition — and the legal system was designed with only one winner in mind.

Why Is the Eviction Crisis 2026 Getting Worse?

Three forces have converged in 2025-2026 to create a perfect storm for renters: the expiration of pandemic safety nets, persistent rent unaffordability, and a construction pipeline that was already undersupplied for the affordable segment and is now being squeezed further by tariff-driven cost increases on building materials.

Emergency Rental Assistance is gone. The federal Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP) — which distributed billions in COVID-era relief to keep renters housed — expired nationwide by September 30, 2025. State programs have wound down. New York’s portal closed in November 2025. Tennessee’s ended in July 2025. The safety net that caught millions during the pandemic no longer exists. And the backlog of renters who were treading water while ERAP existed is now hitting courts all at once.

Rents haven’t come down where it matters. While national rent growth has moderated from its 2022 peak, asking rents in the markets with the highest eviction rates — Atlanta, Phoenix, Indianapolis, Charlotte — remain dramatically higher than pre-pandemic levels and higher than local wages support. A Phoenix renter earning the metro median wage spends more than 30% of their gross income on the median apartment. That leaves zero margin.

Tariffs are making new affordable housing harder to build. Trump’s Section 122 tariffs — now at 15% on most imports — are driving up costs for lumber, steel, aluminum, and appliances. Construction of affordable multifamily housing was already economically marginal. With input costs rising and financing costs elevated, the pipeline of units that could eventually relieve rent pressure is being delayed or cancelled. Workers in the gig economy — the cohort most likely to be renters — are absorbing both the rent pressure and the job insecurity simultaneously.

The Federal Government Is Making It Worse

If the eviction crisis were just market forces at work, one might argue the government should stay out. But the government is not staying out — it’s actively dismantling the infrastructure that kept people housed, while simultaneously making landlord-friendly policies easier to enforce.

The FY2026 HUD Budget Proposal: The Trump administration’s budget proposes a historic 44% cut to HUD programs — a $26.72 billion reduction in rental assistance. The largest single cut targets the Housing Choice Voucher (Section 8) program, which currently helps 5 million low-income households afford market-rate rent. The proposal would consolidate multiple housing programs into a block grant funded at $31.79 billion — a massive reduction in real terms that shifts control to states with varying political will to protect renters.

DOGE at HUD: Elon Musk’s DOGE operation has called for discharging at least half of HUD staff. The proposed cuts are office-specific and devastating: an 84% reduction in the homelessness assistance office, 77% cuts to fair housing enforcement, 50% cuts in the offices that administer Section 8 vouchers for 7 million people. Fewer staff means delayed payments to landlords, which means landlords refusing to accept vouchers, which means Section 8 recipients — disproportionately elderly, disabled, and low-income working families — get evicted or can’t find new housing.

Legal Aid Under Attack: The Legal Services Corporation (LSC), which funds 130 legal aid organizations in all 50 states, was proposed for complete elimination by the Trump administration in May 2025. Congress ultimately approved a 3.6% budget cut instead — but the LSC already operates at roughly half its 1994 inflation-adjusted budget. Housing now represents 40% of LSC’s caseload. When an eviction case goes to court, the landlord almost always has a lawyer. The tenant almost never does. Legal aid organizations are the difference between a fighting chance and a default judgment. Cutting their funding is cutting the only counterweight in an already asymmetric fight.

Two-Year Time Limits on Rental Assistance: The administration has also proposed imposing two-year time limits on rental assistance for households without elderly or disabled members. This would cut off more than 3 million people from Section 8 assistance even if their market rent remains unaffordable. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities estimates this would push over half of those affected — mostly families with children — into housing instability or homelessness.

Mixed-Immigration Families: A proposed HUD rule would end federal housing assistance for households with any undocumented members — including U.S. citizen children living with an undocumented parent. Approximately 80,000 people, many of them American citizens, would lose housing subsidies under this rule. The result is more evictions, more families on the street, more children in housing instability.

What Happens After Eviction — The Record That Never Dies

An eviction isn’t just losing your apartment. It’s a permanent scarlet letter on your housing record that landlords screen for before every new rental application. Tenant screening companies — largely unregulated — report eviction filings, not just judgments. That means you can be screened out of an apartment for an eviction case that was dismissed, settled, or filed in error.

The practical consequences cascade immediately:

• Credit score damage: An eviction judgment triggers collections, which trashes your credit. A credit score drop of 50-100 points is common, affecting car loans, credit cards, and any future lease that requires a credit check.
• Housing discrimination: Most private landlords screen out applicants with any eviction history in the past 3-7 years, regardless of circumstances. In states with landlord-friendly eviction processes like Indiana, a landlord can file for eviction the moment rent is one day late — meaning frivolous filings can appear on your record even if you won.
• Geographic displacement: Evicted renters are often forced into lower-quality housing in lower-opportunity neighborhoods — further from jobs, good schools, and transit. This is the mechanism by which generational wealth is transferred out of younger households and into the pockets of landlords who own the assets.
• Homelessness as a direct outcome: As of January 2024, 770,000 people were experiencing homelessness — an all-time high, according to HUD’s own annual report. Eviction is the leading direct pathway. Cutting homelessness programs while eviction rates hit records is not an accident of policy overlap. It is the policy.

South Carolina has a bipartisan bill moving through its legislature that would clear eviction records after five years — a small but meaningful step. It is the exception, not the rule. Across most of the country, an eviction filed when you were 28 will follow you until you’re 38.

Counter-Argument: Is This Just the Market Correcting?

The standard defense from the landlord lobby and free-market advocates runs like this: evictions are just the natural mechanism of contract enforcement. Tenants signed leases. Tenants didn’t pay. Landlords are entitled to their property. The answer is more housing supply, not more government programs. If the government hadn’t artificially suppressed evictions during COVID with moratoriums, landlords wouldn’t have been as harmed — and the current spike is simply the backlog clearing.

There’s a fragment of truth in the backlog argument. Courts do process eviction filings that accumulated during moratoriums. Some of the 2025-2026 numbers reflect cases that were delayed, not new crises.

But the argument falls apart when you look at the demographic data. If this were simply a contract enforcement mechanism operating neutrally, you wouldn’t see Black renters accounting for 71% of Atlanta’s eviction filings while representing 53% of renters. You wouldn’t see women with children systematically over-targeted. You wouldn’t see corporate landlords who raised rents 40% in three years filing against tenants who couldn’t absorb the increase. And you wouldn’t see the government simultaneously cutting the assistance programs, legal aid, and enforcement staff that might have balanced the equation.

“More supply” is also not a solution to someone who received an eviction notice today. Supply increases take 3-7 years to reach the market. The people being evicted in Atlanta right now cannot wait for a zoning change that might produce affordable units in 2029. The counter-argument is real-world useless for the people actually affected by the eviction crisis 2026.

FAQ: Eviction Crisis 2026

What city has the worst eviction rate in 2026?

Metro Atlanta has the highest raw eviction filing numbers of any tracked metro, with over 144,000 filings in a 12-month period through early 2026 — surpassing New York City. Phoenix had the second-worst year on record in 2025 with 84,833 filings. Indianapolis/Marion County has one of the highest eviction rates per renter household, at approximately 14 filings per 100 renter households annually.

How much is HUD being cut in 2026?

The Trump administration’s FY2026 budget proposes cutting HUD rental assistance by $26.72 billion — a 43% reduction from the prior year. This includes cuts to Section 8 Housing Choice Vouchers, public housing, homelessness programs (including an 84% staff reduction), fair housing enforcement (77% cut), and the proposed introduction of two-year time limits on assistance for non-elderly, non-disabled households.

Does an eviction notice affect your credit score?

An eviction filing itself doesn’t directly appear on credit reports, but the downstream effects do. If the eviction results in an unpaid rent judgment, that judgment can be reported to credit bureaus and sent to collections — causing credit score drops of 50-100 points or more. Separately, tenant screening services report eviction filings to prospective landlords, meaning even a dismissed or settled eviction can affect your ability to rent for years.

What happened to the Emergency Rental Assistance Program?

The federal Emergency Rental Assistance Program (ERAP), which provided billions in COVID-era relief to renters and landlords, expired nationwide. The final federal deadline was September 30, 2025. State-level programs wound down at varying times — New York’s portal closed November 17, 2025; Tennessee’s ended July 31, 2025. No comparable replacement program has been authorized or funded by Congress.

Sources & Methodology

Eviction filing data sourced from the Princeton Eviction Lab (metro Atlanta, Indianapolis, national baseline rates), Maricopa County Justice Courts (Phoenix/Arizona PBS), and Mecklenburg County reporting (QC News/Charlotte). HUD budget cut data from the National Low Income Housing Coalition (NLIHC) and Center on Budget and Policy Priorities (CBPP). DOGE/HUD staffing cut data from CBPP and NPR reporting on internal HUD plans. Legal Services Corporation budget data from Eviction Lab’s February 2, 2026 report “Legal Aid Under Threat.” Emergency Rental Assistance expiration dates from U.S. Treasury and state program portals. Demographic eviction data from WABE/Atlanta Journal-Constitution (Atlanta) and WFYI (Indianapolis). Homelessness data from HUD’s 2024 Annual Homeless Assessment Report. Data current as of February 2026.