In Maricopa County, 2025 is on track to be the second-busiest year ever for eviction filings after they reached an all-time high in 2024.
From January through November, Maricopa County landlords filed nearly 78,000 eviction cases. According to Maricopa County Justice Courts, the county will likely see about 84,000 eviction filings by the end of this year, which would be a 4% drop from last year’s record of 87,310 filings.
The number of eviction filings nationwide was high in 2025, but it leveled off slightly from increases in 2023 and 2024, said Juan Pablo Garnham, a spokesperson for the Eviction Lab at Princeton University. So Phoenix’s slight drop from a 2024 record is consistent with national trends.
Population growth partly accounts for the high number of eviction filings in Maricopa County in recent years.
But Maricopa County’s rate of filings per rental household for the last few years has also risen. The rate in 2024 and 2025 has been at its highest point since the years leading up to the 2008 Great Recession, according to data from the Eviction Lab.
And the Valley's eviction filing rate is much higher than the national average of about 7%, Garnham said.
“In Phoenix, we have [an eviction filing rate of] 14% for this last year, which is twice the amount of eviction filings that we see at a national level,” Garnham said.
Garnham said Phoenix is one of several Sun Belt cities, including Las Vegas and Dallas, with higher-than-average eviction rates.
“These are places that have become more expensive in the last decade or so, places that have laws that are friendly towards landlords and that make eviction very easy,” Garnham said.
Eviction Lab data shows evictions disproportionately impact Black and Hispanic renters in the Valley. About 10% of renters in Maricopa County are Black, but about 18% of evictions are filed against Black people. Hispanics make up about 30% of Maricopa County renters, but 36% of eviction filings.
Not every eviction filing results in someone being forced to leave their home. Maricopa County Justice Courts have not yet confirmed the number of orders from judges to remove a tenant from the property, known as writs of restitution, from eviction cases in 2025.
But Garnham said just having a record of an eviction filing can make it harder for a renter to secure future housing and it can have impacts on someone’s physical or mental health.
“A home — a stable place to live and thrive in — is key to all aspects of life,” Garnham said.
-
For the last several years, there’s been an effort to give cities back some of their ability to regulate that market; the state generally took it away in 2016. -
Democrats at the Arizona Capitol are hopeful that support from President Donald Trump is enough to convince their Republican counterparts to back a plan to stop out-of-state investors from buying up the state’s housing supply. -
Entering the final year of her first term in office, Democratic Gov. Katie Hobbs called on state lawmakers to adopt a series of tax cuts that she says will benefit middle-class Arizonans. But those cuts don’t go far enough for the Republicans who control the state legislature. -
President Donald Trump announced recently he wants to do something that Democrats here in Arizona have championed before: bar Wall Street investors from buying single-family homes. -
The oldest members of the baby boomers, those adults born between 1946 and 1964, are turning 80 this year. So, is our state ready for this next wave?
