Market-rate rents in San Francisco have jumped nearly 20 percent in the past year, and there’s little sign that a years-long drought of new homes will end soon. In short, the latest tech boom is driving demand ever higher, and supply isn’t close to catching up.
“The narrative around the AI boom is ‘San Francisco is back, baby!’ but the boom doesn’t accrue equally to everybody,” says Shanti Singh of the advocacy group Tenants Together.
In such conditions, landlords are more willing to push out rent-controlled tenants to bring rents up to current market-rate levels. And even with San Francisco’s stringent tenant protections, evictions in the city are up too.
But how much? Stories about people, especially elderly tenants, facing eviction or landlord harassment are painful. But they sometimes obscure a troubling fact: No one knows the exact number of evictions.
There are three different sources of numbers from three local agencies, and they all acknowledge their data don’t tell the whole story. What’s going on?
To help sort through recent news stories, various statistics, warnings from tenant advocates, and what they tell us about San Francisco, we’ve put together this FAQ.
Q: How many people are evicted in San Francisco every year?
Nobody knows for sure because different entities collect different data, from eviction attempts to actual removals.
One piece of the puzzle comes from the Sheriff’s Department, which records “lockouts” — when a deputy physically removes a renter to enforce a court-ordered eviction. (By law, landlords can’t physically remove a legal tenant, change locks, or switch off utilities, even if they’ve won a court case.)
Unlike other numbers we’ll look at in a moment, lockouts represent actual evictions. There were 924 last year, according to the sheriff. That’s up from 819 in 2024. The sheriff’s data was available only back to 2022 (688 lockouts) because it previously used different record-keeping software.
For what it’s worth, SF is actually on pace this year for fewer lockouts. In the first half of 2026, there were 436, less than half 2025’s totals.
While lockouts represent actual evictions, they’re almost certainly not the only ones, and they only happen in certain cases. “How many people stay until the sheriff comes to remove them? It’s a very small number,” says SF Anti-Displacement Coalition director Molly Goldberg.
Q: What do other data say?
A different figure comes from the San Francisco Rent Board, the city agency that oversees enforcement of SF’s renter laws. The Rent Board’s annual tally is based on a specific document: eviction notices that landlords give to tenants. Landlords must file these notices with the Rent Board.
For 2025, the board tallied 1,495 notices, compared with 920 in 2024 and 745 in 2023.
It’s a sharp increase but still below pre-pandemic levels. The board reported 2,173 notices in 2016, the decade’s high water mark.
However, these numbers don’t equal actual evictions for at least two reasons. First, not every notice results in a removal. Some situations get resolved, perhaps because the tenant fights back with legal help.
Second, and more important, landlords do not have to file a notice when the cause of eviction is nonpayment of rent. Some landlords choose to do so anyway. There were 488 in 2025, but these represent only a small amount of nonpayment evictions.
Ora Prochovnick, director of litigation at the Eviction Defense Collaborative (EDC), estimates that up to 80 percent of cases the EDC hears are rent payment disputes. EDC is SF’s nonprofit partner in a free legal program for people threatened with eviction.
When asked about Prochovnick’s figure, Rent Board executive director Christina Varner tells The Frisc the city doesn’t track nonpayment evictions.
Q: So the Rent Board figure is almost certainly an undercount because it doesn’t include nonpayment evictions. Who else tracks evictions?
A much larger count comes from the San Francisco Superior Court. When a landlord sues to remove a tenant (for any reason), the court takes the case, called an “unlawful detainer.” This only happens when the landlord has legally ordered an eviction and the tenant refuses to leave.
In 2025, the court took on 3,654 cases, according to records obtained by The Frisc. It’s a 19 percent jump from the previous 12 months of reported data, July 2023 through June 2024. (For some previous years, the court only provided annual data measured by fiscal year, July to June. It has not made available data for the second half of 2024.)
As of June 26, there were 1,762 this year, almost the same pace as 2025.
The court data are a notable increase over the Rent Board figures, but they still lack accuracy when trying to count actual evictions. First, not every court case results in a removal. But there’s no obvious way to know how many cases are resolved in favor of tenants.
Second, not every eviction ends up in court. “Many people move before they even [officially] get a notice,” says Goldberg.
Q: Let’s recap: what are the figures for 2025?
* The Sheriff’s Department says it conducted lockouts for 924 court-ordered evictions.
* The Rent Board says landlords reported handing out 1,489 eviction notices. This figure doesn’t include a large subset (nonpayment of rent) cases and it doesn’t tell us if the eviction attempt was successful.
* The Superior Court took on 3,654 eviction lawsuits last year. It’s not clear how many ended up in evictions.
The following chart shows the most recent three years of figures from each source:
Q: Why doesn’t the Rent Board track “nonpayment” evictions?
The landmark 1979 law that established SF’s rent rules, including rent control, doesn’t require it. The Rent Board’s job is to make sure landlords aren’t strong-arming tenants or pursuing illegal evictions.
But protections can’t help tenants who just plain can’t cover the rent. So the board doesn’t bother asking landlords to report those cases; of all eviction scenarios, they’re the least likely to be disputed.
Q: Are there other kinds of legal evictions? And which ones are illegal?
This is complicated. Specific circumstances can tip an eviction attempt from legal into illegal, with lots of gray area between. That’s one reason anyone faced with the threat can ask for free legal help. Common reasons for eviction that landlords give include breach of rental agreement, nuisance, capital improvements, and owner move-in.
All these reasons are legal, but they’re open to subjective readings of rental agreements and laws, which can give dishonest landlords the room for bad-faith complaints.
Q: What about evictions completely under the radar?
Tenant advocates say there are more situations of people being forced out that aren’t counted or can’t be counted. As noted above, a landlord can legally evict a renter for nonpayment and not file a report with the city. Eviction attempts might never reach court or require a sheriff lockout.
But how many? Advocates acknowledge they don’t know. “I couldn’t guess how many tenants just leave the property” when a notice arrives, says SF attorney Christina Collins.
As rents rise, dishonest landlords are more likely to resort to “shadow evictions,” using harassment or renovations until renters vacate; lying about their rights; and serving legally dubious notices, hoping renters won’t challenge.
“The situation is rare where the tenant has the courage to push back and say they know their rights,” says Julia Wobbe, also a tenants’ attorney. “They don’t want to risk it.”
Q: How serious of a problem is eviction in San Francisco?
SF is a renter-heavy city. In 2024, the most recent year with available data, the US Census estimated there were nearly 260,000 renter households in SF, more than 60 percent of occupied homes.
A 2025 report from the Association of Bay Area Governments (ABAG) estimated that between 2023 and 2024, SF had the second-lowest eviction rate in the Bay Area at 1.2 percent. (Marin County was a tick lower at 1.1 percent.)
The relatively low numbers are likely a result of the city’s renter protections, which everyone interviewed for this article agreed are some of the strongest in the nation.
‘I couldn’t guess how many tenants just leave the property’ when an eviction notice arrives.
san francisco tenant attorney Christina Collins
Among the protections is free legal help for any renter facing eviction threat, thanks to 2018’s Prop F. ABAG also found that 45 percent of SF renters facing eviction had legal representation, compared to just 4 percent nationally. (There’s a caveat: ABAG uses the Superior Court numbers, which, like all data sources, aren’t comprehensive.)
As The Frisc reported last year, there are also many layers of protection against displacement via renovation or demolition.
But economists agree that as rent prices rise, so do eviction rates. Median rent for a one-bedroom apartment is up 19 percent year-over-year on rental sites Zumper and ApartmentList.
Demand is rising fast, eating up existing supply. “There were a lot of vacancies during the pandemic, and they’re starting to be refilled,” says the Rent Board’s Varner.
In cities like San Francisco with chronic housing shortages, the disruption of eviction is amplified because there’s no bounty of available homes that a displaced person can quickly find. And this predicament often hits people who can afford the disruption the least.
The ABAG report found that in 2023, 53 percent of SF lockouts happened in census tracts primarily home to people of color, low-income renters, seniors 75 years and over, disabled people, and people for whom English is not their first language. San Francisco’s was the highest rate in the Bay Area.
And at least anecdotally, people who “don’t fit the platonic ideal” of someone facing eviction are now affected, says tenant advocate Singh: “There are people who are in the middle class in the Bay Area facing tech layoffs.”
Even during the city’s pandemic exodus, affordability remained a discussion point. Now that the boom loop has replaced the doom loop, the inability to build enough housing is causing even more pain.
