Corporate bankruptcies by year: recent big ones

Corporate bankruptcy filings surged in recent years, driven by high interest rates, sticky inflation, and the slow unwind of pandemic-era spending habits. Here are the standout names that reshaped the landscape:

• Party City (2024, Chapter 11) 鈥?Filed for the second time in two years, announcing it would close all stores after failing to find a buyer.
• Tupperware Brands (2024, Chapter 11) 鈥?The 78-year-old kitchenware icon succumbed to declining sales and mounting debt, planning to sell the business.
• WeWork (2023, Chapter 11) 鈥?The coworking giant collapsed under long-term lease obligations, exiting bankruptcy with a restructured debt load and slashed real estate footprint.
• Rite Aid (2023, Chapter 11) 鈥?The pharmacy chain filed to manage opioid litigation claims and close underperforming stores, removing billions in debt.
• FTX (2022, Chapter 11) 鈥?The crypto exchange's fraud-driven implosion kicked off a complex global legal battle that eventually recovered enough assets to potentially repay customers.
• Celsius Network (2022, Chapter 11) 鈥?The crypto lender froze withdrawals and filed as the digital asset market cratered, later emerging with a creditor-owned mining operation.

Each filing reflects a different breaking point, lease overload, lawsuit pressure, liquidity runs, or simple brand decline. No single sector or trigger explains them all, but high leverage and rapidly rising borrowing costs acted as common gasoline on the fire.

The biggest corporate bankruptcy filings in the last few years belong to companies that carried massive debt loads into a period of rising interest rates and shifting consumer habits. Many of these restructured through Chapter 11 to keep operating while cutting costs, though liquidation still hit hard in cases like Bed Bath & Beyond.

Key mega-filings include:

• SVB Financial Group (2023): The parent of Silicon Valley Bank filed Chapter 11 with roughly $3.3 billion in debt after its banking subsidiary collapsed in a historic run on deposits.
• FTX Group (2022): The crypto exchange filed Chapter 11 with an estimated $8 billion shortfall, making it one of the most sprawling and complex digital-asset bankruptcies ever.
• Bed Bath & Beyond (2023): The home goods chain filed Chapter 11 with roughly $5.2 billion in debt and ultimately liquidated after failing to find a buyer to keep the business alive.
• Rite Aid (2023): The pharmacy chain entered Chapter 11 with about $3.3 billion in debt, driven partly by opioid-related legal costs and stiff competition.
• Party City (2023): The party supply retailer filed Chapter 11 in January 2023 with debt reported around $1.7 billion, looking to shed liabilities and right-size its store footprint.

Most of these filings share a pattern: heavy preexisting debt, rising borrowing costs, and a sudden change in customer demand or industry conditions. When a large company files, the immediate question for investors is whether the business is reorganizing to survive or liquidating entirely, because that distinction determines whether common shareholders walk away with anything.

A year-by-year timeline shows how bankruptcy waves often concentrate in specific industries, with a few massive filings shaping each year's totals. The last several years have produced a steady stream of large Chapter 11 cases, mostly driven by heavy debt loads, shifting consumer habits, and rising interest rates.

1. 2020: The pandemic forced a wave of legacy retail names into Chapter 11. J.Crew, Neiman Marcus, and JCPenney all filed within weeks of each other. Hertz also filed, though it would later emerge quickly.
2. 2021: Filings cooled slightly from the panic, but large-scale restructurings continued. Financially stressed companies like Washington Prime Group (mall operator) and Belk (department store chain) restructured debt through pre-negotiated Chapter 11 plans.
3. 2022: Bankruptcy filings dropped sharply historically, as easy money and government stimulus kept many weaker companies on life support. Major filings were rare, with notable exceptions like crypto lender Celsius Network collapsing late in the year.
4. 2023: The tide turned as interest rates climbed. Corporate bankruptcies spiked again, with high-profile failures like Bed Bath & Beyond, party supply retailer Party City, and trucking giant Yellow Corporation. WeWork also filed, capping years of decline.
5. 2024: The volume remained elevated. Big names such as Red Lobster, Spirit Airlines, and Joann Fabrics all entered Chapter 11, looking to shed burdensome leases and debt.

See the next section to compare which of these years saw the highest overall number of filings beyond the headline names.

The year 2009 saw the highest total number of business bankruptcy filings, but 2020 and 2023 stand out for the largest, most disruptive corporate collapses.

When measuring sheer volume, the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis created a historic spike. Over 60,000 businesses filed for bankruptcy in 2009 alone, as frozen credit markets and a deep recession hit companies of all sizes at once. The numbers steadily fell from that peak and stayed relatively low for nearly a decade.

The story changes if you look at liability size rather than filing count. 2020 claimed massive retailers and energy companies destabilized by pandemic shutdowns, making it one of the costliest years on record. 2023 then surpassed it, driven by a wave of overleveraged companies that could not survive the rapid shift from cheap debt to sharply higher interest rates.

2024 and 2025 saw several large, strategic Chapter 11 filings designed more to fix broken balance sheets than to liquidate, with Big Lots, Red Lobster, and Joann standing out as major household names. Unlike the pandemic-era collapses, these restructurings were often fueled by a painful combination of high interest rates, exhausted consumer savings, and stale business models that could not keep pace with shifting spending habits.

The most significant filing to understand is Joann's second trip into Chapter 11 in early 2025, because it flipped from a rescue effort to a total liquidation – closing all 800 stores – serving as a stark example of how a failed restructuring leaves creditors fighting over scraps rather than a going concern. Other notable distress signals included Spirit Airlines and Tupperware, both proving that even iconic brands cannot outrun severe debt loads and operational missteps indefinitely.

Retail was the hardest-hit sector during the heaviest bankruptcy years on our timeline, as the shift to e-commerce collided with too much debt and too many stores. The pain concentrated sharply in 2020 and 2023, when several legacy chains that had survived earlier disruptions finally ran out of runway.

Physical retailers file for Chapter 11 more often than companies in many other industries, but they also face a tougher path to survival. A retailer's most valuable assets (leases and inventory) lose value fast, so creditors often push for liquidation sales instead of reorganization. That dynamic explains why some familiar names disappeared entirely while others shrank to a fraction of their former footprint after emerging from bankruptcy.

What separates the survivors is usually a clean balance sheet and a realistic store count before filing. If a retailer enters Chapter 11 still carrying heavy debt from a leveraged buyout or refusing to close underperforming locations, the second trip through bankruptcy tends to come quickly.

Chapter 11 and Chapter 7 serve two completely different goals: Chapter 11 is a reorganization that lets a business keep running, while Chapter 7 is a liquidation that shuts it down. If you see a company file for Chapter 11, it is trying to restructure its debt and renegotiate contracts to survive. A Chapter 7 filing means the company has stopped operating and a trustee is selling off assets to pay creditors.

Think of it as the difference between a struggling retailer closing underperforming stores to save the brand (Chapter 11) versus shutting every location permanently and running going-out-of-business sales (Chapter 7). Many large filers in recent years, including several on our timeline, started with Chapter 11 hoping to turn things around, but a successful reorganization is never guaranteed.

When a giant files for Chapter 11, the immediate lesson for most individual investors isn't panic, it's that diversification is your only free lunch. Even beloved, seemingly bulletproof brands can see their equity go to zero. If you owned the stock before the filing, the cold reality of the priority waterfall means you're last in line. Assets pay secured creditors and bondholders first, and common shareholders usually get wiped out, making recovery rare in a Chapter 7 liquidation.

For bondholders and the broader market, these filings are early-warning signals about industry headwinds, not just single-company failures. The recent surge in retail bankruptcies often reveals a shift in consumer behavior or crushing debt loads from leveraged buyouts. The smartest move you can make after a headline-grabbing filing is to audit your portfolio for other companies carrying similar high debt-to-EBITDA ratios or facing the same structural decline, since distress often clusters in sectors.

Most big corporate bankruptcies don't happen overnight. The same few red flags tend to surface in the quarters leading up to a Chapter 11 filing, and spotting them early can help investors, suppliers, and employees protect themselves.

A single warning sign rarely seals a company's fate, but a cluster of them almost always precedes a major filing. The most common ones are:

• Repeated missed earnings or guidance cuts that show the business is consistently overpromising and underdelivering.
• A sudden CFO or auditor resignation without a clear succession plan, which often signals accounting disputes or pressure from lenders.
• Ballooning short-term debt and shrinking cash reserves on the balance sheet, leaving no cushion for a slow quarter.
• Aggressive stock buybacks or dividends while debt is piling up, which suggests management is prioritizing share price over solvency.
• Supplier payment delays or renegotiated terms that hint at a cash crunch behind the scenes.
• Heavy reliance on asset sales or 'one-time' charges quarter after quarter to prop up operating income.
• Multiple credit downgrades in a short window from agencies like Moody's or S&P, which can trigger covenant violations and accelerate debt maturities.

None of these signs guarantee bankruptcy on their own. But when you see three or four of them stacking up in the same earnings report or the same news cycle, the company is usually running out of room to maneuver.