Massachusetts courts took in 59,475 probate, divorce and foreclosure-related filings in fiscal year 2026.
Every one of them is a public record. Each was filed before any listing reached the MLS, and many will never reach it at all.
This report counts them. The figures come from the Massachusetts Trial Court's own case-filing data, not from estimates. Fiscal year 2026 ran from July 1, 2025 to June 30, 2026.
The MLS shows what is already for sale. Court and registry filings show what may be coming.
When an estate opens in probate, the heirs have to decide what to do with any real estate. When a couple files for divorce, a jointly owned home has to be sold, bought out or transferred. When a lender starts the foreclosure process, the owner has a limited window to sell first.
None of those owners has listed yet. All of them are in the public record. Massachusetts produces these filings at a steady, countable volume every year.
Probate is the court process for settling a person's estate. In Massachusetts it runs through the Probate and Family Court, which has 14 divisions, one per county. Probate filings are public.
The court recorded 34,658 probate filings in FY2022, 35,599 in FY2023, 36,117 in FY2024, 35,652 in FY2025 and 35,535 in FY2026. For scale, 63,390 Massachusetts residents died in 2022, according to the state's annual death report for that year.
Not every probate estate includes real estate, and property held in a trust or in joint ownership can pass without probate. But where an estate does hold a home, the personal representative has to decide whether to sell, keep or transfer it. Heirs often live out of state and often want a simple sale. CORVENIS marks each probate signal CONFIRMED or INFERRED so an agent knows how firm the property match is.
Sources: Massachusetts Trial Court, FY2026 case filings · Massachusetts Deaths 2022, Registry of Vital Records and Statistics
Divorce cases are also filed in the Probate and Family Court. The court recorded 19,441 divorce filings in FY2022, 20,068 in FY2023, 19,670 in FY2024, 20,098 in FY2025 and 19,766 in FY2026.
Not every divorcing couple owns a home. Where they do, the case has to resolve it through a sale, a buyout or a transfer. A sale can also create two new housing needs, because both spouses have to live somewhere.
Source: Massachusetts Trial Court, FY2026 case filings
Before foreclosing on a Massachusetts home, a lender normally files a Servicemembers Civil Relief Act case in Land Court to establish that the borrower is not on active military duty. That case count is the cleanest statewide measure of foreclosures being started.
Land Court recorded 2,842 Servicemembers cases in FY2022, 4,887 in FY2023, 4,580 in FY2024, 4,059 in FY2025 and 4,174 in FY2026. Massachusetts foreclosure starts peaked in FY2023 and have run 6% to 17% below that level since. Nationally, foreclosure filings rose 14% in calendar 2025 to 367,460 properties.
An owner in pre-foreclosure usually has equity to protect and a deadline. A sale before the auction preserves that equity and avoids a completed foreclosure on their record.
Sources: Massachusetts Trial Court, FY2026 case filings · ATTOM 2025 Year-End U.S. Foreclosure Market Report
When property taxes go unpaid, a city or town can record a tax taking at the Registry of Deeds and later ask Land Court to foreclose. Land Court recorded 1,398 tax lien cases in FY2022, 1,122 in FY2023, 772 in FY2024, 563 in FY2025 and 446 in FY2026.
That count covers only the cases that reach Land Court. The earlier step, the tax taking recorded at a Registry of Deeds, has no published statewide total. CORVENIS tracks municipal tax lien, tax deed and tax sale filings at the registry level in the towns it covers.
Source: Massachusetts Trial Court, FY2026 case filings
Two more signal categories sit outside the totals in this report. Ownership-change documents (mortgage discharges, powers of attorney, warranty and quitclaim deeds, second mortgages) are recorded at the 21 Registries of Deeds, and the state publishes no combined count of them. Guardianship filings, part of the Life Events category, numbered 9,410 in the Probate and Family Court in FY2026.
These are court filings, not sellers. Not every filing involves real estate, and the total leaves out everything recorded only at a Registry of Deeds. What the number shows is the size of the public record an agent could be reading: close to 60,000 filings a year, each tied to a person whose housing situation may be about to change.
The median Massachusetts single-family home sold for $615,000 in 2024, up 7.9% from 2023 and a record at the time, according to The Warren Group. Massachusetts owners who sold in early 2026 had held their homes for 12.70 years on average, according to ATTOM.
Long ownership at rising prices means most owners in a probate, divorce or pre-foreclosure filing have real equity. That gives them options, and it is why a sale is often the best outcome for them.
Sources: The Warren Group, January 2025 · ATTOM, U.S. Homeownership Tenure by State, Q1 2026
The table below shows FY2026 probate, divorce and guardianship filings for each of the 14 divisions of the Probate and Family Court. These are the court's actual counts, not population estimates.
Middlesex County alone recorded 11,132 probate and divorce filings in FY2026, one in five statewide. Worcester, Essex and Norfolk follow. Together those four counties account for 54.6% of the state total.
These are statewide court counts, not CORVENIS coverage. 202 of Massachusetts's ~358 towns are live today. Check your town on the Coverage Map before you subscribe.
Most agents know these records exist. Few read them, because finding the filings, matching them to a property and doing it again the next day takes hours.
Most list vendors surface these filings 3 to 6 months after they are made. CORVENIS pulls them from 22 Massachusetts government sources, the 21 Registries of Deeds and the statewide Probate and Family Court, and makes them searchable the day after they are recorded.
See how each signal works: probate, pre-foreclosure, divorce, tax lien and ownership change.
What changed in this revision. The April 2026 edition estimated annual volumes from mortality and divorce rates and arrived at 30,000 to 34,000. Those inputs understated the real numbers. This edition replaces the estimates with the Trial Court's filing counts.
This report is updated when the Trial Court publishes each new fiscal year. Questions about the data: matt@corvenis.com.
Published by CORVENIS LLC. CORVENIS is a Massachusetts public-records seller intelligence platform for real estate agents and broker offices.