The 2026 Illinois Foreclosure Risk Index
Where financial pressure on Illinois homeowners is building, county by county
Published on August 11th, 2026, by John Carter | Founder, NestCashOriginal NestCash research, free to read and cite. If you need to sell a house fast in Illinois, start here.
Abstract
Illinois has a foreclosure problem that does not look like the ones making headlines in the Sun Belt. It is not a sudden surge off a low base. It is a high, steady rate that has kept the state near the top of the national table for years. Illinois recorded about 12,533 foreclosure filings in the first half of 2026, one for every 435 housing units, which ranks it fifth in the country. But the year-over-year increase was just 2 percent, the mildest of any state we have studied, because Illinois never fell as far as the boom states did and so had little ground to recover. This is a chronic condition, not an acute one. The other thing that sets Illinois apart is where the pressure sits. In the fast-growing states, the biggest metros are the safest ground and the risk lives at the rural edges. In Illinois the biggest metro is part of the story. Cook County, home to Chicago, grades among the highest-risk counties in the state and files more foreclosures than any county in America. To map the rest, we built the Illinois Foreclosure Risk Index, a county-level measure that combines market softness, mortgage cost burden, mortgage delinquency, and unemployment into a single score from 0 to 100. It finds pressure in three places at once: Cook County and the working-class corridors around it, the old industrial and river counties downstate, and the small rural and college counties. The safest ground is the affluent collar west of Chicago and the state’s insurance and government hubs.
We score each county from 0 to 100 by blending four public signals, each weighted by how directly it bears on a mortgaged homeowner: market softness (35 percent), mortgage cost burden (30 percent), 90-day mortgage delinquency (20 percent), and unemployment (15 percent). Each signal is min-max normalized within Illinois, so the score ranks counties against one another in the state, not against a national or absolute standard. A county grades Elevated at 50 or above, Moderate from 44 to 49.9, and Lower below 44. One rule matters for accuracy: we only rank the 51 counties with at least 12,000 housing units. Illinois has 102 counties, and in the smallest of them a single stale listing or a handful of mortgages can swing a percentage wildly. Those smaller counties stay in the data but are not ranked, so a county with a few thousand homes never lands at the top of a statewide list on noise alone. The full weighting, the normalization, and the honest limits of the data are spelled out in the methodology section below.
Key findings
- Illinois is high and steady, not surging. First-half 2026 filings totaled about 12,533, one per 435 housing units, the fifth-highest rate in the country (ATTOM Data Solutions). But the year-over-year rise was only 2 percent, the smallest of any state we have studied. Illinois is chronically elevated, not newly stressed.
- The biggest metro carries real risk, which is unusual. Cook County, home to Chicago, scores 64.4 and grades Elevated, fourth of the 51 ranked counties, on the heaviest housing cost burden in the state at 31.9 percent. Cook also files more foreclosures than any county in the nation, with 3,439 filings in a single month this year.
- The working-class corridors around Chicago and St. Louis are Elevated too. Will County (57.7), home to Joliet, and St. Clair County (57.8) in the Metro-East across from St. Louis both grade Elevated, and both carry delinquency rates above the state average, 1.4 and 1.3 percent.
- The affluent collar and the institutional hubs are insulated. DuPage County, home to Naperville, scores 36.2 and grades Lower with a delinquency rate of just 0.5 percent. McLean County, home to Bloomington and State Farm, is the safest in the state at 22.6, and Springfield’s Sangamon County (32.6) and the Metro-East’s Madison County (30.8) also grade Lower.
- Downstate is split between distress and calm. The rural and college counties run hot, led by Jo Daviess (68.6) in the far northwest, Jackson (66.9), home to Carbondale, and McDonough (65.5), home to Macomb, while the farm-and-institution counties of central Illinois grade Lower.
Methodology
Data and sources
We built the index entirely from public and openly licensed data, and we cite each source at the point of use. Market conditions come from Realtor.com Economic Research (county listing data through July 2026). Housing tenure, mortgage status, cost burden, county housing counts, and unemployment come from the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey five-year estimates. Mortgage delinquency comes from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau’s Mortgage Performance Trends (latest data December 2025). Statewide filing counts, the national rank, and trend come from ATTOM Data Solutions’ published foreclosure market reports. Every dataset we used is free and publicly available.
Building the index
The Illinois Foreclosure Risk Index is a weighted blend of four signals, each chosen because it precedes or predicts foreclosure among homeowners who carry a mortgage:
35%
The share of active listings with a price cut and the median days a home sits on the market. A soft market matters because a homeowner in trouble who cannot sell quickly has fewer ways to avoid foreclosure.
30%
The share of owners with a mortgage who spend more than 30 percent of household income on housing. This is direct payment stress on the exact population that can be foreclosed on.
20%
The 90-day-or-more delinquency rate, the clearest early warning that foreclosures are coming.
15%
A secondary driver. We hold its weight down deliberately, because unemployment also captures renters and therefore dilutes a signal meant to describe homeowners.
We normalized each signal across the ranked counties on a 0-to-1 scale, where 0 is the lowest value in Illinois and 1 is the highest, then applied the weights above and multiplied by 100. The result is a relative score: it ranks counties against one another within Illinois, not against a national or absolute standard. We then graded each county by its score, Elevated for 50 or above, Moderate for 44 to 49.9, and Lower for anything below 44. Twenty-two counties land in the Elevated tier, eleven in Moderate, and eighteen in Lower.
Limitations
Three limits are worth stating plainly. First, we rank only the 51 counties with at least 12,000 housing units. Illinois has 102 counties, and in the smallest of them a single price-cut or a handful of mortgages produces wild percentages, so ranking them would put statistical noise at the top of the list. Those counties remain in the underlying data and are shaded gray on the map, but they are not ranked. Second, the CFPB reports county delinquency only where a county has enough mortgages to protect borrower privacy, so for 35 of the 51 ranked counties we substituted the Illinois statewide rate of 1.1 percent. Because that component carries 20 percent of the weight, the substitution mainly affects the smaller counties and leaves the large metros, which do report their own rates, unaffected. Third, the index measures leading pressure, not completed foreclosures. Where our scores and realized foreclosure activity disagree, we say so rather than force a match.
Findings
The index: pressure in three places at once
Ranked from most to least risk, the index tells a story that is broader than any single region. Unlike states where distress is neatly rural or neatly urban, Illinois carries it in three places at the same time.
The very top of the list is small and downstate. Jo Daviess County, in the far northwest corner around Galena, scores 68.6 on a slow market and heavy cost burden. Jackson County (66.9), home to Carbondale and Southern Illinois University, and McDonough County (65.5), home to Macomb and Western Illinois University, follow, both college counties where enrollment declines have hollowed out the local housing market and pushed unemployment near 8 percent. These are the kind of counties a purely metro-focused analysis misses entirely.
Then comes the finding that defines Illinois. Cook County, home to Chicago, sits fourth at 64.4. It gets there on the heaviest housing cost burden in the state, 31.9 percent of mortgaged owners spending more than 30 percent of income on housing, paired with a delinquency rate of 1.2 percent and unemployment of 7 percent. In most of the country the largest county is a safe harbor. In Illinois it is one of the most stressed.
Cook County and the corridors: the metro story
Cook County is not an isolated hot spot. The pressure extends into the working-class corridors on either side of the state. Will County (57.7), home to Joliet on the southwest edge of the Chicago metro, grades Elevated and carries the highest delinquency rate of any ranked county at 1.4 percent. Across the state, St. Clair County (57.8), the heart of the Metro-East across the river from St. Louis, grades Elevated on a 1.3 percent delinquency rate of its own. Kankakee (52.6) south of Chicago rounds out the corridor.
What ties them together is that these are older, working-class, industrial-adjacent counties where incomes have not kept pace with housing costs and where the manufacturing base has thinned. They are the places in Illinois where a metro economy and real payment stress overlap. And the raw scale is its own story: Cook County recorded more properties with foreclosure filings than any other county in the United States, 3,439 in a single month in 2026. When the biggest county in a top-five state is also the single largest source of foreclosures in the country, the volume is impossible to ignore.
The affluent collar and institutional hubs are the safe ground
The contrast within the Chicago metro is sharp. While Cook and Will grade Elevated, the affluent collar counties to the west grade Lower. DuPage County, home to Naperville and Wheaton, scores 36.2 with a delinquency rate of just 0.5 percent, and neighboring McHenry (41.4) and Kane (44.6) sit in the Lower and Moderate tiers. The same insulation shows up wherever a stable, high-income employer base anchors the local economy. McLean County, home to Bloomington-Normal and the headquarters of State Farm, is the safest county in the state at 22.6, with the lowest delinquency rate anywhere in Illinois at 0.4 percent. Springfield’s Sangamon County, anchored by state government, scores 32.6. The lesson is consistent: in Illinois, foreclosure risk tracks the strength of the local job base more than the size of the city.
Rate versus volume
Risk per homeowner and total foreclosure volume are different measurements, and Illinois shows both extremes at once. Cook County holds more than 2.2 million housing units, so it produces enormous raw numbers, the most of any county in the country, even though its per-homeowner score, while Elevated, is not the highest in the state. Meanwhile Jo Daviess County tops the risk index on a small housing stock, so its risk per owner is high but its raw filing count will always be modest. For a homeowner weighing their own exposure, the risk index is the relevant number. For anyone sizing the market, volume is. We report both, and Illinois is the clearest case in our series of why the two must not be collapsed: the same state holds the nation’s highest-volume county and a set of small downstate counties with higher risk per home.
Leading indicators against realized activity
The index is built from housing composition and payment stress, not foreclosure filings, so it is worth asking whether it agrees with data collected a different way. It does, closely. ATTOM’s quarterly reporting places four Illinois metros, Cook County, Rockford, Peoria, and the Quad Cities, among the twenty highest-foreclosure metros in the country. Our index independently flags all four: Cook grades Elevated, and Rockford’s Winnebago County, Peoria County, and the Quad Cities’ Rock Island County all land in the ranked tier. Peoria County has separately topped ATTOM’s national ranking of zombie foreclosures, abandoned homes stuck in the foreclosure process, which is consistent with the payment stress our index reads across central Illinois. When two methods that share no inputs point at the same places, both gain credibility.
Why Illinois stays elevated
Illinois’s position is best understood as structural rather than cyclical. The state did not have the price boom that Arizona, Florida, or Texas had, so it has not had a boom-driven correction, and its foreclosure rate has instead stayed persistently high. Three forces keep it there. Property taxes among the highest in the nation add to the monthly cost of owning a home well beyond the mortgage payment, which shows up as cost burden even where home prices are moderate. Population has declined across much of downstate and in Cook County, thinning demand and softening resale markets in exactly the counties the index flags. And the manufacturing and institutional bases that once anchored places like Rockford, Peoria, and the college towns have contracted, leaving weaker local economies behind. None of these is a sudden shock. Together they produce a foreclosure rate that is high, broad, and slow to move.
How today compares to the last crash
Illinois was hit hard in the last housing crisis, and the numbers tell the story better than any adjective. In 2008 roughly 99,000 Illinois properties received a foreclosure filing. That climbed about 32 percent to 131,132 in 2009, and peaked at 151,304 in 2010, the fourth-largest state total in the entire country both years, behind only the epicenters of the boom-and-bust, California, Florida, and Arizona. At the peak, more Illinois homes drew a filing than in all but three states.
What makes Illinois different from those boom states is what happened next. California, Florida, and Arizona had run their prices up and then crashed, so when the market cleared, their foreclosure activity fell away sharply. Illinois never had that boom, so it never had that clean recovery. As a judicial-foreclosure state with a slow court process, its cases moved through the system for years, and the backlog kept Illinois near the top of the national tables long after the crisis had faded elsewhere. As recently as 2019, before the pandemic, Illinois had the highest foreclosure rate of any state in the country. Today’s activity, a projected 25,000 or so filings for full-year 2026, runs more than 80 percent below the 2010 peak, a real and welcome decline. But the state’s national ranking has barely moved: fifth today, fourth at the crisis peak, first as recently as 2019.
That is the frame this report insists on. Illinois’s foreclosure activity is far below its crisis peak in absolute terms, and a filing is only the start of the legal process, not a home already lost. But where the Sun Belt reports in this series describe states rising off a low base, Illinois describes a state that has simply never left the top of the list. The pressure here is not a spike. It is a plateau.
If you are an Illinois homeowner facing foreclosure
This report is a market analysis, not legal advice, but the data points to a few things worth knowing. Illinois is a judicial-foreclosure state, which means a lender must file a lawsuit and move the case through the courts before a home can be sold. That makes the Illinois process one of the longer ones in the country, and the time it buys is real. After being served, a homeowner generally has a reinstatement period of 90 days to bring the loan current and stop the case, and a redemption period that typically runs until the later of seven months after service or three months after a judgment of foreclosure. Those windows give an Illinois owner more room to act than a homeowner in a fast, non-judicial state.
The time only helps if it is used. Options like reinstatement, a loan modification, or selling the home before the sale can stop the process and limit the damage to your credit, since a foreclosure can remain on a credit report for up to seven years. NestCash works with Illinois homeowners in exactly this situation. Our guide on how to sell a house in foreclosure walks through the timeline and the choices in more detail, and you can also start with a cash offer anywhere in the state through our Illinois home-buying page.
The full data
The 51 ranked counties, from highest to lowest Foreclosure Risk Index. An asterisk on the delinquency rate marks a county where the Illinois statewide rate was substituted because the county’s own rate is not separately reported. See Methodology.
| Rank | County | Risk Index | Grade | Price-cut share | Median DOM | Cost burden | 90+ delinquency | Unemployment |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Jo Daviess | 68.6 | Elevated | 24.1% | 71 | 25.2% | 1.1%* | 3.6% |
| 2 | Jackson | 66.9 | Elevated | 15.8% | 72 | 23.0% | 1.1%* | 7.5% |
| 3 | McDonough | 65.5 | Elevated | 18.5% | 63 | 22.0% | 1.1%* | 7.9% |
| 4 | Cook | 64.4 | Elevated | 11.6% | 34 | 31.9% | 1.2% | 7.0% |
| 5 | DeKalb | 61.9 | Elevated | 13.3% | 45 | 28.5% | 1.1%* | 6.8% |
| 6 | Fulton | 61.3 | Elevated | 20.8% | 51 | 22.6% | 1.1%* | 6.7% |
| 7 | Randolph | 61.2 | Elevated | 27.1% | 63 | 18.8% | 1.1%* | 5.0% |
| 8 | Iroquois | 59.5 | Elevated | 20.2% | 60 | 23.2% | 1.1%* | 4.5% |
| 9 | Jefferson | 58.2 | Elevated | 15.4% | 68 | 21.5% | 1.1%* | 5.8% |
| 10 | St. Clair | 57.8 | Elevated | 15.7% | 50 | 22.4% | 1.3% | 6.0% |
| 11 | Will | 57.7 | Elevated | 16.1% | 32 | 26.5% | 1.4% | 4.9% |
| 12 | Christian | 56.5 | Elevated | 20.4% | 62 | 20.7% | 1.1%* | 4.6% |
| 13 | Macon | 56.3 | Elevated | 22.5% | 39 | 21.2% | 1.1%* | 6.8% |
| 14 | Knox | 54.7 | Elevated | 23.7% | 43 | 21.2% | 1.1%* | 5.1% |
| 15 | Morgan | 54.4 | Elevated | 18.9% | 40 | 24.0% | 1.1%* | 5.4% |
| 16 | Stephenson | 53.6 | Elevated | 23.1% | 41 | 22.5% | 1.1%* | 4.3% |
| 17 | Franklin | 53.5 | Elevated | 11.2% | 50 | 22.3% | 1.1%* | 7.7% |
| 18 | Kankakee | 52.6 | Elevated | 15.2% | 45 | 24.7% | 1.1%* | 4.9% |
| 19 | Williamson | 51.5 | Elevated | 17.5% | 55 | 20.4% | 1.1%* | 5.0% |
| 20 | LaSalle | 51.1 | Elevated | 17.1% | 44 | 22.2% | 1.1%* | 5.4% |
| 21 | Boone | 50.7 | Elevated | 9.2% | 32 | 26.2% | 1.1%* | 7.4% |
| 22 | Vermilion | 50.6 | Elevated | 19.1% | 41 | 20.4% | 1.1%* | 6.1% |
| 23 | Kendall | 49.8 | Moderate | 11.1% | 34 | 27.5% | 1.2% | 4.3% |
| 24 | Marion | 49.7 | Moderate | 13.2% | 53 | 20.9% | 1.1%* | 5.9% |
| 25 | Lee | 49.3 | Moderate | 16.8% | 35 | 23.6% | 1.1%* | 5.2% |
| 26 | Rock Island | 47.2 | Moderate | 19.1% | 43 | 21.0% | 0.9% | 5.6% |
| 27 | Macoupin | 46.6 | Moderate | 18.3% | 52 | 19.6% | 1.1%* | 3.7% |
| 28 | Winnebago | 46.0 | Moderate | 10.8% | 30 | 23.1% | 1.1% | 7.3% |
| 29 | Peoria | 46.0 | Moderate | 12.7% | 40 | 22.6% | 1.0% | 6.2% |
| 30 | Lake | 45.2 | Moderate | 12.4% | 29 | 25.0% | 1.1% | 5.2% |
| 31 | Kane | 44.6 | Moderate | 11.7% | 30 | 26.6% | 1.0% | 4.8% |
| 32 | Grundy | 44.4 | Moderate | 12.4% | 35 | 24.1% | 1.1%* | 4.6% |
| 33 | Coles | 44.3 | Moderate | 16.1% | 39 | 18.8% | 1.1%* | 6.1% |
| 34 | Adams | 42.7 | Lower | 15.9% | 51 | 18.6% | 1.1%* | 3.9% |
| 35 | Woodford | 42.2 | Lower | 26.0% | 25 | 18.8% | 1.1%* | 3.5% |
| 36 | Effingham | 41.9 | Lower | 19.4% | 56 | 17.7% | 1.1%* | 2.1% |
| 37 | McHenry | 41.4 | Lower | 15.2% | 32 | 24.8% | 0.8% | 4.7% |
| 38 | Bureau | 41.0 | Lower | 17.1% | 51 | 16.3% | 1.1%* | 4.3% |
| 39 | Ogle | 40.8 | Lower | 15.7% | 35 | 19.5% | 1.1%* | 5.0% |
| 40 | Champaign | 40.5 | Lower | 21.2% | 46 | 19.5% | 0.7% | 4.3% |
| 41 | Clinton | 39.6 | Lower | 17.2% | 48 | 17.4% | 1.1%* | 3.4% |
| 42 | Henry | 39.4 | Lower | 15.4% | 42 | 17.6% | 1.1%* | 4.8% |
| 43 | Livingston | 39.3 | Lower | 15.8% | 48 | 17.9% | 1.1%* | 3.5% |
| 44 | Tazewell | 38.9 | Lower | 20.9% | 33 | 21.4% | 0.8% | 3.6% |
| 45 | DuPage | 36.2 | Lower | 13.6% | 30 | 26.3% | 0.5% | 4.9% |
| 46 | Whiteside | 34.2 | Lower | 11.3% | 45 | 16.8% | 1.1%* | 4.4% |
| 47 | Sangamon | 32.6 | Lower | 13.2% | 35 | 20.2% | 0.7% | 5.4% |
| 48 | Montgomery | 31.3 | Lower | 14.4% | 39 | 14.2% | 1.1%* | 4.7% |
| 49 | Monroe | 30.9 | Lower | 12.8% | 34 | 20.1% | 1.1%* | 1.9% |
| 50 | Madison | 30.8 | Lower | 12.8% | 36 | 19.2% | 0.8% | 4.6% |
| 51 | McLean | 22.6 | Lower | 18.2% | 34 | 18.6% | 0.4% | 3.1% |
What we will watch
We plan to update this index quarterly. Three things will tell us whether Illinois’s chronic pressure is easing or deepening: the serious delinquency rate, which runs hottest today in Will, St. Clair, and Cook, whether the downstate college and industrial counties stabilize or continue to hollow out, and whether Cook County’s nation-leading foreclosure volume grows or recedes. Illinois sits fifth nationally by rate today, and it has sat near the top for two decades. The question the next few quarters will answer is whether anything finally moves it.
Sources and data
- Foreclosure activity and trend. ATTOM Data Solutions, 2026 Mid-Year U.S. Foreclosure Market Report and its quarterly and monthly reports. Used for statewide filing counts, the national rank, the year-over-year change, and the Cook County monthly filing figure. Historical year-end Illinois filing totals in the crisis comparison (99,000 in 2008, 131,132 in 2009, and 151,304 in 2010) come from RealtyTrac and ATTOM year-end reports; the 2019 highest-rate ranking is from ATTOM’s 2019 year-end report; the 2026 figure is this report’s full-year projection.
- Housing market softness. Realtor.com Economic Research, county inventory core metrics through July 2026. Used for the price-cut share, median days on market, and active listing counts.
- Housing, mortgage status, cost burden, and unemployment. U.S. Census Bureau, American Community Survey five-year estimates. Used for county housing counts, the mortgaged-owner universe, housing cost burden, and the unemployment rate.
- Mortgage delinquency. CFPB Mortgage Performance Trends, data through December 2025. Used for the 90-or-more day delinquency rates.
About NestCash
NestCash buys houses for cash in twelve states, including throughout Illinois. We publish original housing research to help homeowners, buyers, and investors understand the markets we work in. This report may be cited and its charts embedded with attribution to NestCash.
John is the Founder of NestCash and a leading voice in real estate investing and housing market strategy. With experience across 12 states, he helps buyers, sellers, and investors make smarter decisions using real-world insight and market data.