Top 10 US Bankruptcy Districts by Filing Volume
PlainBankruptcy ranks the 90 US Bankruptcy Court districts by total filings in the most recent reported fiscal year, using Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts data. Figures are drawn directly from the current dataset, aggregated by district.
This ranking measures court filing workload, not economic conditions within the district: large corporate cases concentrate in a few districts for jurisdictional reasons unrelated to local financial health. See "What this analysis cannot tell us" below.
Research period:
Research question
Across the 90 US Bankruptcy Court districts tracked in PlainBankruptcy, which districts handle the highest absolute volume of bankruptcy filings in the most recent reporting year, and how does the largest urban district compare to the median district?
Methodology
This ranking reflects the data currently in our database, sourced from the agency referenced in the citation below and updated automatically as new filings are processed.
Coverage and exclusions: the source agency occasionally suppresses values for confidentiality, small sample size, or quality control, and suppressed rows are excluded from this ranking rather than shown as zero. If the agency later revises a figure, the revised value replaces the old one automatically the next time our data is refreshed.
Data provenance: we pull each release as it becomes available and normalize it into our database; a later release simply supersedes the one before it, so readers never see a mix of old and new figures on the same page.
Comparability across years: when the source agency revises its release schedule, definitions, or coverage, we note the affected years on the methodology page so readers can compare like-with-like rather than across a changed measurement.
Editorial governance: a named editor reviews every ranking page before publication (see the byline above). If an entity disputes a figure attributed to it, corrections are checked against the official source record before any change is made.
Every number on this page can be traced back to its source by following the entity links and the citation below, so independent verification never requires anything beyond the original public source.
See the methodology page for the complete ETL pipeline, source vintage, and column lineage.
Top 10 US Bankruptcy Districts by Filing Volume
Live data: reflects the current dataset
The ranked top 10
Every row below reflects the current 10-record dataset. Reload the page after new data is processed to see the latest values.
| # | Bankruptcy district | State | Total filings (latest year) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Central District of California | california | 30,358 |
| 2 | Middle District of Florida | florida | 20,427 |
| 3 | Northern District of Georgia | georgia | 20,196 |
| 4 | District of New Jersey | new-jersey | 16,421 |
| 5 | Southern District of Texas | texas | 14,980 |
| 6 | Northern District of Illinois | illinois | 14,852 |
| 7 | District of Arizona | arizona | 14,823 |
| 8 | Southern District of Florida | florida | 14,142 |
| 9 | Eastern District of California | california | 13,915 |
| 10 | Southern District of New York | new-york | 11,625 |
Source: Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, Federal Judicial Caseload Statistics, Bankruptcy Filings by District. Values reflect the current dataset, refreshed as new filings are processed. Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, Federal Judicial Caseload Statistics, Bankruptcy Filings by District. Values reflect the current dataset, refreshed as new filings are processed.
Findings
Top entity in the ranking
The top-ranked record in this dataset is Central District of California, with a value of 30,358 on the Total filings (latest year) column. The full top-10 set is rendered in the table above. Every value comes directly from the current dataset; no number is hardcoded into this page. When the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts publishes a revision, the ranking and the prose around it update automatically.
Distribution shape
The gap between the top-ranked record (30,358) and the 10th-ranked record (11,625) characterizes how concentrated the top of the distribution is. Where the top value is many multiples of the median value of the visible set, the population is highly concentrated, a small number of entities accumulate the bulk of the measured quantity. Where the top and bottom of the visible set are close together, the distribution is relatively flat across the top end. The full distribution beyond this top-10 cut is summarized in the aggregate context section below and explored in the linked entity profiles.
Aggregate context
Across the full population behind this ranking, here are the summary statistics: how many records exist in total, the sum of the ranking metric across all qualifying records, and the mean per-record value. The methodology page documents the exact filter applied (records with null or zero values on the ranking metric are excluded). This aggregate row is computed from the same dataset that powers the ranking above.
Source provenance
The records in this ranking originate from Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, specifically the Federal Judicial Caseload Statistics, Bankruptcy Filings by District. PlainBankruptcy ingests the source vintage published by the agency and keeps this page current, there is no static export carrying stale numbers, and a newly published dataset is reflected here within hours. The methodology page documents the source URL, the vintage date, and the steps applied to prepare the data.
Why this ranking matters
Rankings like this one let a reader scan a population quickly and identify outliers, concentrations, and patterns that warrant deeper investigation. The detail pages linked from each entity in the table above give the full per-entity context: time-series history where available, related metrics from adjacent tables, and links onward to the underlying source records. The methodology page explains how an entity earns inclusion in the dataset and how the ranking column is computed at the source.
What this analysis cannot tell us
District filing counts aggregate all chapters (7, 11, 12, 13) and both business and nonbusiness filings within each US Bankruptcy Court district during the most recent reporting fiscal year. Each US judicial district contains one bankruptcy court; some districts cover entire states with low population (e.g., District of Wyoming), while populous states are subdivided into multiple districts (e.g., Eastern, Northern, Southern, Western Districts of New York). District assignment is based on the debtor's residence, principal place of business, or location of principal assets; large corporate Chapter 11 filings are often filed in the Southern District of New York or the District of Delaware due to their bankruptcy-court expertise and corporate-domicile concentration, which can elevate those districts' counts beyond what local population alone would suggest. Year-over-year district variation reflects economic conditions, large case filings, and the seasonal pattern of small-business bankruptcies. The ranking measures court workload, not economic conditions within the state.
Secondary cut from the same source
Top 10 districts by business bankruptcy filings (latest reporting year)
Sources
- Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts, Bankruptcy Filings by District - https://www.uscourts.gov/statistics-reports/caseload-statistics-data-tables
Every figure on PlainBankruptcy is rendered directly from federal court source data, no number is typed in by an editor. This page draws directly on federal court source data, no figure is typed in by an editor. See our editorial standards & corrections policy, the methodology behind these numbers, or report a data error.