Fort Myers bankruptcy filings 2026: 1,981 by Aug 11, up 28%

Bankruptcy filings in the court's Fort Myers division have already passed the whole of 2023 and sit 16 cases short of the whole of 2024, with the count standing at 1,981 on August 11 and nearly five months of the year still to run

Money & World

The Editorial Team · August 12, 2026

Stock photo

Stock photo. Not the actual scene. Photo: Suki Lee / Pexels

What it changes

The first thing worth separating is what this number is and what it is not. It is a count of cases opened, so it measures how many households and businesses in Charlotte, Collier, De Soto, Glades, Hendry and Lee reached the point of filing, and it says nothing at all about how much debt was involved or how any of them ended. It is also a court district measure rather than a county measure, so a Punta Gorda filing and a Naples filing land in the same total, and nothing in the public docket number tells you which. Anyone wanting the Lee or Collier share specifically will not find it here and should not infer it. The second thing is that the local increase is not local. The court's other three divisions moved the same way over the same twelve months, Jacksonville by more than Fort Myers did, and a filing surge that shows up in Tampa, Orlando, Jacksonville and Fort Myers at once is a Florida story that Southwest Florida is inside rather than a Southwest Florida story. That matters if you are tempted to read it as a verdict on the local insurance market or the local rebuilding economy. Those pressures are real and this particular number does not isolate them. What it does do is put a floor under a lot of anecdote. The third thing is the shape of the caseload. Chapter 7 wipes out qualifying unsecured debt and can force the sale of assets that are not exempt, chapter 13 keeps the assets and runs a court supervised repayment plan for three to five years, and both are consumer routes rather than business ones. In the most recent block of twenty cases on the division's board, thirteen were chapter 7, seven were chapter 13, and not one debtor carried a company name. Florida's homestead exemption is unusually generous in a bankruptcy, which is part of why chapter 7 is the more common filing here, and it is also why a filing does not automatically mean somebody lost a house. Fourth, and practically, the timing of a filing changes what it can do. A chapter 13 filed before a foreclosure sale date can stop that sale and roll the arrears into a plan, and the same case filed the day after cannot. That gap of a few days is the single most consequential fact in this area of law and it is the one people most often learn too late. Nobody should read a rising filing count as advice to file, and this publication gives none. The point is narrower: the option has a clock on it, the clock is set by other people's calendars, and 1,981 households in this corner of Florida have already reached that decision this year.

Southwest Florida's bankruptcy count is running further ahead of last year than at any point since the pandemic, and the record for it is the court's own numbering rather than anybody's estimate.

The United States Bankruptcy Court for the Middle District of Florida gives every case in its Fort Myers division a sequential number that restarts at one each January. The court's own county page assigns Charlotte, Collier, De Soto, Glades, Hendry and Lee to that division. Case 2:26-bk-00001 was filed on January 2. The case filed on August 11 carries the number 2:26-bk-01981.

That is 1,981 cases in the first 223 days of the year.

At the identical point in the calendar the count stood at 1,549 last year, 1,177 in 2024, 929 in 2023 and 843 in 2022. This year is therefore 432 cases, or 27.9 percent, ahead of 2025, and it has more than doubled the 2022 figure.

The comparison that carries more weight is against the finished years. The division closed 2022 at 1,284 cases, 2023 at 1,588, 2024 at 1,997 and 2025 at 2,627. So 2026 has already passed the whole of 2023, and it sits 16 cases short of the whole of 2024, with nearly five months left to run.

Two things qualify that, and both cut against reading it as a purely local signal.

The first is that the same rise appears everywhere else in the district. Measured the same way and to the same date, the Tampa division went from 5,663 cases to 7,145, Orlando from 5,090 to 6,179, and Jacksonville from 2,773 to 3,643. In percentage terms that is 26.2, 21.4 and 31.4 against Fort Myers at 27.9, which puts this division in the middle of its own court rather than out in front of it.

The second is that these are consumer cases. In the twenty most recent filings on the division's board, thirteen were opened under chapter 7 and seven under chapter 13, and no debtor in that block carried a company name. Neither chapter is the one a failing business uses to reorganise.

The docket does not say why anyone filed, and this item does not speculate. It says how many did.

Bankruptcy filings in the court's Fort Myers division have already passed the whole of 2023 and sit 16 cases short of the whole of 2024, with the count standing at 1,981 on August 11 and nearly five months of the year still to run

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