Bankruptcy Statistics (2026)

US bankruptcy courts opened 608,511 new cases in the 12 months ending June 30, 2026, the latest period the Administrative Office of the US Courts has published. That is 65,982 more than the 542,529 filed in the year to June 2025, a 12.2% increase (see the table below).

Every major chapter grew. Chapter 7 filings rose 14.7% to 382,161, Chapter 13 rose 7.6% to 215,490, and Chapter 11 rose 22.7% to 10,320. The courts also counted 336 Chapter 12 cases (family farmers and fishermen), 202 Chapter 15 cross-border cases, and two Chapter 9 municipal cases.

Filings bottomed out at 380,634 in the year to June 2022 and have risen in every quarterly report since. The year to June 2026 total is 60% above that low (see the table below).

The pace has held steady rather than accelerating. The year to March 31, 2026 showed 591,850 filings, up 11.9%, and the June report added another 12.2%. Personal filings rose from 367,886 to 581,570 over the four years, and business filings roughly doubled, from 12,748 to 26,941.

The modern record is shaped by one law. The Bankruptcy Abuse Prevention and Consumer Protection Act of 2005 (BAPCPA) took effect on October 17, 2005, adding a means test and credit counseling requirements. People rushed to file under the old rules: fiscal year 2005 (the year to September 30) saw 1,782,643 filings, and the NY Fed counts about 949,000 consumers with a new bankruptcy on their credit report in the fourth quarter of 2005 alone.

Filings collapsed to 617,660 in calendar 2006, then climbed with the housing crash and recession to 1,593,081 in calendar 2010. US Courts puts the all-time 12-month high at nearly 1.6 million in the year to September 2010 (1,596,355). Filings then fell for a decade, to 774,940 in 2019 (see the chart and table below).

Filings dropped sharply when the pandemic arrived, even as unemployment spiked. Calendar-year filings fell from 774,940 in 2019 to 544,463 in 2020, 413,616 in 2021, and 387,721 in 2022, the lowest calendar year in the series shown here.

Stimulus payments, enhanced unemployment benefits, foreclosure moratoriums, and student loan payment pauses all reduced the pressure to file during that stretch. As those programs ended, filings returned: 452,990 in 2023, 517,308 in 2024, and 574,314 in 2025. Even so, 2025 was 26% below 2019 and 64% below 2010.

Bankruptcy in the US is overwhelmingly personal. Nonbusiness cases, where the debts are mainly consumer debts incurred for personal, family, or household purposes, made up 581,570 of the 608,511 filings in the year to June 2026, or 95.6%.

Business cases are the 26,941 where the debtor is a corporation or partnership, or where business debt predominates. They grew faster over the year (16.9%) than personal cases (12.0%), but they remain a small slice of the total, about 4.4%.

Personal filers choose mainly between two chapters. Chapter 7 liquidates non-exempt assets and discharges eligible debts, usually within months. Chapter 13 sets up a three to five year repayment plan, often used to keep a home or car. In the year to June 2026, 366,863 personal cases (63.1%) were Chapter 7 and 214,153 (36.8%) were Chapter 13 (see the chart below). Only 554 individuals with mostly consumer debt filed under Chapter 11.

The mix shifts over time. Chapter 7 was 71.6% of personal filings in calendar 2010, when job losses and foreclosures were widespread, compared with 62.3% in 2025. Over the latest year, Chapter 7 grew about twice as fast as Chapter 13 (14.7% vs 7.6% across all filers).

Business bankruptcies totaled 26,941 in the year to June 2026, split among 15,298 Chapter 7 liquidations, 9,766 Chapter 11 reorganizations, and 1,337 Chapter 13 cases, plus 540 under other chapters.

That is still well under the 56,282 business filings in calendar 2010 and the 60,837 in 2009. Large corporate cases are concentrated in a few courts: the Southern District of Texas logged 1,569 business Chapter 11 cases and the Northern District of Texas 971, against 331 in Delaware, where total filings fell 20.9% over the year.

The most populous states file the most cases. California led with 58,111 filings in the year to June 2026, followed by Florida (49,338), Texas (42,229), and Georgia (33,570). Those four states accounted for 30.1% of all filings (see the table below).

Growth was uneven. Texas filings rose 23.7% and Florida 21.3%, while Illinois rose 4.7% and Wisconsin was flat (10,149 vs 10,153). Among smaller states, North Dakota rose 46.9% and Alaska 57.7%, though from low bases of 571 and 194 cases.

Raw counts mostly track population, so a per-person rate is more telling. Dividing each state's personal filings by its Census Vintage 2025 population gives a national rate of about 168 personal bankruptcies per 100,000 residents for the 50 states and DC (see the chart and table below).

Alabama is the clear outlier at about 412 per 100,000, followed by Mississippi (343), Tennessee (306), Nevada (290), and Georgia (288). The lowest rates are in Alaska (37), Maine (40), and Vermont (44). The high-rate group is concentrated in the Southeast and Midwest, with Nevada and Utah the main exceptions in the West.

The choice between Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 varies far more by place than by year. In Louisiana, 75.0% of personal filings in the year to June 2026 were Chapter 13, and in Alabama 70.3%. South Carolina (66.5%), North Carolina (64.6%), Arkansas (58.1%), Tennessee (56.6%), Mississippi (54.4%), and Georgia (54.2%) also lean toward repayment plans.

Western states lean the other way. Only 8.1% of Idaho's personal filings were Chapter 13, along with 12.7% in North Dakota, 12.9% in New Mexico, 16.8% in Nevada, 16.9% in Arizona, and 17.5% in California. These gaps reflect local legal culture, state exemption laws, and court practices as much as differences in household finances.

In the three months from April through June 2026, courts received 162,772 filings, about 54,000 a month. Of those, 155,807 were personal and 6,965 were business cases.

Month by month, US Courts counted 57,214 filings in April, 52,485 in May, and 53,073 in June 2026. Chapter 7 accounted for 37,589, 33,922, and 33,560 of those, respectively.

Bankruptcy cases outlast the year they are filed in, especially Chapter 13 plans that run up to five years. At June 30, 2026, 742,257 cases were pending in the bankruptcy courts, up 9.2% from 679,644 a year earlier.

Courts closed (terminated) 546,486 cases over the year, up 3.7%, which is fewer than the 608,511 opened. That gap is why the pending caseload is growing. On October 15, 2026, the judiciary also reported a cybersecurity incident at the contractor that runs the Bankruptcy Noticing Center, halting production of bankruptcy notices for all federal bankruptcy courts while systems are restored.

The NY Fed tracks bankruptcy from the other side: the number of consumers who have a new bankruptcy notation added to their credit reports each quarter. About 137,000 consumers (136,800) had one in the second quarter of 2026, up from about 124,000 in the first quarter and about 131,000 a year earlier (see the chart below).

That is far below the 621,000 recorded in the second quarter of 2010 and the 949,000 in the fourth quarter of 2005, when filers rushed ahead of BAPCPA. The low point came in the first quarter of 2022, at about 91,000.

People in midlife file most often. In the second quarter of 2026, about 36,700 consumers aged 40 to 49 had a new bankruptcy on their credit reports, followed by 31,500 aged 50 to 59 and 29,400 aged 30 to 39 (see the chart below).

Young adults file rarely despite high delinquency rates: only about 8,000 consumers aged 18 to 29 had a new bankruptcy in the quarter. Older Americans are a meaningful share too, with 19,900 aged 60 to 69 and 11,200 aged 70 and over.

The NY Fed also reports the share of consumers with a credit report who had a new bankruptcy in the quarter, for 11 large states. Nationally it was 0.046% in the second quarter of 2026, roughly 1 in 2,200 people with a credit file (see the table below).

Nevada was highest at 0.087%, followed by Ohio (0.066%) and Michigan (0.057%). New York was lowest at 0.028%, and it was one of the few large states where the rate fell from a year earlier.

For a more current read, industry data from Epiq AACER, published with the American Bankruptcy Institute (ABI), covers filings through September 2026. These are industry counts, not official court statistics. They show 469,719 total filings in the first nine months of 2026, up 11% from 423,168 a year earlier.

By the same count, individual filings reached 444,252 (from 399,379), including 282,413 Chapter 7 cases and 160,817 Chapter 13 cases. September 2026 alone had 52,299 filings, up 6%. Small businesses electing Subchapter V within Chapter 11 rose 46% to 2,442 over the nine months, and the ABI reported that Congress had passed a bill to raise the Chapter 13 debt limit to $2.75 million and restore the $7.5 million Subchapter V limit.

Court data does not record why people file, so causes come from research, and the leading studies disagree. A survey led by David Himmelstein and published in the American Journal of Public Health in 2019 sampled filers from 2013 to 2016. Of the 910 who responded, 58.5% said medical expenses contributed to their bankruptcy, 44.3% cited illness-related work loss, and 66.5% cited at least one of the two. Income loss was the most common contributor overall, at 77.8% (see the table below).

An economics study by Carlos Dobkin, Amy Finkelstein, Raymond Kluender, and Matthew Notowidigdo (NBER Working Paper 22288, later in the American Economic Review) took a different approach, linking hospital admissions to credit reports. It estimated that hospital admissions cause about 4% of bankruptcies for insured non-elderly adults and about 6% for the uninsured, and found that, among insured adults aged 50 to 59 in survey data, an admission cut annual earnings by about 20% over the following three years. The Himmelstein authors argue that method undercounts, since many medical costs arise outside a hospital stay. Both studies agree that illness hurts household finances; they differ on how often it is the trigger for bankruptcy.