Note: historical eviction filing counts in all sites may have shifted due to changes in our commercial defendant flagging criteria.

Virginia

Virginia implemented a state-wide eviction moratorium between March 16, 2020 and June 28, 2020. Further protections restricting the circumstances under which evictions could be filed were in place from August 10, 2020 to September 7, 2020, and then from January 1, 2021 to June 30, 2021. These were again renewed from August 10, 2021 to June 30, 2022. Eviction filings remained low in the state during these periods, but have increased since these protections were lifted.

A closer look at eviction filing patterns in Richmond and the surrounding area is available here.

  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 Last updated:

Filing Rates Over the Past Year

Trends in eviction filings

This plot shows monthly eviction filings in Virginia 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 for Virginia were collected by LSC. Historical averages cover the years 2016-2019.

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

Virginia is divided into 134 counties and jurisdictions. In 1241 of these, 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.2 3

  1. Filings could not be tracked at the county-level in 10 counties due to the use of combined court jurisdictions in Virginia.
  2. Eviction filing data for Virginia were collected by LSC. Historical averages cover the years 2016-2019.
  3. 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 counties in this figure Get the data for top filers in this figure