Hutchinson County, Texas Eviction Risk: Very Low

Hutchinson County, Texas eviction laws carries an average eviction-risk score of 1.8/10 (Low) across its 5 tracked cities, placing it in the middle third of the state at rank 132 of 254 Texas counties. That means 131 counties carry more risk and 122 carry less, so landlords here are operating in genuinely moderate-to-low-risk territory rather than at either extreme. Average rent runs $960 per month, rent burden sits at 27.6% of income, and the renter share of the total population is a modest 19.6%, all of which points to a market where most residents are homeowners and the rental pool is relatively thin but stable.

The intra-county spread of 1.4 to 2.1 across those 5 cities is meaningful for investors, because underwriting a property in the lowest-risk community is a materially different proposition than entering the highest-risk one, even within the same county lines. Operators who treat Hutchinson County as a single homogeneous market are missing the fine-grained variation that drives actual landlord outcomes.

The cities inside Hutchinson County

Fritch is the county's highest-risk city, scoring 2.1/10, and with a population of 2,293 it is a small market where a single difficult tenant can represent an outsized share of a landlord's portfolio. Borger, the county seat and by far the largest city at 12,226 residents, lands at 1.8/10, essentially matching the county average. Investors considering Borger should weigh its scale advantage against the fact that a majority of the county's renter stock is concentrated there.

Below those two, Stinnett scores 1.6/10 (population 1,170), Sanford scores 1.5/10 (population 130), and Lake Meredith Estates is the lowest-risk community in the county at 1.4/10 (population 183). The gap between Fritch at 2.1 and Lake Meredith Estates at 1.4 illustrates that risk is hyper-local here: two properties a few miles apart can carry meaningfully different landlord-outcome profiles.

State-level laws that apply here

Texas state law under Tex. Prop. Code SS 91 and SS 92 (Residential Tenancies) governs every lease in the county. Texas requires only a 3-day written notice before filing for eviction in nearly every standard scenario, including non-payment of rent, lease violations, holdover tenancies, and end-of-term situations. For squatters or unauthorized occupants, Tex. Prop. Code SS 24.011 (as added by SB-38) requires no notice period at all. Reviewing the full Texas eviction process is worthwhile for any new operator, because the short statutory timeline means landlords who miss procedural steps can lose weeks re-serving defective notices.

Court filing fees in Texas run $54 to $125, sheriff or constable lockout fees run $50 to $175, and attorney fees for a contested matter typically fall in the $500 to $3,500 range, making total costs highly variable depending on whether a tenant contests the action. Texas eviction costs should be stress-tested into any underwriting model. On the regulatory side, Texas imposes no just-cause requirement for non-renewal and the state preempts local rent control under TX Local Gov Code SS 214.902, meaning Hutchinson County cities cannot independently cap rents or impose additional eviction restrictions beyond what state law allows. Texas security deposit limits are set at the state level, and Texas tenant protections such as the retaliation bar under Tex. Prop. Code SS 92.331 and habitability standards under SS 92.052 apply county-wide.

With a poverty rate of 12.1% and a renter share of 19.6%, Hutchinson County's rental market is relatively small but carries limited structural stress at the county level; the city-by-city grid above shows where that risk concentrates and where it is most diffuse.