Baltimore County recorded more than 4,300 evictions during Maryland's 2025 fiscal year, more than any other jurisdiction in the state, even as evictions statewide were on the decline. A single 9 a.m. docket at the District Court in Towson included 735 eviction cases, a snapshot of how deeply the housing crunch has settled into the county's courtrooms.
The disparity stood out because it ran counter to the broader statewide trend, according to The Baltimore Banner, which first reported the figures. CBS News Baltimore also covered the findings in a video segment published Tuesday, titled Baltimore Banner: Baltimore County is worst in Maryland for evictions. The county's median rent now sits around $1,700 a month, with rents climbing nearly 8% over the past decade, a pace that has outstripped what many renters can absorb.
A Housing Shortfall Years in the Making
Behind the eviction numbers is a supply problem that local officials have only recently quantified. A December 2025 report commissioned by the county found Baltimore County is short at least 19,000 homes, according to the Banner's reporting. That shortage has coincided with a steep rise in homelessness: Maryland housing officials said homelessness in the county jumped 28% over the prior two years, outpacing the rest of Central Maryland, per the same account.
The county is not without a recent track record of intervention. During the COVID-19 period, Baltimore County used more than $115 million in federal emergency rental assistance to prevent an estimated 8,500 evictions, the Banner's report notes. County Executive Kathy Klausmeier's office said she has since added $5 million to this year's budget specifically to help create new attainable housing units, an acknowledgment that the supply gap, not just rental assistance, needs addressing.
How the County's Numbers Compare
The county's current standing is a reversal from a few years ago. Back in August and September 2022, Baltimore City had the highest eviction rate in the state, with about eight people evicted monthly for every 10,000 residents, compared with roughly four in Baltimore County and a little more than two statewide, the Banner reported in earlier coverage. That same reporting found that 13 Maryland jurisdictions, including Baltimore City, recorded at least one month in that stretch where evictions exceeded their 2019 totals, as the state climbed back from a pandemic-era low.
Statewide, the numbers from that period illustrate just how far evictions had fallen and then rebounded: Maryland recorded 4,107 evictions during the summer of 2022, which was 30% below the same period in 2019 but roughly triple the summer 2020 total and about double summer 2021's, according to the Banner. In the final six months of 2019 alone, before the pandemic reshaped the landscape, 10,486 people were evicted across Maryland, including 2,920 in Baltimore City.
Fixing the Data Problem
Part of what makes Baltimore County's current standing notable is that better data now exists to track it. New America partnered with the county's Department of Housing and Community Development through the 2024-2025 Eviction Data Response Network, an effort described by New America as designed to improve how eviction data is collected and analyzed. That collaboration helped facilitate, for the first time, the sharing of county-level eviction data, including addresses and other case-specific information, with the state. As a result, the county can now access state Department of Housing and Community Development datasets to sharpen its local analysis of eviction trends, the organization said.
All of these cases ultimately move through the same legal channel. The Maryland Courts system notes that the District Court of Maryland has jurisdiction over all landlord-tenant cases in the state. The court also cautions that its internal tracking numbers should not be used for external reporting, which it says should instead rely on the Maryland Judiciary's annual Statistical Abstract, since eviction totals in court spreadsheets can shift if clerks have not finished entering data when a report is generated.
Nationally, the scale of the eviction crisis is tracked in other ways too. The Eviction Lab's Eviction Tracking System monitors filings across 11 states and 43 cities with monthly updates, and has found that over the past year, women accounted for 53% of people facing eviction in the locations it monitors. For Baltimore County, though, the more immediate story remains the crowded morning dockets in Towson and a housing supply that officials themselves admit has fallen tens of thousands of units short.
