Data

SEC deregistrations and bankruptcy filings

Last updated October 28, 2026

Next update November 2026

A company whose shares are registered with the SEC has to keep filing reports. When it stops, it usually files a Form 15. When it goes bankrupt or a court appoints a receiver, it has to say so on a Form 8-K, under Item 1.03. Both filings are public, and anyone can search them on EDGAR, the SEC’s filing system.

Our sourcing database holds 3,226 company rows from those two filings, filed from 2 January 2020 to 15 October 2026. 2,864 are Form 15 deregistrations. 362 are 8-K reports of a bankruptcy or receivership. This page counts them by form, by year and month, by state, by industry, and by what our pipeline did with each one. It also says plainly what a Form 15 does not prove, which is that the business closed.

Rows by filing kind

A row is one filer and one kind of filing. A filer that sent both a Form 15 and an Item 1.03 report has two rows; 22 filers do. The date of a row is the first filing of that kind the filer made since 2020. A later filing of the same kind is noted on the row, not counted again: 333 rows carry one.

Filing kindForm labelFirst filingLast filingRows
Form 15, labelled 15-12G15-12G10 Jan 202015 Oct 20262,282
Form 15, amended15-12G/A14 May 20212 Jan 20264
Form 15, deregistration under 12(b)15-12B2 Jan 202013 Jun 2022578
All Form 152 Jan 202015 Oct 20262,864
8-K, Item 1.038-K14 Jan 20207 Oct 2026359
8-K, Item 1.03, amended8-K/A16 Oct 20236 Dec 20243
All Item 1.0314 Jan 20207 Oct 2026362
All rows2 Jan 202015 Oct 20263,226

The 3,226 rows belong to 3,204 distinct filer numbers.

Form 15’s own title says what it is: a “certification and notice of termination of registration under section 12(g)” of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, “or suspension of duty to file reports under sections 13 and 15(d)”. Until mid-2022 EDGAR labelled each one by the section it was filed under: a 15-12G ended a registration under section 12(g), a 15-12B one under section 12(b). Since then both carry the 15-12G label. We keep both and drop the 15-15D, as the method below explains.

Item 1.03 of Form 8-K is titled “Bankruptcy or Receivership”. It applies when “a receiver, fiscal agent or similar officer has been appointed” for the company in a proceeding under the Bankruptcy Code or other law, where a court or authority “has assumed jurisdiction over substantially all of the assets or business”. It also covers the case where the managers stay in place “subject to the supervision and orders of a court”. Unless an item says otherwise, the general instructions give a company four business days to file the report.

One gap stands out. Our rows carry no 15-12B after 13 June 2022. On 28 October 2026 at 04:11 UTC we asked the same full-text search for 15-12B filings in 2021 and in 2023, with the query our collector uses. It returned 312 hits for 2021 and none for 2023. EDGAR’s own quarterly form index lists no 15-12B filings from July 2022 on, while its 15-12G count roughly triples from the second quarter of 2022 to the third. So from mid-2022 a 12(b) deregistration shows up as a 15-12G. Compare the years on the two Form 15 columns together, not on 15-12G alone.

By year and form

Each row sits in the year of its first filing of that kind. 2026 runs to 15 October.

Year15-12G and 15-12G/A15-12BItem 1.03All rows
202012920999437
202113226120413
202233210825465
2023594081675
2024402073475
2025392035427
2026 (to 15 Oct)305029334
All years2,2865783623,226

2020 stands out for bankruptcy and receivership reports. It has 99 of the 362, more than a quarter. 2023 and 2024 come next, with 81 and 73. 2021 and 2022 are the quietest, with 20 and 25.

Form 15 rows, both columns together, run 338, 393, 440, 594, 402 and 392 from 2020 to 2025, and 305 to 15 October 2026. The 15-12B column stops in mid-2022 because EDGAR stopped using that label, so only the two Form 15 columns together compare across the years.

The last thirteen months

MonthForm 15Item 1.03All rows
October 202529029
November 202521223
December 202543346
January 202641344
February 202632133
March 202628735
April 202625328
May 202637441
June 202631334
July 202638139
August 202641243
September 202617421
October 2026 (to 15th)15116

A month here counts filers whose first Form 15 or first Item 1.03 report since 2020 fell in that month. A filer that also filed in an earlier year sits in that earlier year. So a month counts the filers new to the table, not every Form 15 or Item 1.03 report filed in it.

By calendar month, 2020 to 2025

Pooling the six full years shows when in the year the rows land.

MonthForm 15Item 1.03All rows
January25723280
February16825193
March26329292
April22333256
May18329212
June20839247
July20333236
August22725252
September16125186
October21524239
November17219191
December27929308

December and March carry the most Form 15 rows, January close behind. Bankruptcy and receivership reports spread more evenly, from 19 in November to 39 in June.

By state of the business address

The state is the business state the search index gives for the filing, or, when it gives none, the one in the business address of the filer’s submissions history, read when we collected. It isn’t where the company was incorporated, and it isn’t where every plant or store was. A company with a head office in Texas may have run shops in ten states.

Business stateForm 15Item 1.03All rows
California37252424
New York38530415
Texas27153324
Florida15239191
Massachusetts16213175
Pennsylvania9515110
New Jersey9112103
Colorado841498
Illinois80787
Nevada68977
40 other states, DC, PR, VI and Guam67090760
US, no state in the address49150
Outside the US38527412
All2,8643623,226

All 50 states appear, with the District of Columbia (9 rows), Puerto Rico (4), the US Virgin Islands (2) and Guam (1). The ten states at the top hold 2,004 of the 2,764 US rows with a state, 72.5%.

California and New York lead on rows. Texas leads on bankruptcy and receivership reports, with 53, one more than California. Florida comes fourth on rows and third on bankruptcy and receivership reports, with 39.

412 filers give a business address outside the US, in 37 countries.

Country of business addressForm 15Item 1.03All rows
Canada82991
China62062
Cayman Islands37239
United Kingdom34337
Israel21223
Bermuda20020
31 other countries12911140
All outside the US38527412

Hong Kong (14), Singapore (12), Ireland (12), Australia (11) and Japan (10) are the next five.

By industry

EDGAR gives each filer an industry from the SEC’s Standard Industrial Classification list. These are the fifteen most common descriptions, as EDGAR writes them. 326 descriptions appear in all; 51 rows have none.

SEC industry descriptionForm 15Item 1.03All rows
Blank Checks5031504
Pharmaceutical Preparations26243305
Services-Prepackaged Software1269135
Real Estate Investment Trusts1047111
Crude Petroleum & Natural Gas792099
Biological Products, (No Diagnostic Substances)771390
State Commercial Banks79180
Surgical & Medical Instruments & Apparatus48957
Services-Business Services, NEC441054
Services-Computer Processing & Data Preparation43346
Savings Institution, Federally Chartered46046
National Commercial Banks37037
Real Estate30535
Commodity Contracts Brokers & Dealers35035
Semiconductors & Related Devices25631

“Blank Checks” is code 6770 in the SEC’s list. It holds 504 rows, 15.6% of the table, and all but one are a Form 15. Drug makers come second, with 305 rows, and they lead on bankruptcy and receivership reports: 43 of the 362.

By the first word of the description, 522 rows are “Services”, 125 “Retail” and 57 “Wholesale”. 49 are carriers and transport services: shipping 20, air carriers and couriers 8, “Transportation Services” 8, trucking 5, rail 3, freight arranging 3 and airport services 2. Pipelines, 11 more, are left out of that count. The trades are thin in this source, as you’d expect from public companies. Restaurants (“Retail-Eating Places” and “Retail-Eating & Drinking Places”) make 26 rows. Home builders (“Operative Builders”) make 11. General building contractors, special trade contractors, heavy construction and utility-line construction make 11 between them, and trucking 5.

What our pipeline did

Every row is a company in our database, and our qualification step gives it a lane and a status. Lane A is a closed company of 30 or more people, or a closed company outside the US. Lane B is an operating company of 30 or more, or an operating company outside the US. Lanes A and B are the ones we refer to micro1. Lane C is every other company, unknown size included. Status says where the row is now: qualified to be written to, held for a person to review, excluded, or written to.

Filing kindLane ALane BLane CNo laneQualifiedReviewExcludedWritten toAll
Form 15884022,363112,0857532602,864
Item 1.0336392861244104131362
All1244412,649122,3298573913,226

Lane B is mostly the filers abroad: 409 of its 441 rows have an address outside the US, and the rule sends a company outside the US to micro1 whatever its size. The other 32 are US rows. Lane A is all US rows. 60 of its 124 rows carry a headcount of 30 or more taken from another public record, nearly always a retirement plan’s final filing. Of the other 64, 62 carry 30 or more affected workers from a WARN notice matched to the same company, and 2 carry no figure. Most rows in the table have no headcount at all, because neither SEC filing states one. That’s why 2,649 rows, 82.1%, sit in lane C.

So far one row has been written to, and 25 companies have contacts on file, 44 contacts in all. This source arrived on 16 October 2026, and the work on it has barely started.

29 rows carry a closed status at the read: 14 Item 1.03 rows marked closed and 2 verified closed by our closure check, and 13 Form 15 rows marked closed. 20 Form 15 rows and 12 Item 1.03 rows are marked operating. The rest, 3,165, are unknown.

Why rows were held or excluded

857 rows wait for a person.

Held for reviewRows
Name or industry screen: pharm294
Name or industry screen: banks116
Name or industry screen: medical94
Name or industry screen: diagnost90
Name or industry screen: financial, credit, lending69
Name or industry screen: health59
Closure check: possibly acquired56
Closure check: site closure of a continuing company31
Name or industry screen: other words25
Name or industry screen: laboratory, aircraft, nursing23
All in review857

The screen reads each company’s name and industry description for words that suggest health, money or other sensitive records. A drug maker, a bank or a clinic keeps records that need a closer look than a rule can give. So 770 rows are held on a word, and a person decides.

The closure check is a web search for each company with closure terms, sorted by rule. “Possibly acquired” means the results speak of a buyer. “Site closure” means they speak of one location closing while the company carries on. Either way a person reads the evidence before anyone is written to.

39 rows are excluded. 27 are closures of one site of a company that continues. 12 have no lane and no reason recorded.

1,049 of the 2,864 Form 15 rows carry a second note: the filing’s text contains “merger”, “acquired” or “acquisition”. That’s 36.6%. The note doesn’t move the row. It tells the person reading it that the deregistration may follow a sale, not a shutdown.

What the tables show

Since 2020, 3,226 filer rows in our database come from a public company stopping its SEC reports or reporting a bankruptcy or receivership. Nine in ten are deregistrations.

A deregistration is the weaker signal. The company stopped reporting to the SEC. It may have been bought, taken private or moved off an exchange, and more than a third of the Form 15 rows say “merger”, “acquired” or “acquisition” somewhere. A bankruptcy or receivership report is the stronger one: a court or a receiver now stands over the company’s assets.

Most of these companies aren’t trade businesses. Blank checks, drug makers, software companies, banks and property trusts lead the industry table. The few that are trades, the restaurant groups, the home builders, the contractors, the carriers, ran on the same records a private shop keeps, only more of them.

For closures from other public records, see our count of business bankruptcy filings, which counts Chapter 7 and Chapter 11 dockets from a public court archive over five weeks of 2026. Our table of WARN notices by state counts the larger employers that gave notice before a closing or layoff. Our count of final retirement plan filings shows employers whose plan ended, which is where most of lane A’s headcounts above come from.

Why a closed public company’s records still matter

A public company that stops reporting still has its records. A deregistered restaurant group still holds years of kitchen schedules, supplier orders, health inspection follow-ups and shift notes. A home builder still holds its estimates, its change orders, its punch lists and the emails that settled them. A carrier still has its dispatch notes and its maintenance logs. Bankruptcy doesn’t delete any of that. The servers and the shared drives sit there until someone decides what to do with them.

The records a buyer wants are the ones that show how the work was done. How an estimate turned into a job. How a change order was argued and settled. How a crew was sent out, and what it found when it got there. How a late delivery was chased. A buyer licenses records like these to train AI models.

Customer names and payments are never what is wanted. Before any of it is used, the records are de-identified. micro1’s payout page says “Personal and identifying information is removed or transformed before your data is shared with third parties”. Its data partnerships page says personally identifiable information “is removed when relevant”, and that “certain datasets may undergo synthetic rewrites that preserve workflow structure”. The workflow is the point. The names aren’t. 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 requirements it lists for that track are “30+ employees”, “10+ Countries”, “English” and “All industries”. Neither SEC filing states a headcount, so the line has to be shown from other records. 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.”

Who can sign for a deregistered or bankrupt company is a legal question. In a receivership, Item 1.03 itself says a receiver or similar officer has been appointed. In bankruptcy, the answer depends on the chapter. Our page on whether a closed company can still license its records sets out what official pages say about each case. Ask 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.

If your company has closed or is winding down, our estimate asks five questions and gives you a band. It’s ours, not an offer. Do you still have the logins to the old job system?

What is never included

On this page: counts only. No company names, no filer numbers, no accession numbers, no addresses and no people. EDGAR shows 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. For a public company, keep the shareholder registers, the board minutes and the SEC filings themselves out too. They’re about the company’s ownership and money, 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. EDGAR is the SEC’s filing system. Its full-text search, the FAQ says, covers “the full text of all EDGAR filings submitted electronically since 2001”, and it can be limited by form type and by a custom date range. Our collector uses the search’s public index, which needs no key. For each filer it also reads the submissions history at data.sec.gov, which the SEC’s API page describes as each entity’s “current filing history”, with metadata such as its current and former names. That’s where the business address and the industry description come from.

The searches. The collector runs four searches for each calendar month since 1 January 2020. Form 15 filings labelled 15-12G or 15-12B. The same forms again, with the words “merger OR acquired OR acquisition”, to note which ones mention a sale. 8-K filings containing “Item 1.03”. 8-K filings containing “Item 2.05”. This collection loaded no Item 2.05 rows into our database, so only the first three searches feed the tables. It reads 100 hits a page until a month is done, and keeps every page it reads. It sends one request a second; the SEC’s fair-access page gives a current maximum of 10.

What it keeps. One row per filer and filing kind: the earliest Form 15, the earliest Item 1.03 report and the earliest Item 2.05 report since 2020. Later filings of the same kind are noted on the row. A filing that carries both 8-K items counts once, as Item 1.03. An 8-K is kept only when EDGAR lists the item on it, not when the words merely appear in the text.

What it drops. Form 15 filings labelled 15-15D, which suspend a duty to report under section 15(d); the collector’s notes describe these filers as mostly issuers of debt. Asset-backed trusts and other securitisation vehicles, picked out by their names: a series year in the name, an owner or receivables trust, recovery-bond issuers. The collector’s notes say they deregister when the notes pay off. Nothing else is dropped for its size, state or industry.

Item 2.05. Item 2.05 of Form 8-K covers a company committing to “an exit or disposal plan”, disposing of a long-lived asset, or ending jobs under a plan of termination, when “material charges will be incurred”. A plant closure, a line closure or an exit from a business can file one, and so can a company that carries on. The collector writes such a row with status, kind and scope all unknown. At our read the database held no Item 2.05 rows, so this page has none. They’ll be counted here once a collection with them is loaded.

From file to database. The collection of 16 October 2026 produced 3,467 filings, one per filer and kind. Loading them into our database matched 84 to companies we already held from other sources, such as layoff notices, and 157 to a company row another SEC filing had just created. That leaves the 3,226 rows whose first source is SEC EDGAR, the rows every table here counts.

Status from the collector. A Form 15 row starts with its status unknown and a note that a deregistration “does not by itself mean the business closed”. An Item 1.03 row starts as closing. Our qualification step then sets the lane and status by the rules above, and the closure check and later sources can change the company status. The tables show the values at the read.

State, country, industry. The state and country come from the business state the search index gives for the filing, or from the business address in the filer’s submissions history when the index has none. EDGAR writes a place outside the US as a code, which the collector turns into a country. The industry is EDGAR’s SIC description for the filer.

Known gap. EDGAR’s quarterly form index lists no 15-12B filings after the second quarter of 2022, and the full-text search returned none when we checked on 28 October 2026. From then on a 12(b) deregistration carries the 15-12G label, so the 15-12B column stops in June 2022.

When. The filings run from 2 January 2020 to 15 October 2026. All were collected on 16 October 2026 at 06:46 UTC. We read the host database read-only on 28 October 2026 between 04:09 and 04:13 UTC.

Left out. 15-15D filers. Asset-backed trusts. Item 2.05 reports, until they’re loaded. Any company that stopped without filing either form, which is most private companies.

Refresh. The tables are rebuilt monthly from a new collection and a new read of the database. The next update is due 28 November 2026.

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Sources