May 2013 Bankruptcy Filing Numbers Continue Trend

The latest data from Epiq Systems are available, and they confirm my estimate last month of just over 1.0 million bankruptcy filings for the 2013 calendar year. Epiq Systems reports 96,430 bankruptcy filings for the month of May. Spread over the 22 business days in the month, that is a daily filing rate of 4,383. The daily filing rate is a 12.0% decline on a year-over-year basis.

If one extrapolates the filing rates from the first five months over the rest of the calendar year, the prediction remains for just over 1.0 million total filings in 2013. This figure would be a 14% annual decline.

Annualized, the bankruptcy filing rate stands at 3.54 filings per 1,000 persons. The last time the filing rate was lower was November 2008, when the bankruptcy filing rate was still experiencing the dip in filings that occurred right after enactment of the 2005 bankruptcy law. If one takes a longer view and considers the filing rate gyrations around 2005 as a statistical anomaly, the last time the filing rate was this low was 1995.