Memphis Eviction Filings per 100 Rental Houses, by ZIP Code

Between February 2026 and July 2026, Memphis landlords filed 2,334 eviction cases against the 62,733 single-family houses in the city whose owner lives somewhere else. That is 3.7 filings per 100 rental houses in six months, or about one filing for every 13 rental houses a year at that pace. By ZIP code the rate runs from 6.2 in Hickory Ridge (38141) to 1.1 in Midtown (38104), a spread of about 6 to one.

Why per 100 houses and not a raw count

A raw count of filings mostly tells you where the rental houses are. The two ZIPs with the most filings in the city, South Memphis (38109) and Frayser (38127), are also the two with the most rental houses. Dividing by the number of rental houses in each ZIP turns the count into a rate an owner can use: out of 100 houses like the one you are underwriting, how many saw a filing in the last six months.

Every Memphis ZIP with at least 2,000 single-family houses

Citywide: 62,733 rental houses, 2,334 filings, 3.7 per 100. The top of the table is Hickory Ridge (38141) at 6.2, Cordova (38016) at 5.3, Parkway Village (38118) at 5.0, Frayser (38127) at 4.6, and the bottom is Midtown (38104) at 1.1 and East Memphis (38120) at 1.7. Cordova near the top surprises people who think of eviction filings as an inner-city measure. It only shows up because the measure is per rental house: on a raw filing count Cordova (38016) ranks 10 of 22.

What counts as a rental house

The assessor's roll does not say whether a house is rented. We call a house a rental when the owner's mailing address is not the house itself, which is 39% of the 160,910 single-family houses inside Memphis. That rule misses a landlord who lives next door and catches a second home nobody rents, so we checked it against the filings: 90% of all eviction filings that matched to a Memphis house landed on a house the rule called a rental. The rule is doing its job. The same owner-address test is what our who is buying Memphis homes page uses to separate company buyers from people buying a home to live in.

A filing is not an eviction

Every number on this page is a case filed in General Sessions court, the moment a landlord starts the process. It is not a judgment and it is not a family removed from a house. Many filings are dismissed or settled when the rent is paid, and how the docket actually resolves is a separate question we answer on what the eviction docket shows. A filing is also the landlord's action, not the tenant's. Some large operators file at the first missed payment as routine collection practice, so a ZIP with a lot of company-owned rentals can post a high filing rate on the strength of policy rather than on how tenants behave. Read the table as collection activity by area, not as a verdict on the people who live there.

Every rate is a floor

Only filings that matched to a parcel on the county roll are counted, and the ones that could not be matched are left out rather than guessed at. The docket also lags: the most recent month is dropped from the window whenever it has not caught up, which is why the window ends in July 2026. Both choices push the rates down, never up. If you are checking a specific case rather than an area, the eviction status check and the courthouse decoder read the same docket.

Figures on this page are as of 2026-09-01, cover February 2026 through July 2026, and refresh weekly with the rest of Memphis rental data. Method notes are on how we source our numbers.

Quick answers