AFTER MORE THAN a decade of advocacy, a new law took effect a year ago that lets tenants petition to seal the court records of past eviction cases. The biggest roadblock for implementation turns out to be that almost no one knows the option exists.
Massachusetts courts logged more than a million eviction case filings since 1988. In the year since the law took effect last May, just 6,284 petitions to seal cases have been filed.
Advocates see both promise in the process and plenty of work to be done to make tenants aware of their right to seek to have past eviction cases – the “Scarlet E” – sealed from public view.
“Few people actually know about the law,” said Annette Duke, senior housing attorney at the Massachusetts Law Reform Institute, which helped develop the legislation and has led outreach since it took effect. “If you had an eviction 20 years ago or 10 years ago, you may not be paying attention.”
The eviction sealing law, included in the Affordable Homes Act signed by Gov. Maura Healey in August 2024, gives tenants the right to petition courts to remove certain eviction records from public view. An eviction record — even from a case a tenant won, or that was dismissed — shows up in the public court database and in the paid screening algorithms most landlords use to screen applicants.
The process for sealing the record depends on the outcome of the case, the type of eviction case, and whether the appeal period has passed. Broadly, cases where the tenant won or the case was dismissed can be sealed immediately, but if the eviction involved an agreement to pay late rent or claims of some sort of criminal activity, there can be additional steps during court proceedings.
Black renters in Massachusetts are on average 2.4 times more likely to have an eviction filed against them than white renters, a disparity that is wider for Black women.
The idea behind the law is to let tenants wipe the slate clean from certain evictions and not have those cases present obstacles to renting an apartment, securing a mortgage to buy a home, or finding employment.
State Sen. Lydia Edwards, of East Boston, who sponsored the legislation and first encountered the concept while heading Boston’s Office of Housing Stability, said the stigma attached to any filing was the core problem.
“What does an eviction mean on the record? It’s oftentimes the stigma that prevents you from getting other bits of housing,” she said. Sealing it, she said, is “a second chance.”
The Legislature passed a version of the bill in 2021, but then-Gov. Charlie Baker vetoed it, arguing it would shield criminal conduct from landlords. Edwards said that argument was easily rebutted — a civil eviction carries no criminal finding — and the coalition that ultimately pushed the law through included law enforcement, with district attorneys, including Suffolk District Attorney Kevin Hayden, testifying in favor.
The implication of eviction sealing extends beyond the rental market. Edwards said she saw firsthand when directing the city housing stability office how an eviction record complicated first-time home buying, surfacing in credit reports and derailing applicants who had financing to buy a home but one old court filing on their record.
Lori Stewart, a housing activist and the inaugural housing stability coordinator for the city of Salem, said that one of the first things she did when the law passed was seal her own record — a dismissal brought by the Salem Housing Authority that had never resulted in an eviction.
“It gave me great peace of mind to do that,” Stewart said on a recent Mass. Law Reform Institute podcast. “It also felt like I closed the chapter on something that was unpleasant and allowed me to move forward.”
Getting to that point has required more hand-holding than advocates expected.
A digital petition tool built by Suffolk University Law School’s Legal Innovation and Technology Lab in collaboration with the Massachusetts Trial Court is an effort to ease the petition process. It presents tenants with a virtual guided interview that takes about 15 minutes, pulls directly from court records, and files a sealing petition electronically. Duke said many tenants still needed in-person help with using the tool, though it does make the process more efficient.
Legal services organizations are running clinics across the state on how to get eviction records sealed, and Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s office directed more than $500,000 this year in grant funding to regional legal aid groups to expand that capacity and extend outreach beyond Greater Boston.
“It’s going to give us geographic diversity, so that not all of the eviction sealings are in Eastern Mass.,” Edwards said, “and it’s going to give legal services an added service to provide in their housing justice clinics and housing justice work. I believe by having full-time individuals on the ground, doing eviction record sealing, they’re going to be in a great position to hopefully double those numbers to 1,000 a month.”
Duke, the Mass. Law Reform Institute lawyer, said other early complications included the initial lack of multilingual materials, now being addressed through a separate MLRI grant from Campbell’s office, and heightened fear of courthouses among immigrant communities under current federal immigration enforcement crackdowns.
Processing times have also been uneven. Duke said petitions are being resolved anywhere from within one day to three months depending on the court, with no uniform time standards across divisions.
The courts processing those petitions are already strained. The Trial Court’s eviction dashboard shows persistently high case volumes, and court leaders have flagged severe resource constraints. Trial Court administrators reported 543,000 case filings between July 2024 and March 2025, a jump of 30,000 over the prior year, while operating under a hiring freeze after last year’s budget fell short of what administrators called a maintenance-level request.
There is a split in the real estate industry over the policy. While the Greater Boston Real Estate Board and Massachusetts Realtors both endorsed it, the state’s main landlord advocacy organization wants it repealed. MassLandlords executive director Doug Quattrochi wants the law repealed.
MassLandlords, the state’s main landlord advocacy organization, warned when the law passed that it would place “harm housing providers and good renters” and “place excessive burden on the courts.”
Doug Quattrochi, executive director of MassLandlords, said those concerns have materialized. He said landlords are now holding units vacant for months rather than risk renting to applicants they can no longer adequately screen, because a clean eviction record and a sealed one are now indistinguishable.
“You can’t tell if that person has got a sealed case, or something else has gone wrong on their record,” he said.
The next legislative push, according to Edwards, centers on making sealing automatic for the two case types that currently require a petition but can be approved immediately: dismissals and cases where the tenant prevailed. Edwards said a look at the petitions filed so far shows those two categories make up a substantial share of the total.
Duke said this change would ease court processing as much as it would help tenants, many of whom walk out of a won or dismissed case and simply move on, not realizing they still carry a public record. “The thought of coming back may not come to mind until they’re trying to buy a house and realize they have bad credit,” she said.
The program dovetails with another ongoing state-funded housing program – the Access to Counsel initiative offering representation to low-income tenants and even some landlords. Duke said that attorneys shepherding tenants through eviction proceedings are now building record sealing into their work once cases wrap up.
“As part of full representation, attorneys are, after the case is concluded and the appeal period runs, actually helping people seal their record,” she said.
