Contract Dispute Statistics by State
We analyzed 4,637,839 contract court cases to find where disputes are most common, where they're rising fastest, and what they cost.
Raw lawsuit counts mostly track how big a state is. To compare fairly, DocsGenie Research normalized incoming contract cases against each state's business base — contract filings per 1,000 businesses — and tracked the change since 2020. Below: the rankings, where volume concentrates, the five-year trend, the cost context, and eight data-backed findings.
Where disputes are most common
Filings per 1,000 businesses, 2024. Maryland stands apart — 4.8× the typical state.
Where the volume concentrates
By raw count, a handful of states carry most of the load. The five busiest — Maryland, New Jersey, Georgia, Texas, and Indiana — are 48% of all filings analyzed.
Rising fastest
Five-year growth in filings, 2020–2024. Every full-data state increased; these climbed the most.
Full state ranking
All ranked states. * New York, mapped from its own court data.
| # | State | Per 1k biz | Per 1k pop | 2020 | 2024 | 5-yr | CAGR |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Maryland | 3,359 | 76.6 | 353,467 | 478,536 | +35% | 7.9% |
| 2 | New Jersey | 1,936 | 48.4 | 268,293 | 459,722 | +71% | 14.4% |
| 3 | Nevada | 1,922 | 45.1 | 70,285 | 146,844 | +109% | 20.2% |
| 4 | Georgia | 1,750 | 40.4 | 250,952 | 452,281 | +80% | 15.9% |
| 5 | Nebraska | 1,702 | 47.8 | 78,614 | 95,857 | +22% | 5.1% |
| 6 | Kentucky | 1,571 | 32.0 | 100,288 | 146,924 | +46% | 10.0% |
| 7 | Indiana | 1,541 | 34.2 | 112,116 | 236,926 | +111% | 20.6% |
| 8 | Alabama | 1,508 | 30.7 | 109,505 | 158,423 | +45% | 9.7% |
| 9 | Arizona | 1,407 | 29.8 | 148,846 | 224,940 | +51% | 10.9% |
| 10 | Missouri | 1,380 | 34.0 | 142,208 | 212,253 | +49% | 10.5% |
| 11 | Rhode Island | 1,317 | 35.0 | 30,737 | 38,831 | +26% | 6.0% |
| 12 | Utah | 932 | 24.9 | 62,143 | 87,310 | +40% | 8.9% |
| 13 | Michigan | 897 | 20.2 | 112,782 | 204,460 | +81% | 16.0% |
| 14 | North Dakota | 804 | 25.4 | 14,562 | 20,190 | +39% | 8.5% |
| 15 | District of Columbia | 774 | 26.7 | — | 18,471 | — | — |
| 16 | New Mexico | 751 | 15.8 | — | 33,666 | — | — |
| 17 | Delaware | 742 | 20.6 | 21,084 | 21,665 | +3% | 0.7% |
| 18 | New York* | 674 | 18.3 | — | 364,412 | — | — |
| 19 | Pennsylvania | 668 | 15.8 | 95,592 | 205,411 | +115% | 21.1% |
| 20 | Texas | 666 | 14.0 | 242,938 | 437,823 | +80% | 15.9% |
| 21 | Wyoming | 654 | 25.9 | — | 15,164 | — | — |
| 22 | Connecticut | 550 | 13.4 | 23,036 | 49,078 | +113% | 20.8% |
| 23 | Iowa | 466 | 12.1 | 25,425 | 38,976 | +53% | 11.3% |
| 24 | Massachusetts | 359 | 9.2 | 28,340 | 65,741 | +132% | 23.4% |
| 25 | Wisconsin | 324 | 7.9 | 38,883 | 46,806 | +20% | 4.7% |
| 26 | Alaska | 314 | 9.4 | 5,314 | 6,942 | +31% | 6.9% |
| 27 | South Carolina | 299 | 6.6 | 25,896 | 36,097 | +39% | 8.7% |
| 28 | Florida | 290 | 7.9 | 132,828 | 183,643 | +38% | 8.4% |
| 29 | Puerto Rico | 275 | 4.2 | 6,965 | 13,576 | +95% | 18.2% |
| 30 | New Hampshire | 269 | 7.5 | 7,274 | 10,570 | +45% | 9.8% |
| 31 | Illinois | 254 | 6.5 | — | 82,034 | — | — |
| 32 | Maine | 220 | 6.8 | 6,364 | 9,519 | +50% | 10.6% |
| 33 | Vermont | 191 | 6.2 | 3,570 | 3,987 | +12% | 2.8% |
| 34 | Idaho | 146 | 4.2 | — | 8,337 | — | — |
| 35 | Minnesota | 140 | 3.7 | 11,645 | 21,656 | +86% | 16.8% |
The cost behind the caseload
Legal labor is what makes disputes expensive. Average lawyer pay varies widely by state (BLS, May 2024).
Eight things the data shows
Maryland is a statistical outlier, not just rank #1
3,359 per 1,000 businesses against a mean of 893 and median of 705 — 3.5 standard deviations above the mean. This is structural, driven by how Maryland's District Court concentrates landlord/tenant and debt volume.
Filing volume is concentrated
The top five states account for 48% of all filings analyzed (Maryland, New Jersey, Georgia each ~11%, Texas ~10%, Indiana ~6%). A few dockets carry most of the load.
The surge was 2022, not a 2020 COVID dip
Only 13 of 29 states dipped in 2020–2021 (+5.6% aggregate), then filings jumped 54% through 2024 — a post-moratorium eviction and debt catch-up wave concentrated in 2021–2022.
Flat national growth hides opposite trajectories
The aggregate growth rate is nearly identical across both halves of the period, but underneath, states like Arizona and North Dakota are accelerating while Minnesota and Maine decelerate sharply.
Litigation volume ≠ legal-market value
The correlation between a state's filing rate and its lawyer wages is essentially zero. High-filing states run 27–29 filings per lawyer — assembly-line debt and eviction processing, not commercial litigation.
An ADR desert
19 of 34 reporting states have too few arbitrators or mediators for BLS to publish a figure, even as contract disputes climb ~13% a year. (Suppression means very few, not literally none.)
More businesses does not mean more disputes
The correlation between business-formation growth and filing growth is -0.11 — essentially none. Delaware's +92% formation boom is an LLC/shell-company artifact, not organic activity, so a 'formation drives disputes' story does not hold.
Lawyer pay gaps are widest in rural states
The P90/P10 pay ratio is widest in Iowa (4.4×), Idaho (3.7×), and Kentucky (3.6×), and narrowest in Alaska (2.3×) and North Dakota (2.5×).
Use this data
The full dataset, map, and methodology are free to republish with attribution.
docsgenie.net/research/contract-disputes. Free to republish charts and data with a link to the source.