Any tenant who loses their housing as a result of any step of the eviction process, including notice of termination, stipulated agreements, and judgments, has been displaced by the eviction process. All tenants who are displaced by the eviction process face many of the negative outcomes associated with evictions, including difficulty finding new housing, health consequences, loss of community, disruption to school and work routines.

Displaced Tenants (tenants displaced without a judgment of eviction on their record) includes tenants who are displaced after being harassed by a landlord, threatened with eviction, served a notice of termination, and tenants who reach an agreement with their landlord to move out in exchange for having the eviction case dismissed.

Evicted Tenants (tenants displaced with a judgment of eviction on their record) includes tenants who receive default judgments, and judgments of eviction after a trial or a determination of non-compliance with a stipulated agreement. An eviction judgment on a tenant’s record creates a significant barrier to finding new rental housing during the application screening process.

We do not use the terms “self-evict” or “informal evictions” for tenants who are displaced before they have a judgment of eviction in court against them, because none of these tenants left under conditions free from an imbalance of power, knowledge, resources, and options.

The overwhelming majority of cases that are filed and heard in eviction courts in Oregon are residential eviction cases where there is a standard landlord-tenant relationship. However, there are a small number of cases in these data that represent other situations. Out of the 18,000+ eviction cases filed in Oregon in 2022, around 495 cases fell into one of these four categories. These cases are not included in the filing count data on this website.

The four other types of cases that are filed using the LT case designation are:

Commercial eviction cases - when a business is being evicted.

Return of Personal Property - after a tenant is evicted, they can sue the landlord for return of any property that was on site when they were forcibly removed by the sheriffs.

Evictions associated with Employment Termination - some jobs include employer provided housing. When that job is terminated, so is the access to housing. The employer/landlord can use the eviction court to evict the former employee faster than other forms of “standard” evictions.

Foreclosures - If a bank forecloses on a home, and the former mortgage holders (homeowners) remain in the property after the deed has transferred back to the lender, the lender can file an eviction case to have the sheriff remove the former owner from the property.

Eviction issues have gained visibility in the past ten years, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, as housing security was recognized as a vital need threatened by income loss. Most eviction research is focused on examining eviction data produced from eviction court records. This information has long been used by landlords as a part of the tenant screening process, usually via commercial firms that collate court records for background checks. Eviction court data havebeen less accessible to tenants and tenant organizers, so there is value in making this data publicly available and usable.   

However, it is important to remember that eviction court records only tell us part of the story of landlord-tenant relations, housing insecurity, and displacement. Understanding what eviction court data does and does not capture is especially important in Oregon, where not all evictions are visible in judicial records. For example, in Oregon, court data can never count the number of tenants who are displaced by a notice of termination before receiving a court summons. Eviction court cases therefore represent a lower-bound estimate of displacement happening in the eviction process.

Evicted in Oregon captures the records of evictions when they reach the court; it can never count the number of tenants who are displaced by an eviction notice before receiving a court summons. In some counties in Oregon, evictions can be filed in a Justice Court, a county-run court that is not under the administration of the Oregon Judicial Department; these evictions are not available in the court data that is compiled here.

The eviction numbers you can find here are a lower bound of eviction events in Oregon. Using eviction court data, in combination with additional data collected in partnership with tenants, court observers, and community partners, we will be able to tell a fuller story about eviction displacement happening in Oregon.

Read more about the importance of community-led data collection and research in Eviction Lab Misses the Mark >

The case counts included on this website represent the most recent extraction of eviction case numbers from the Oregon Judicial Department court records.

These case numbers represent only evictions for which a summons has been issued; they do not represent all termination notices received by tenants as part of the eviction process.

These numbers do not include all evictions filed in Justice Courts or municipal courts in Baker, Clackamas, Douglas, Gilliam, Grant, Harney, Lane, Linn, Malheur, Marion, Morrow, Sherman, Tillamook, Wheeler counties.

Learn more about the data availability by county >

Eviction data isn’t static, even in the cases of evictions filed over 5 years ago. There are multiple ways that the status of a case can change overtime, changing the data.

For example:

• a case that had a judgment of eviction by default may be overturned, reopened and then end in a dismissal.

• a case can be expunged, wiping it from the courts database

Therefore, some numbers on Evicted in Oregon may change as court records are updated.

Eviction court data and research uses both technical legal terms and plain language to describe the procedural steps of the eviction process and the experience the people in process are having. Sometimes these terms overlap, and sometimes the words the court uses do not translate to how we talk about the experience.

The glossary below aims to clarify the terms we use, what those data points can and cannot tell us, and how much visibility we have on different steps in the eviction process.