Pennsylvania

The state of Pennsylvania enacted a strong eviction moratorium that extended until August 31, 2020. Eviction filings related to nonpayment of rent were not accepted during that period. Filings increased following the end of the moratorium.

Our state-wide counts of eviction filings are slight underestimates when compared to the official Pennsylvania court data dashboard.

Additional information is available on eviction filing patterns in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia

  1. Data on renter population and median rent drawn from the American Community Survey (ACS). Details of the eviction process from the LSC Eviction Laws Database.

Filing Counts

Filing Rates Over the Past Year

Trends in eviction filings

This plot shows monthly eviction filings in Pennsylvania over the last year. Filings are displayed relative to the pre-pandemic average for the same set of months. You can toggle the plot to display filing counts and to extend the time frame back to January 2020.1

  1. Eviction filing data were collected by Legal Services Corporation. Historical averages cover the years 2016-2019. Additional data was provided by Lancaster Stands Up.

Get the data for this figure

Eviction filings by defendant race/ethnicity and gender

There are often large racial/ethnic and gender disparities in eviction risk. Here, we estimate the demographic characteristics of those filed against for eviction over the last year. We compare to data from the ACS that show the share of renters in the same categories.1

Share of eviction filings

Share of renters

FILINGS OVER THE LAST YEAR BY DEFENDANT RACE/ETHNICITY AND GENDER

Get the data for these figures
  • Statistics rely on imputation of race/ethnicity and gender based on defendant names and addresses. We refer to “gender” throughout while acknowledging necessarily limitations of the imputation process and its inability to capture important subtleties in individuals’ gender identification. A complete description of this process can be found in the ETS methods page. ACS data are from 2015-2019 five-year estimates.

The geography of eviction filings

Pennsylvania is divided into 67 counties. In each of those counties, we map the number of eviction filings over the last year. If you toggle below you can see these numbers as eviction filing rates—the number of eviction filings divided by the number of renter households in the county—or compared to the typical number of filings in the average year.1 2

  1. Eviction filing data were collected by Legal Services Corporation. Historical averages cover the years 2016-2019. Additional data was provided by Lancaster Stands Up.
  2. County breakdown of renter race/ethnicity determined using American Community Survey (ACS) estimates for 2015–2019.

On map, we also plot the location of the top 100 eviction hotspots in the county (see above). Hover over the circles to see more information about filings from these locations.3

Get the data for tracts in this figure Get the data for top filers in this figure