Original data · federal source
U.S. consumer bankruptcy filings
12 months ending June 30, 2026 · Retrieved 2026-09-04 · Source: Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, Table F-2
Research question: how many households actually took a bankruptcy case to federal court in the most recent full year the judiciary has published, which chapter did they file, and how did that differ from the year before? The Administrative Office reports chapter counts with business and consumer cases mixed together. Table F-2 splits them, so we split them — and publish every court, both years, with the limits stated before the conclusions.
Short answer
581,570 consumer bankruptcy cases were filed in U.S. courts in the 12 months ending June 30, 2026 — up 12% from 519,486 a year earlier. Chapter 7 accounted for 366,863 of them (63.1%) and Chapter 13 for 214,153 (36.8%). Source: Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, Table F-2.
Read this before the numbers: a rise in filings is not advice
How many people filed for bankruptcy in the past year?
608,511 bankruptcy cases of every kind were commenced in the 12 months ending June 30, 2026. 581,570 of them — 95.6% — were classified non-business, the judiciary’s term for a case where consumer debt, rather than business debt, predominates. The remaining 26,941 were business cases. That non-business figure is the one worth quoting when the question is about households, and it is not the number most coverage uses.
Two cautions travel with it. The unit is cases, not people: spouses generally file a single joint case, so 581,570 cases represent more than 581,570 people, and the judiciary publishes no person-level count. And a case is a court filing, not a measure of hardship — most households who fall behind on debts never file at all.
Consumer (non-business) filings by chapter
| Chapter | Year to Jun 2026 | Year to Jun 2025 | Change | Share 2026 | Share 2025 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chapter 7 (liquidation) | 366,863 | 320,007 | +14.6% | 63.1% | 61.6% |
| Chapter 13 (repayment plan) | 214,153 | 198,971 | +7.6% | 36.8% | 38.3% |
| Chapter 11 (reorganization) | 554 | 508 | +9.1% | 0.10% | 0.10% |
| All consumer filings | 581,570 | 519,486 | +12.0% | 100% | 100% |
Shares are each chapter’s portion of non-business filings, computed from the counts in this table. Chapter 12 (family farmers and fishermen), Chapter 9 and Chapter 15 cases were all classified business in this period, so none appear above.
Is bankruptcy rising or falling?
Rising, from a historically low base — and both halves of that sentence matter. Total filings rose 12.2% year over year, to 608,511 from 542,529. Business filings rose faster (+16.9%) than consumer filings (+12.0%), off a much smaller base. The Administrative Office reports that filings fell steadily from a high of nearly 1.6 million in September 2010 to a low of 380,634 in June 2022, have increased each quarter since, and “remain far lower than historical highs.”
We publish no projection for the next quarter or the next year. The judiciary reports these totals four times a year; when a newer 12-month table appears, this page is re-retrieved and re-dated.
Filings, years ending June 30
| Year ending Jun 30 | Non-business | Business | Total | Change in total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026 | 581,570 | 26,941 | 608,511 | +12.2% |
| 2025 | 519,486 | 23,043 | 542,529 | +11.5% |
| 2024 | 464,553 | 22,060 | 486,613 | +16.2% |
| 2023 | 403,000 | 15,724 | 418,724 | +10.0% |
| 2022 | 367,886 | 12,748 | 380,634 | — |
The 2022 row has no change column because this dataset does not carry the year ending June 2021, and we do not compute against a figure we have not retrieved.
How do Chapter 7 and Chapter 13 filings compare?
Among consumers, Chapter 7 outnumbered Chapter 13 by roughly 1.7 to one: 366,863 against 214,153. Both rose, but not equally — Chapter 7 filings grew +14.6% while Chapter 13 filings grew +7.6%. That gap is the finding in this year’s data: Chapter 7’s share of consumer filings moved from 61.6% to 63.1%, and Chapter 13’s fell from 38.3% to 36.8%, even though the raw number of Chapter 13 cases went up.
The mix is also intensely regional, which national reporting rarely shows. Among jurisdictions with at least 3,000 consumer filings, Connecticut is the most Chapter 7–weighted (84.2% of its consumer cases), while Louisiana is the most Chapter 13–weighted (75.0%). The table records no reason for any filing, so we do not offer one for that spread. What it does establish is that the national 63%/37% split describes almost nobody’s local court. That is a reason to read your own district’s figures rather than the national average — and a better reason to ask a bankruptcy attorney in your district what is normal where you live.
Consumer filings by state — 12 largest
| State | Consumer filings | Change | Chapter 7 | Chapter 13 | Courts |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| California | 54,719 | +14.9% | 82.3% | 17.5% | 4 |
| Florida | 46,701 | +21.2% | 70.9% | 28.9% | 3 |
| Texas | 37,406 | +20.6% | 62.7% | 37.2% | 4 |
| Georgia | 32,494 | +14.0% | 45.7% | 54.2% | 3 |
| Illinois | 26,941 | +4.8% | 59.1% | 40.9% | 3 |
| Ohio | 26,796 | +5.8% | 77.0% | 23.0% | 2 |
| Michigan | 23,306 | +11.9% | 68.4% | 31.6% | 2 |
| Tennessee | 22,354 | +9.9% | 43.3% | 56.6% | 3 |
| New York | 21,607 | +7.0% | 67.5% | 32.1% | 4 |
| Alabama | 21,412 | +10.0% | 29.7% | 70.3% | 3 |
| Indiana | 18,442 | +8.0% | 56.1% | 43.9% | 2 |
| Virginia | 16,471 | +12.0% | 60.3% | 39.7% | 2 |
Raw counts in the courts where cases were opened — not rates per resident, and not adjusted for population, so the largest states appear at the top by construction. State rows are computed by summing the judiciary’s district figures; the judiciary itself publishes districts and circuits, never states. All 93 courts, both years, are in the downloadable JSON. The single busiest court was California, Central District with 30,266 consumer filings.
Which chapter do most consumers file?
Chapter 7 — 63.1% of consumer filings, or about 63 in every 100. Chapter 13 is 36.8%. Consumer Chapter 11 is a rounding error at 554 cases, 0.10% of the total, and is essentially a business chapter: 9,766 of the 10,320 Chapter 11 cases filed in this period were business cases.
This is the number most summaries get slightly wrong, and it is worth being precise about. If you divide all 382,161 Chapter 7 cases by all 608,511 filings you get a different, lower figure, because the denominator quietly includes 26,941 business cases — including 9,766 business Chapter 11 filings no household would ever make. The consumer share above uses the consumer denominator, which is why it is higher and why it is the honest answer to “which chapter do people file.”
What the two chapters actually are
Chapter 7 is liquidation: qualifying debts can be discharged, and property that is not exempt under the filer’s state rules can be sold. Chapter 13 is a court-supervised repayment plan, generally three to five years, which people often use when they need to catch up a mortgage or keep property that Chapter 7 would not protect. Which one a household can even use depends on income and assets — the bankruptcy hub walks through both, and debt relief options covers the paths that are not bankruptcy at all.
Limitations
What this data does not show
This table counts cases opened. That is all it counts. Everything below is a limit we are stating rather than a caveat we are burying.
- A filing count is not a hardship count. This is a count of bankruptcy cases opened in federal court. It does not measure how many households were in financial trouble, how many people considered filing, or how many were helped by filing. Most people who fall behind on their debts never file.
- A rise in filings says nothing about whether any individual should file. Whether bankruptcy makes sense for one person depends on their income, their assets, their state’s exemptions, and which debts they owe — none of which appears in this table. A national total cannot answer that question, and neither can this page.
- The unit is cases, not people. Spouses generally file one joint case, so 581,570 non-business cases represent more than 581,570 people. Table F-2 contains no person-level count, so we publish none.
- “Non-business” is not exactly “consumer.” The AO classifies each case by the predominant nature of the debt, so a sole proprietor whose consumer debt outweighs their business debt is counted as non-business. We use “consumer” as shorthand for the AO’s non-business category, and we say so wherever we use it.
- Filings are counted where the case was opened, not where the filer lives, and district figures are not adjusted for population. A district covering more people will show more filings; that alone says nothing about the people who live there.
- Cases commenced only. Table F-2 does not report outcomes — no discharges, no dismissals, no conversions from one chapter to another, and no amount of debt discharged. Nothing here shows what happened to any of these cases.
- No causes. The table records no reason for filing. Medical debt, job loss, divorce, student loans, and business failure are not distinguished, so this dataset cannot support any claim about why filings rose.
- The AO revises its own numbers. Table F-2 carries the note that because the bankruptcy database is continually updated, the numbers in it may not match previously published tables. These are the figures the table showed on the retrieval date, not a permanent record.
- No forecast. We publish only 12-month periods the AO has already published. There is no projection here for the next quarter or the next year, and we never annualize a partial period.
- No county detail. The AO publishes filings by county in Table F-5A; we did not incorporate it, so nothing in this dataset is finer-grained than a federal judicial district.
Methodology
How we built this, and how to check it
- SOURCE: Table F-2, “U.S. Bankruptcy Courts—Business and Nonbusiness Cases Commenced, by Chapter of the Bankruptcy Code,” published by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts for the 12-month period ending June 30, 2026. Retrieved 2026-09-04 from the PDF linked on that table’s page (the AO publishes the same table as XLSX). Prior-period figures come from the identically structured Table F-2 for the 12-month period ending June 30, 2025.
- NOTHING IS ESTIMATED. Every count in this file is transcribed from those two AO tables. No figure is modeled, interpolated, seasonally adjusted, annualized, or projected. Where the AO does not publish a number, this file does not contain one.
- TRANSCRIPTION CHECK: all 93 district rows were summed column by column and compared against the AO’s own published national “Total” row. All 28 column totals (14 columns × 2 periods) match exactly. Every row was also checked internally: total = Chapter 7 + Chapter 11 + Chapter 13 + other chapters, and total = business + non-business, and each of those two subtotals equals the sum of its own chapter columns.
- “NON-BUSINESS” IS THE AO’S OWN CLASSIFICATION, not ours. Per the note printed on Table F-2: the nature of debt is business if the debtor is a corporation or partnership, or if debt related to the operation of a business predominates; non-business debt includes consumer debt as defined in Section 101 of the Bankruptcy Code, or other debt that the debtor indicates is not consumer debt or business debt.
- NO PERCENTAGES ARE STORED. This file holds counts only. Every share, percentage, and year-over-year change shown on the page is computed at render time from these counts by src/lib/research/bankruptcy-filings.ts, so a number and its percentage cannot drift apart. A test asserts that no percentage is hardcoded in this file.
- STATE TOTALS ARE COMPUTED BY US. The AO publishes districts and circuits, not states; state figures are the sum of the AO’s district figures for that state. Arkansas is published by the AO as one combined court covering both the Eastern and Western Districts of Arkansas.
- FIVE-YEAR SERIES: the years ending June 30, 2022 through 2026 are transcribed from the two summary tables printed in the AO’s July 28, 2026 news release. Its 2026 and 2025 rows were cross-checked against Table F-2 for both years and agree exactly.
- “OTHER CHAPTERS” is the AO’s residual bucket. For the 12 months ending June 30, 2026 it comprises Chapter 9 (2 cases), Chapter 12 (336), Chapter 15 (202) and Section 304 (0) — 540 cases, all classified business, so none of them appear in the non-business (consumer) figures on this page.
- UPDATE SCHEDULE: the AO reports bankruptcy totals for the previous 12 months four times a year. This dataset is re-retrieved when a newer 12-month table is published; the retrieval date is stored in retrievedAt and shown on the page. Corrections are logged with dates rather than silently overwritten.
- AUTHOR: Credit Defense Hub Editorial Team. Pending named subject-matter review — we do not display an expert-review badge until a real named reviewer exists.
Retrieved 2026-09-04 from U.S. Courts Table F-2, Bankruptcy Filings (June 30, 2026), published by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. Prior-year figures come from the same table for the period ending June 30, 2025; the five-year series comes from the AO’s July 28, 2026 news release. Corrections: via our contact page — logged with dates rather than silently overwritten.
Download the dataset
Frequently asked questions
How many people filed for bankruptcy in the US in 2026?
581,570 non-business (consumer) bankruptcy cases were commenced in US bankruptcy courts during the 12 months ending June 30, 2026, out of 608,511 filings of all kinds. That is a count of cases, not people — spouses generally file one joint case — and it is a 12-month period ending in June, not a calendar year; the 2026 calendar year is not over, so no full-year 2026 figure exists yet.
Is bankruptcy going up or down in the United States?
Up, from a low base. Total filings rose 12.2 percent in the year ending June 30, 2026, to 608,511 from 542,529. The Administrative Office of the US Courts reports that filings fell steadily from a high of nearly 1.6 million in September 2010 to a low of 380,634 in June 2022 and have risen each quarter since, while remaining far below historical highs.
Do more people file Chapter 7 or Chapter 13?
Chapter 7. Of the 581,570 consumer cases in the year ending June 30, 2026, 366,863 were Chapter 7 (63.1 percent) and 214,153 were Chapter 13 (36.8 percent) — roughly 1.7 Chapter 7 cases for every Chapter 13 case. Chapter 11 accounted for 554 consumer cases, about one tenth of one percent.
Does a rise in bankruptcy filings mean I should file?
No. A national filing count carries no information about any individual. Whether bankruptcy makes sense for one person depends on their income, their assets, their state exemptions, and which debts they owe — none of which appears in this data. Credit Defense Hub is an educational publisher, not a law firm, and does not tell anyone whether to file.
Which state has the most bankruptcy filings?
California, by raw count: its four federal judicial districts recorded 54,719 consumer filings in the year ending June 30, 2026, ahead of Florida (46,701) and Texas (37,406). These are raw counts in the courts where cases were opened, not rates per resident, so the largest states will naturally appear at the top.
Where does this bankruptcy data come from, and can I download it?
Every figure comes from Table F-2 published by the Administrative Office of the US Courts for the 12-month periods ending June 30, 2026 and June 30, 2025, plus the AO news release of July 28, 2026 for the five-year series. The full dataset, including all 93 courts and both periods, is downloadable as JSON under a CC BY 4.0 licence.
Go deeper
- Bankruptcy hubWhat the chapters actually do: the automatic stay, the means test, the 341 meeting, discharge, and rebuilding after.
- How to find a bankruptcy attorneyState bar referral, NACBA, legal aid, what a consultation costs, and a vetting checklist — the district-level questions this data cannot answer.
- Debt relief options that are not bankruptcyCredit counseling, debt management plans, settlement, and consolidation, with what each one costs and what it can and cannot do.
- All original researchEvery dataset we publish, with its methodology, limitations, and downloadable file.
Sources
- U.S. Courts — Table F-2, Bankruptcy Filings (June 30, 2026) — business and non-business cases commenced, by chapter, by district, 12 months ending June 30, 2026. Published as PDF and XLSX (retrieved 2026-09-04).
- U.S. Courts — Table F-2 (June 30, 2025) — the identically structured prior-period table, used for every year-over-year figure on this page (retrieved 2026-09-04).
- Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts — “Bankruptcies Rise 12.2 Percent” (published July 28, 2026) — the 12.2 percent headline, the five-year business/non-business and by-chapter series, and the September 2010 peak and June 2022 low (verified live 2026-09-04).
- U.S. Courts — Table F-5A, bankruptcy filings by county — published by the AO alongside Table F-2. Listed for completeness; not incorporated into this dataset, which is why nothing here is finer-grained than a judicial district.
- U.S. Courts — caseload statistics data tables — the index where each quarter’s replacement tables are published.
Educational information — not advice
This page provides general educational information about credit, debt, and consumer protections. It is not legal advice, financial advice, or credit repair services, and reading it does not create any professional relationship. Laws, procedures, deadlines, and dollar amounts vary by state and change over time.
For advice about your specific situation, consult a licensed attorney or qualified financial professional. See our full disclaimer.