The Florida Counties Where Foreclosure Filings Are Actually Rising (August 2026)

“Florida foreclosures are up” is true and almost useless. Up where, by how much, and against what baseline? Below are measured lis pendens counts for 18 Florida counties, pulled from the county clerks themselves and dated 25 August 2026 — plus the two ways a county-level foreclosure number will mislead you if you read it the way most people do.

Read this before the table

A lis pendens is the public notice a lender files when it starts a foreclosure. In Florida it is recorded with the county clerk, usually the same day the complaint is filed, which makes it the earliest public, dated, searchable signal that a property is in trouble. Counting them by county is the cleanest available read on where foreclosure activity is actually moving.

Two traps, both of which catch people constantly.

Trap one: percentage changes on tiny baselines

Levy County filings rose 125% from June to July. Levy County went from 4 filings to 9. The percentage is arithmetically correct and completely meaningless as a market signal. Always read the percentage next to the raw count.

Trap two: mistaking a data provider's coverage growth for the market

This one is worth spelling out, because it is the most common way foreclosure “trend” content is wrong — including, if we were careless, ours.

Our raw statewide series looks explosive: 34 filings in March, 406 in April, 352 in May, 914 in June, 1,230 in July. Filings tripling in ninety days would be extraordinary news. It is also not what happened. Over those same months the number of counties we were collecting went 2 → 2 → 14 → 18 → 18. Almost all of that “growth” is us adding counties.

So the comparison below uses a fixed panel: only the 14 counties whose data covers the entire June–July window. Palm Beach, Duval, St. Johns and Wakulla are excluded from the growth ranking because we started collecting them mid-window — including them would report our onboarding as their foreclosure surge. Whenever you see a vendor publish a trend line, ask what their panel was. If the answer is “all our data,” the number is contaminated.

The ranking: June vs July 2026, fixed 14-county panel

Across the whole panel, filings went from 673 to 931 — a 38% increase in one month across a constant set of markets. That is the headline number, and unlike the raw statewide series, it means something.

What the four biggest movers actually tell you

Hillsborough: the one to pay attention to

116 additional filings in a single month, on an already-large base, is the most substantial move on the board. Tampa has been a top-three Florida wholesaling market for years, which cuts both ways: more deal flow, and more competitors who already have systems pointed at it.

Escambia: the quiet one

An 81% rise on a base of 36 is a genuine acceleration in a market most out-of-state investors ignore entirely. Pensacola is far from the Miami–Tampa–Orlando axis where most wholesaling attention concentrates. Less competition per filing is the argument for a market like this.

Miami-Dade: the largest absolute volume

161 filings in July and 350 in the most recent 30 days — the highest raw volume of any county we cover. Also the most saturated wholesaling market in the state, and the county where the insurance picture is improving fastest (the Florida Office of Insurance Regulation reported an average reduction near 14% for Miami-Dade in 2026). Volume is there; so is everyone else. We took Miami-Dade apart on its own — how much of that raw volume is actually workable, which is a different and less flattering number than the headline.

Santa Rosa: the only genuine decline

Down from 25 to 11. On a base that small, one slow month at the clerk explains it as easily as a market shift. Worth watching for another month before drawing any conclusion — which is the honest thing to say about most single-month county moves.

All 18 counties by current volume

Growth rate tells you where things are changing. Raw volume tells you where there is enough deal flow to build a business on. These are the last 30 and 90 days to 25 August 2026 for every Florida county we currently collect lis pendens from.

Why filings are rising at all

The driver is not collapsing home values. Florida home insurance premiums have more than doubled on average since 2022, with some homeowners facing 200–300% increases, and insurance-industry reporting now treats premiums as a frontline cause of Florida foreclosures rather than a background cost. Combine that with rising property taxes and the end of pandemic-era relief and you get owners who cannot carry the monthly cost of a house they still have equity in.

For anyone buying, that distinction is everything. An affordability-driven default usually leaves equity in the property, which means there is room for a deal. A value-driven default — the 2008 pattern — usually does not.

The pressure may be easing. The Florida Office of Insurance Regulation reported rate decreases in 51 of 67 counties in 2026. If that holds, the mechanism generating these filings weakens over the next several quarters.

How to check any of this yourself

None of this requires buying data. Every Florida county clerk publishes a free official records search:

• Open the clerk of court's official records search for your county.
• Filter by document type — “LIS PENDENS” or “NOTICE OF LIS PENDENS” depending on the county's vocabulary.
• Set a date range. Count the results. That is your county's filing volume for the period, from the authoritative source.
• Repeat for the prior period to get a change. Use the same date span for both, and check the county was publishing consistently across the whole window.

It takes about ten minutes per county per period, and you will be reading the same records we do. If a number in this post ever disagrees with the clerk, the clerk is right.

Frequently asked

All filing counts measured from Lispend's own collection of Florida county clerk records on 25 August 2026. Insurance and rate-change context is attributed to its sources inline. See also our 2026 guide to wholesaling in Florida.