Stats › Listings, IPOs and corporate actions › Bankruptcies and delistings
Bankruptcies and why companies delist
Companies leave the stock market all the time. Ask most people why, and they'll say the company went bust, because that's the version that makes the news. The data disagrees. The ordinary way to stop being a listed company is to be bought by somebody else, and failing is the exception rather than the rule.
This page holds two things that usually get muddled together. The first is the bankruptcy count, meaning how many US companies filed each year, from the 2010 peak through the trough in 2022 and back up to 2025. The second is the academic decomposition of delistings, which takes every company that left a US exchange between 1975 and 2012 and asks why it went. I put them side by side because the bankruptcy number gets quoted as if it measures the health of the stock market, and it doesn't. It measures one exit route out of three, and not the busiest one.
Two honest limits before you start. The filing counts cover larger companies only, and the delisting study stops in 2012, so nothing on this page describes the composition of exits in the last decade. Both are spelled out in the notes rather than quietly ignored, because they change what the numbers can be used for. Everything else is sourced and dated at the foot of the page if you want to check my reading against the originals.
US corporate bankruptcy filings reached 785 in 2025, the highest since 2010, and the first half of 2026 ran at 372 against 371 a year earlier. Small business filings rose about 50% over the same period. But bankruptcy is not the main way companies leave the stock market. Across 17,303 delistings from 1975 to 2012, 56.3% were mergers and only 41.1% were delistings for cause, which includes bankruptcy, liquidation and failure to meet listing standards. Being bought is the ordinary exit. Failing is the exception, and its share of exits fell from 45% before 1996 to 37% after.
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