New Bankruptcy Data: Now at County Level

PolicyMap has long had data on bankruptcies, both business and non-business, but it had one frustrating limitation—it was only available at the state level. It was great for seeing how bankruptcies were affecting regions of the country, but not so great for seeing their effect at the local level.

Now, thanks to new data available from the U.S. courts system, we have bankruptcy data at the county level. It has data on total bankruptcies, business bankruptcies, and non-business bankruptcies. For non-business bankruptcies, you can see the data as a rate of bankruptcies per 1,000 adults, which is helpful because it’s normalized by population.

This data is available to all users, and can be found in the Incomes & Spending menu, under Additional Income & Spending Data.