Free tool · Philadelphia
What does a squatter cost you in Pennsylvania?
Change the numbers to match your property. The rent is Pennsylvania's own, from HUD; how long it drags on is your call; everything else is yours to overwrite.
Pennsylvania estimate
$35,740
Your numbers.
These are national starting points, not claims about your property. The one figure that drives the total — how long it drags on — is yours to set. Nobody can source it, so we do not pretend to.
How long before you get it back?
6 months
Your assumption, not ours — courts do not publish how long this takes. A contested removal runs in months, not weeks, almost everywhere; how it goes in Pennsylvania is in the guide.
How many bedrooms?
Sets the rent from HUD’s published Fair Market Rent for Philadelphia — $2,170/mo.
Mortgage / loan payment — per month
$
Only you know this one. The placeholder is roughly a $300k loan at current rates.
Lost rent or delayed sale — per month
$
HUD's Fair Market Rent for this metro, at the bedroom count you picked. It is the 40th percentile of recent-mover rents, so on a renovated or market-rate property it is a floor, not a valuation.
Attorney fees — one-off
$
No public data exists. Our estimate — nothing published backs it. No state bar and no court in any of these markets publishes fee data for an ejectment. Get a written quote and put it here.
Property taxes — per month
$
Your bill, divided by twelve. The placeholder is roughly a $250k property at Philadelphia's 1.3998% — Newark runs 1.845%, Los Angeles 1.187%.
Insurance — per month
$
No public data exists. Our estimate. Vacant cover genuinely does cost more, but the published figures for how much more disagree by a factor of five — anywhere from +25% to 5x. Use your own premium.
Utilities — per month
$
A national placeholder, unless your state overrides it below — Philadelphia's is the Water Department's own published bill. Whoever is inside, you are the ratepayer of record.
Damage and clean-out — one-off
$
No public data exists. Our estimate, and we want to be blunt: NO government body in the United States publishes squatter-damage data. Every figure you have seen quoted traces to one news story or to a lobby survey that counted houses, not dollars. We are not going to launder a number we cannot stand behind — put yours here.
If it happens in Pennsylvania
$35,740
at 6 months— and every extra month adds $4,540.
Against a $0–$120k range, so the bar means something as you drag.
Carrying it, empty ($4,540/mo × 6 mo)
$27,240
One-off costs (attorney, damage)
$8,500
What ruins you is the carry — the months. On top of this you will pay to file, for the sheriff to serve and remove, and for a lawyer. Those are set locally and we do not print a number we cannot cite — but next to the months, they are a sliver.
Can you get any of it back? NO — you eat every dollar of it, permanently. § 2503 has no ejectment hook, and you have no contract with a squatter. Your only route is the bad-faith sanction. You CAN plead mesne profits in the same complaint — fair rental value for the months they were inside, plus the damage (Pa.R.C.P. 1055). Recoverable on paper; a judgment against a squatter is rarely collectible in practice.
Why Pennsylvania costs what it does
Pennsylvania is the hard case, and most owners do not find out until they try. A true squatter was never your tenant — so the fast landlord-tenant track is not merely slower, it is jurisdictionally closed to you. The Pennsylvania Supreme Court confirmed in Assouline v. Reynolds (2019) that a magisterial district judge has no power to hear it at all. You must file ejectment in the Court of Common Pleas: a full civil lawsuit that runs four to seven months. The courthouse fees are about double a normal eviction's — but the fees were never what hurt you. The months are.
What the total doesn’t show you
Real, sourced, and deliberately not in the number above — none of them has a published amount, and we would rather name a cost than invent it.
You supply the movers, the truck, and the storage
The Sheriff executes the writ; the Sheriff does not empty the house. Philadelphia practitioners report the owner must provide four movers, a 24-foot truck, and storage for the occupant's belongings — at the owner's expense, after 21 days' notice to the occupant.
The Sheriff's brochure confirms the owner may not do it himself ('prohibited from using self-help — changing locks or removing belongings'). The movers/truck/storage requirement comes from practitioner accounts, and no primary Philadelphia source publishes a dollar figure. We are not going to invent one.
The fast route requires you to post a bond
The emergency injunction — the one accelerator Philadelphia offers — is granted 'only if the plaintiff files a bond in an amount fixed and with security approved by the court.' You post money against the squatter's damages in order to move quickly.
The amount is at the judge's discretion; there is no published figure, so we do not guess at one. Budget the $67.68 petition fee and a surety premium on top.
Your property tax penalty compounds while you wait
Philadelphia real estate tax is due March 31. Miss it and the penalty runs 1.5% per month through January 1, then jumps 15% and heads for a lien. An ejectment takes four to seven months.
The combined rate is 1.3998% (0.6159% city + 0.7839% school). An owner already bleeding cash on a house they cannot use is exactly the owner who misses March 31.
The police-affidavit route costs nothing
Philadelphia charges $0 for the § 10-840 route: the owner gives the Police Department a sworn affidavit of ownership stating no landlord-tenant relationship ever existed, and police assess whether there is probable cause for criminal trespass.
It is free, and it is not automatic: the affidavit is only worth what the responding officer thinks it is worth, and the officer has no way to check that the person who signed it owns the building. That gap is not a footnote — it is the reason this route so often fails.
“This section shall not apply to a landlord desirous of repossessing real property from a person who is not, nor ever has been, a tenant of the real property.”
The statute
68 P.S. § 250.501(g) (Act 88 of 2024); Assouline v. Reynolds, 219 A.3d 1131 (Pa. 2019)
The Assouline holding is corroborated by the allocatur question and by Act 88's codification. Counsel should confirm against the reported opinion before it is relied on.
Rent, by bedroom
1 bed $1,520 · 2 bed $1,810 · 3 bed $2,170 · 4 bed $2,423
FY2026, effective 2025-10-01
HUD does not break Philadelphia out on its own — the county sits in the undivided Philadelphia-Camden-Wilmington MSA, and the same figures apply across the PA, NJ, DE and MD portions. Philadelphia is also a Small Area FMR metro, so the operative voucher standard is ZIP-level, not this metro-wide number.
Do you get your legal fees back?
NO — you eat every dollar of it, permanently
“Attorney's fees are not an item of taxable costs except to the extent authorized by section 2503.”
§ 2503 has no ejectment hook, and you have no contract with a squatter. Your only route is the bad-faith sanction. You CAN plead mesne profits in the same complaint — fair rental value for the months they were inside, plus the damage (Pa.R.C.P. 1055). Recoverable on paper; a judgment against a squatter is rarely collectible in practice.
Is there a fast sheriff route?
No. HB 530 would create one — in committee since Feb 2025, no votes.
This is the bill for finding out too late.
Nothing on this page will get an occupant out, and be wary of anyone who says otherwise. What DeedProof does is earlier and duller: it verifies you own the property, structures the statement you swear before a notary, and files it — so that if someone does break in, the officer at the door has something to work from instead of a lease they cannot check.
The decision still belongs to the officer. Our job is to make it an easy one.
This page is the money. The law behind it is on Pennsylvania’s guide — whether police can arrest, whether a sheriff can act on your affidavit alone, and how long occupation takes to become a claim. Every answer quoted from the statute.