Answered Research · Original data analysis
Texas debt lawsuits: what six years of official court data show
Published 2026-07-06 · By John DiSalle · Data: Texas Office of Court Administration published statistics, FY2020–FY2025 · Download the dataset (CSV)
Key findings
- • Texas justice courts opened 457,212 debt claim cases in FY2025 — the highest of the six years analyzed, up 27% in one year and up 94% from the FY2022 low of 235,950. Six-year total: about 1.94 million filings.
- • Debt claims are now 55% of all new civil filings in Texas justice courts (457,212 of 828,279 in FY2025) — more than 7× the volume of small-claims cases.
- • 127,583 debt claim cases ended in default judgment in FY2025. Of the cases that ended in a judgment for either side, roughly 64% were defaults — the defendant never meaningfully participated. Across all six years, 649,772 default judgments were entered.
- • Jury trials are nearly extinct: 75 debt claim jury trials statewide in FY2025 — about 0.02% of the year’s 373,132 dispositions. Another ~33% of dispositions were cases the plaintiff nonsuited or dismissed itself.
- • The active pending debt claim docket nearly doubled, from 244,789 cases (September 1, 2019) to 460,485 (August 31, 2025).
Debt claim cases filed per year
“Debt Claim” is the justice court case category for lawsuits by debt collectors, debt buyers, and original creditors to recover consumer debt (up to $20,000). Texas fiscal years run September–August.
Default judgments entered per year
A default judgment usually means the defendant never filed an answer — the plaintiff wins without having to prove its case at a contested hearing.
How these cases end
| Fiscal year | Default judgment | Nonsuited / dismissed by plaintiff | Trial or hearing (judge or jury) | Agreed judgment |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| FY2020 | 93,136 (35.2%) | 104,184 (39.4%) | 16,937 (6.4%) | 24,740 (9.4%) |
| FY2021 | 101,982 (36.7%) | 102,983 (37.1%) | 14,899 (5.4%) | 24,838 (8.9%) |
| FY2022 | 101,096 (35.5%) | 111,127 (39.1%) | 18,084 (6.4%) | 26,313 (9.2%) |
| FY2023 | 103,394 (37.6%) | 96,259 (35.0%) | 20,802 (7.6%) | 23,987 (8.7%) |
| FY2024 | 122,581 (37.2%) | 109,188 (33.1%) | 24,573 (7.4%) | 32,799 (9.9%) |
| FY2025 | 127,583 (34.2%) | 124,110 (33.3%) | 29,517 (7.9%) | 42,898 (11.5%) |
Share of each fiscal year’s total debt claim dispositions. Remaining dispositions are cases dismissed for want of prosecution (5–10%) and “all other dispositions.” Source: OCA Justice Courts Activity Detail reports (full counts in the CSV).
Two disposition patterns stand out. First, when a debt claim case ends in a judgment for either side, that judgment is usually a default: 649,772 of the six years’ 950,159 judgments — about 68.4% — were defaults (63.8% in FY2025). Second, roughly one in three cases is nonsuited or dismissed by the plaintiff itself — collectors walk away from a large share of the cases they file, which is consistent with suits filed in bulk on thin documentation.
What changes when defendants answer
Texas’s official reports do not split outcomes by whether the defendant filed an answer — but independent research does. The Debt Collection Lab’s Harris County tracker (the state’s largest county) reports that of 145,402 debt collection lawsuits from July 2022 to November 2024, 75.5% resulted in default judgments, and 90.7% of defendants had no lawyer. In the largest recent analysis of answered vs. unanswered cases (California, 2021–2023, by the data scientists behind the Debt Collection Lab), cases where the defendant filed no answer ended in 78% default judgments; cases where the defendant answered produced zero defaults — 51% went to trial or judgment on the merits and 49% settled.
The statewide numbers above point the same direction: a default judgment requires a defendant who never responded, and defaults are the single largest way Texas debt claim cases end. The honest summary: answering does not guarantee a win, but not answering nearly guarantees a loss.
Justice courts are only part of the picture
The figures above cover justice (JP) courts, where debt suits up to $20,000 are filed. Larger consumer debt suits land in district and statutory county courts, which report a combined “Consumer/Commercial/Debt” contract category: 99,691 new cases filed in FY2025, with 26,516 default judgments among 99,393 dispositions. That category mixes consumer and commercial contract disputes, so it cannot be added to the justice court totals as a clean consumer-debt count — but it means the true volume of Texas debt litigation is meaningfully higher than the justice court numbers alone.
Methodology, limitations & sources
All Texas figures are transcribed from the “Debt Claim” column of the Civil Cases table in the Office of Court Administration’s Justice Courts Activity Detailreport (page 2 of each report), published in the Annual Statistical Report for the Texas Judiciary for fiscal years 2020–2025. “Filed” is the report’s “New Cases Filed” line; disposition categories are the report’s own. District/county court figures come from the “Consumer/Commercial/Debt” column of the District and Statutory County Courts Civil and Family Case Activity Detail report for FY2025. No scraping of individual dockets was used.
What this data does not show: OCA’s reports are self-reported by courts (reporting rates ran 93.7–95.3% across these years, so true totals are slightly higher); they do not break debt claim filings out by county in the published annual tables (the by-county files aggregate all civil case types); they do not distinguish debt buyers from original creditors; and they do not report outcomes by whether the defendant answered. Dispositions in a fiscal year include cases filed in earlier years, so disposition percentages are shares of cases closed, not of cases filed.
- Texas OCA — Annual Statistical Reports for the Texas Judiciary (official index)
- Justice Courts Activity Detail, Sept 1, 2024 – Aug 31, 2025 (FY2025)
- Justice Courts Activity Detail, FY2024
- Justice Courts Activity Detail, FY2023
- Justice Courts Activity Detail, FY2022
- Justice Courts Activity Detail, FY2021
- Justice Courts Activity Detail, FY2020
- District & Statutory County Courts — Civil and Family Case Activity Detail, FY2025
- Debt Collection Lab — Harris County, Texas lawsuit tracker
- January Advisors — answered vs. unanswered case outcomes (California)
- Pew Charitable Trusts — How Debt Collectors Are Transforming the Business of State Courts
Dataset licensed CC BY 4.0 — journalists and researchers may reuse it with attribution to Answered (answeredlaw.com). For questions or the underlying aggregation, contact support@ellasid.com.
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Answered is self-help software, not a law firm. This analysis is general information about court statistics, not legal advice, and no individual outcome is guaranteed. Six-year filing total (1,943,898) is the sum of the OCA’s yearly “New Cases Filed” counts.