Data
Business bankruptcy filings, Sept–Oct 2026
Last updated October 27, 2026
Next update November 2026
When a business files for bankruptcy, the case opens as a docket in a federal bankruptcy court. A Chapter 7 case ends the business: a trustee sells what is left and pays the creditors. A Chapter 11 case usually keeps the business trading while it works out a plan. CourtListener, a free archive run by a non-profit, holds many of those dockets and lets anyone search them.
We collected the business dockets it held for filings up to 15 October 2026: 977 dockets for 968 companies. 498 are Chapter 7, filed from 9 September. 479 are Chapter 11, filed from 19 September, 48 of those under the small-business track called Subchapter V. The two chapters reach back to different dates because our collector reads the same number of pages for each. This page counts them by chapter, by month, by state and by court. Then it shows what our pipeline did with each one, and why the two chapters go different ways.
Filings by chapter
Each row is a docket. A company with two dockets counts twice; there are nine of those.
| Chapter | Filing dates | Dockets |
|---|---|---|
| Chapter 7 (liquidation) | 9 Sep to 15 Oct 2026 | 498 |
| Chapter 11 | 19 Sep to 15 Oct 2026 | 431 |
| Chapter 11, Subchapter V | 19 Sep to 15 Oct 2026 | 48 |
| All chapters | 9 Sep to 15 Oct 2026 | 977 |
The chapters cover different spans, so the table doesn’t give the courts’ split between them. Our collector reads the same number of result pages for each chapter, and the split follows that cap.
The federal courts’ own guide says Chapter 7 provides for “liquidation”, which it defines as “the sale of a debtor’s nonexempt property and the distribution of the proceeds to creditors.” For Chapter 11 it says the debtor “usually proposes a plan of reorganization to keep its business alive and pay creditors over time.”
Subchapter V is a faster Chapter 11 for smaller businesses. The same guide says it “was created in 2019 by the Small Business Reorganization Act”. It gives the debt limit for a filer as about $3.4 million in total, at least half of it from the business. The 48 here are the dockets where a court document in the search result says “subchapter V”. The search returns up to three documents per docket, so 48 is a floor. Some of the other 431 may be Subchapter V cases too.
By month and chapter
The window is short, and the second month is half a month. The September Chapter 7 rows start on 9 September; the September Chapter 11 rows start on 19 September. The October rows of both run from 1 to 15 October.
| Filing month | Chapter 7 | Chapter 11 | Subchapter V | All |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| September (Ch. 7 from 9th, Ch. 11 from 19th) | 317 | 210 | 18 | 545 |
| October (to 15th) | 181 | 221 | 30 | 432 |
| Both months | 498 | 431 | 48 | 977 |
On the window both chapters cover, 19 September to 15 October, the counts are these:
| Filing month, common window | Chapter 7 | Chapter 11 | Subchapter V | All |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| September (19th to 30th) | 160 | 210 | 18 | 388 |
| October (1st to 15th) | 181 | 221 | 30 | 432 |
| 19 September to 15 October | 341 | 431 | 48 | 820 |
The other 157 Chapter 7 dockets were filed from 9 to 18 September, earlier than the Chapter 11 search reached.
The archive fills in over time, as people and feeds add dockets, so the newest weeks may grow by next month. Each chapter was read from the newest filing back until a page cap, so the oldest days are the ones a search may not have reached.
Filings fall on working days, mostly. Of the 977, 908 carry a weekday date: 177 Monday, 182 Tuesday, 200 Wednesday, 190 Thursday and 159 Friday. 60 carry a Sunday date and 9 a Saturday. The date is the filing date CourtListener shows for the docket.
By state of the court
The state here is the state of the bankruptcy court, which is a federal district. It’s not the company’s address. A company that filed in Delaware may have worked somewhere else entirely.
| Court state | Dockets | Chapter 7 | Chapter 11 |
|---|---|---|---|
| New York | 132 | 75 | 57 |
| California | 119 | 90 | 29 |
| Florida | 98 | 26 | 72 |
| Texas | 93 | 35 | 58 |
| New Jersey | 60 | 19 | 41 |
| Illinois | 51 | 18 | 33 |
| Georgia | 51 | 27 | 24 |
| Delaware | 47 | 31 | 16 |
| Pennsylvania | 44 | 20 | 24 |
| Washington | 19 | 10 | 9 |
| 36 other states, DC and PR | 232 | 132 | 100 |
| Court not mapped to a state | 31 | 15 | 16 |
| All | 977 | 498 | 479 |
The Chapter 11 column includes Subchapter V. The ten states at the top hold 714 of the 977 dockets, 73.1%. No docket in the window came from a court in Hawaii, Idaho, Montana or North Dakota.
The Chapter 7 column reaches ten days further back than the Chapter 11 column, so compare states down a column, not across. California has the most Chapter 7 dockets, 90, and New York the next most, 75. Florida has the most Chapter 11 dockets, 72, then Texas with 58 and New York with 57. These are counts of what the archive held, not filing rates, so they say where dockets were captured as much as where businesses failed.
The 31 rows with no state came from one gap in our collector, explained under the next table.
The busiest courts
Each docket names its court. These ten held 584 of the 977 dockets, 59.8%.
| Bankruptcy court | Dockets |
|---|---|
| Middle District of Florida | 94 |
| Eastern District of New York | 91 |
| Central District of California | 83 |
| District of New Jersey | 60 |
| Southern District of Texas | 54 |
| Northern District of Illinois | 49 |
| District of Delaware | 47 |
| Northern District of Georgia | 43 |
| Southern District of New York | 32 |
| Southern District of Florida | 31 |
The Western District of Texas and the Northern District of California come next, with 21 each.
The courts are written two ways in the archive. Most carry a short citation such as “M.D. Fla.”. The Southern District of Florida carries its name in full, “S.D. Florida”, and CourtListener’s court record writes its full name with a full stop at the end. Our collector read the state from that full name and didn’t recognise “Florida.” with the stop. The counts match: 31 dockets from that court and 31 rows with no state. So Florida’s true row in the state table is most likely 129, not 98, and the “not mapped” row is the Southern District of Florida. The court isn’t split under two spellings in the top fifteen; each court there appears once. We fixed the collector on 27 October 2026 and gave the 31 rows their state the same day, so Florida reads 129 from the next update.
What our pipeline did
Every docket becomes a company row in our database, and our qualification step gives it a lane and a status. Lane A is closed companies, the ones we refer to micro1. Lane C holds every company under 30 people or of unknown size. Status says where the row is now: written to, in the queue to be written to, held for a person to review, or excluded.
| Chapter | Lane A | Lane C | No lane | Written to | In the queue | Review | Excluded | All |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Chapter 7 | 457 | 38 | 3 | 154 | 190 | 54 | 100 | 498 |
| Chapter 11 | 0 | 431 | 0 | 0 | 408 | 23 | 0 | 431 |
| Subchapter V | 0 | 48 | 0 | 0 | 45 | 3 | 0 | 48 |
| All | 457 | 517 | 3 | 154 | 643 | 80 | 100 | 977 |
Inside lane A, the 457 Chapter 7 rows split as 154 written to, 153 in the queue, 53 in review and 97 excluded. The 38 Chapter 7 rows in lane C are 37 in the queue and 1 in review. The 3 with no lane are excluded.
Contacts so far sit only on Chapter 7 companies: 193 companies have one contact each. No Chapter 11 company has a contact yet.
115 of the Chapter 7 rows carry a verified closed status from our closure check. 345 are marked closing, the default for a liquidation under way, and 38 are unknown. Every Chapter 11 row is unknown, by design: a business in Chapter 11 is still trading, and the check isn’t run on it.
Why rows were excluded or held
All 100 exclusions are Chapter 7 rows.
| Excluded, Chapter 7 | Rows |
|---|---|
| Their trustee is being written to about another of their estates | 94 |
| Closure at one site of an enterprise that continues | 3 |
| No reason recorded | 3 |
| All excluded | 100 |
The 94 is a rule about manners. One Chapter 7 trustee often handles many estates at once. We write to a trustee once, about their newest estate, and set the others aside. Nobody needs the same letter five times.
80 rows are held for a person to look at, across all three chapters: 54 Chapter 7, 23 Chapter 11 and 3 Subchapter V.
| Held for review, all chapters | Rows |
|---|---|
| Closure check: possibly acquired | 21 |
| Closure check: site closure of a continuing company | 21 |
| Name screen: health or care (health, medical, rehab, hospice, home health, child, daycare, care center, senior living) | 32 |
| Name screen: other words (laboratory and lab, academy, aerospace, financial) | 6 |
| All in review | 80 |
The closure check is a web search for each company’s name with closure terms, sorted by rule. “Possibly acquired” means the results talk of a buyer. “Site closure” means they talk of one location closing, or of a company that carries on. Either way a person reads the evidence before anyone is written to. The name screen holds companies whose names suggest health or care records, and a few other sensitive words. Those need a closer look than a rule can give.
Why Chapter 7 goes to lane A and Chapter 11 to lane C
The Chapter 7 route was set on 19 October 2026. The Chapter 11 rule followed on 23 October, and its 30-person line on 25 October. Both are written into our qualification step.
A Chapter 7 docket with a trustee named goes to lane A, whatever the company’s size. The liquidation is under way, and the trustee is the person who can speak for the estate. The federal courts’ guide says the U.S. trustee “appoints an impartial case trustee to administer the case and liquidate the debtor’s nonexempt assets.” That makes the trustee the one to write to. A Chapter 7 docket without a trustee named takes the ordinary rule instead: lane A from 30 people at peak, lane C below that or when the size is unknown. Our dockets carry no headcount, so a Chapter 7 row without a named trustee lands in lane C. That’s where the 38 sit, as the rule reads.
A Chapter 11 docket is treated as a business that’s still running. The guide says that in Chapter 11 the debtor usually “may continue to operate its business”. So the row takes the rule for operating companies: lane B, micro1’s lane for operating companies, from 30 people, and lane C below that or when the size is unknown. The dockets carry no headcount, so every Chapter 11 row starts in lane C. None has moved to lane B yet. If a Chapter 11 case is later converted to Chapter 7, it arrives as a new Chapter 7 docket and takes the Chapter 7 route.
What the tables show
A few weeks of business bankruptcies, as far as a public archive had caught them, came to 977 dockets: five weeks of Chapter 7 filings and four of Chapter 11. About one in ten of the Chapter 11 dockets is marked Subchapter V, the small-business track.
Most of the dockets sit in a handful of courts. Ten courts hold six in ten of them. The Middle District of Florida and the Eastern District of New York lead, with more than 90 each.
The pipeline has acted on the Chapter 7 rows first. 154 rows have been written to, and 193 companies have a contact. The Chapter 11 rows wait in lane C until a headcount puts some of them in lane B.
For other closures in public records, see our table of WARN notices by state, which counts the larger employers that gave notice before a closing. Our count of final retirement plan filings shows employers whose 401(k) or pension ended, which is sometimes one step of a wind-down. Public companies report a bankruptcy to the SEC too: our count of SEC deregistrations and bankruptcy filings covers those reports and the Form 15 deregistrations since 2020.
What this means for a company in Chapter 7 or Chapter 11
A business in bankruptcy still holds its records. The estimate files, the job folders, the service tickets, the shared mailboxes. In Chapter 7 the courts’ guide says the debtor must “provide any financial records or documents that the trustee requests.” In Chapter 11 the business still runs on them every day. What happened when one bankrupt airline put its emails and chat records up for sale in court is on our page on bankruptcy and company records.
The records a buyer wants are the ones that show how the work was done. How an estimate became a job. How a change order was settled. How a repair was diagnosed, and what the technician tried first. Customer names and payments are never what is wanted. Before any of it is used, the record is de-identified. micro1’s payout page says “Personal and identifying information is removed or transformed before your data is shared with third parties”. Our explainer on what data buyers actually want from a trade business goes through the record types one by one.
micro1 runs a separate track for companies that have stopped. Its referral page names a “Defunct Company Data Partnership” and says: “We are acquiring data from companies that are no longer operating.” The company requirement it lists for that track is “30+ employees”. micro1 decides each company at application. Its data partnerships page says it looks at “the historical depth, breadth, quality, and relevance of the available data” and that “Companies with several years of records across multiple business systems are generally a stronger fit.” Its payout page asks “How many years of data do you have?” A buyer licenses records like these to train AI models.
micro1 also said, on 9 October 2026, that it is “announcing a commitment to spend $1 billion over the next 12 months acquiring and licensing enterprise operational data through our Company Data Partnerships program.” That’s the buyer’s statement about its own budget. It says nothing about any one company’s records.
Who can sign for a company in bankruptcy is a legal question, and it differs between the chapters. In Chapter 7 the trustee administers the estate. In Chapter 11 the guide says that, generally, the debtor “operates the business” as debtor in possession. Ask the trustee or the company’s counsel before anything is licensed. We don’t give legal advice, and neither does this page. For the steps once a company has closed, see our page for closed companies. For which accounts to export before a bill is cut, see what a closing company’s records are worth.
If your company has closed, our estimate asks five questions and gives you a band. It’s ours, not an offer. Do you still have the logins to the job software?
What is never included
On this page: counts only. No company names, no trustee names, no docket numbers, no addresses and no people. The court records name them; we don’t repeat them.
In a licence: micro1’s data partnerships page says “Personally identifiable information (PII) is removed when relevant”. Its payout page says data is “De-identified before sharing”. As our own advice: keep customer payment details, bank statements, payroll, employee medical records and anything a client owns out of any export. In bankruptcy, keep the creditor lists and the court filings out too; they’re about money owed, not about how the work was done. How it’s safe sets out what leaves your systems and when, and our page on how de-identification works explains the steps.
Methodology
The source. CourtListener is run by Free Law Project, a non-profit. Its RECAP Archive holds federal court dockets and documents from PACER, the courts’ own paid system. CourtListener’s coverage page lists where the archive’s dockets come from, among them copies sent by the RECAP browser extension, the court notification emails some users forward, the courts’ RSS feeds, and a scraper that reads basic case data. On RSS it says: “Most federal district courts provide RSS feeds listing their latest docket entries. We crawl these feeds on an ongoing basis”. The archive holds what those routes captured. It doesn’t hold every case, and a docket can arrive days after it was filed.
The search. Our collector uses CourtListener’s public search API, type r, which returns federal cases “with up to three nested documents”. It asks for Chapter 7 and Chapter 11 dockets, one search per chapter, newest filing first, at one request a second. It reads only what the archive already holds and buys nothing from PACER. The collector fetches the same number of result pages for each chapter, so the split between the chapters reflects the page cap, not the courts’ mix. Anonymous search is throttled; in our runs in October 2026 it allowed about five pages a minute. The collector stops at a page cap and resumes next time. That’s why this first read covers a few weeks and not back to January 2024, where the collector is set to stop.
What counts as a business. The case name must carry a legal-entity suffix: Inc, LLC, Corp, Corporation, Ltd, Limited, Company, Co, LP, LLP or PLC. That drops individual debtors, including individuals who file under Subchapter V. A business filed under a person’s own name is left out too.
Chapter. Chapter 7 and Chapter 11 come from the docket’s chapter field. A docket is marked Subchapter V when one of the documents in the search result mentions it. Each table counts dockets by the chapter in the company row’s notes, as written by the collector.
State and court. The state is the state of the bankruptcy court, read from the court’s name, not the company’s address. The court in the court table is read from the docket’s citation. 31 rows had no state at the read: the state lookup didn’t read the court’s name. The Southern District of Florida’s name ends with a full stop in CourtListener’s court record, and its 31 dockets match the 31 rows without a state. The lookup was fixed on 27 October 2026, and the 31 rows were given their state the same day.
When. The Chapter 7 filing dates run from 9 September to 15 October 2026, the Chapter 11 ones (Subchapter V included) from 19 September to 15 October 2026. All 977 dockets were collected on 16 October 2026 at 06:45 UTC. We read the host database read-only on 27 October 2026 between 11:19 and 11:21 UTC, and read each chapter’s date range and the common-window counts between 11:39 and 11:40 UTC.
Rows and companies. A row is one docket. 977 dockets belong to 968 companies, so nine companies carry two. A Chapter 7 docket that matches a company another source already holds, such as a WARN notice, joins that company and takes the Chapter 7 route.
Lane and status. The lane and status are the pipeline’s own at the read, set by our qualification step under the rules above. “Written to” is the status contacted. “In the queue” is qualified. The 205 closure checks recorded on these companies by the read are web searches sorted by rule, a reading of what the web says, not proof either way. A trustee’s estates beyond the newest are excluded once the trustee has been written to.
Left out. Chapter 9, 12, 13 and 15 cases. Individual debtors. Any business docket the archive hadn’t captured by 16 October 2026.
Refresh. The tables are rebuilt monthly from a new collection and a new read of the database. The next update is due 27 November 2026.
TrustPast
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Sources
- CourtListener, REST API v4: the search API, type r (federal cases with up to three nested documents)
- CourtListener, data coverage for federal cases and filings: the RECAP Archive, the RECAP extension, PACER RSS feeds, the basic PACER content scraper
- Free Law Project, the RECAP Suite: what the RECAP Archive holds and how it grows
- CourtListener, court record for the Southern District of Florida bankruptcy court (its full name, as the API writes it)
- United States Courts, Chapter 7 bankruptcy basics: liquidation, the case trustee, a business debtor
- United States Courts, Chapter 11 bankruptcy basics: reorganization, the debtor in possession, Subchapter V
- micro1, refer a company: the Defunct Company Data Partnership, company requirements 30+ employees (micro1.ai)
- micro1, data partnerships: the data it looks for, years of records, de-identification (micro1.ai)
- micro1, how much is your data worth: the years question, de-identification before sharing (micro1.ai)
- micro1, blog, 9 October 2026: a commitment to spend $1 billion over 12 months on enterprise operational data (micro1.ai)