The federal eviction backstop closed. Housing court didn't.

Between December 2020 and March 2021, Congress built the largest direct rent-relief program in U.S. history: $46.55 billion, paid out household by household to landlords and utility companies on behalf of tenants who'd fallen behind.▸ It was designed to expire, and it did. Treasury's program page now states plainly that the period of performance has ended and grantees "may no longer use ERA2 award funds to assist renters." No ongoing federal successor replaced it. The eviction courts the program was built to keep people out of never got the same memo.

The money came in two appropriations: $25 billion under the Consolidated Appropriations Act of December 2020 ("ERA1"), and $21.55 billion under the American Rescue Plan Act of March 2021 ("ERA2") — $46.55 billion combined, per the Government Accountability Office.▸ By June 30, 2023, the last date GAO could verify a complete cross-program tally, grantees had expended 87% of it: 94% of ERA1, a slower 80% of ERA2.

That spending reached people, not just balance sheets.▸ By October 2023, state, local, and territorial grantees had made more than 11.6 million payments to renter households since the program began, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, which tracked Treasury's quarterly compliance reports through late 2023. Public tracking of that count effectively stopped there, well before ERA2's period of performance actually ended on September 30, 2025 — so 11.6 million is the last full tally available, not a final one. Today, a renter who searches Treasury's ERA page for help is routed to a referral list on the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau's site — not a program, a list of other people to call.

Eviction courts run on a separate clock from Congress.▸ Princeton's Eviction Lab tracks monthly filings through its Eviction Tracking System, covering 38 city areas and 10 states — roughly a third of the nation's renter households. Landlords filed 1.23 million eviction cases across those sites in 2025 — a second straight year of decline, down slightly from 1.26 million in 2024, and 3.2% below the 2023–2024 "post-pandemic" baseline Eviction Lab now uses for comparison.

That national dip wasn't even.▸ Filings ran hotter than baseline in 14 of the 48 tracked sites — up 27% in the Austin, Texas area, and up substantially across Oregon, Charleston, and Tacoma. And a falling national rate still means enormous local caseloads: metro Atlanta filed 4% fewer cases than its own average in 2025, and still logged 144,000 eviction filings — more than New Mexico, Minnesota, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Delaware, and Wisconsin combined. Houston filed 77,000, also a decline from its own baseline.

The spread is the story as much as the average is.▸ In Atlanta, landlords filed against one in four renter households in 2025. In New York City, where — per Eviction Lab's analysis — strong local tenant protections limit filings regardless of high rents, the rate was one in twenty. There is no federal program left to explain that gap. It's now entirely a matter of which state or city still funds its own eviction-prevention machinery, and which doesn't.

Eviction Lab's Eviction Tracking System covers 38 city areas and 10 states, not a full national count, so its totals are a lower bound on U.S. eviction filings. ERA expenditure figures are the last complete cross-program tally GAO could verify, as of June 30, 2023; the program has since fully wound down.