Eviction Tracking
Wisconsin

Wisconsin

Eviction filings in Wisconsin fell sharply once Governor Tony Evers blocked the initiation of non-emergency eviction proceedings on March 27, 2020. Eviction protections in Wisconsin began to expire on May 26, 2020, after which filings increased.

A closer look at eviction filing patterns in Milwaukee County is available here.

Filing counts in some counties for baseline years may differ slightly compared to court-released aggregates in Wisconsin. In particular, Chippewa, Douglas, Fond du Lac, La Crosse, Marathon, Rock, St. Croix, and Waukesha Counties are slightly underestimated in at least one of the three years compared to court aggregate data, while Eau Claire and Outagamie Counties see overestimates. Please see here for more information on our validation procedures.

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  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 Wisconsin were higher than average in January and February of 2020. That pattern reversed in March, and filings 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 2

  1. Average eviction filings taken from Eviction Lab data for 2016-2018.
  2. Filing data for 2020 onward collected by January Advisors.

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

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  • 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

Wisconsin is divided into 72 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 January Advisors. Historical averages were taken from Eviction Lab data and cover the years 2016-2018.
  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 counties in this figure Get the data for top filers in this figure

See eviction data for other places

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