Search nationwide bankruptcy case filings across all federal bankruptcy courts. Look up individuals and businesses that have filed for Chapter 7, 11, 13, or other bankruptcy protection. Free search available through the Public Case Locator.
Every federal bankruptcy filing in the United States lives inside PACER — Public Access to Court Electronic Records — the electronic docket system operated by the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts. There is no single national bankruptcy "database" in the way people imagine. Instead, each of the 94 federal judicial districts runs its own CM/ECF docket, and PACER is the public window into all of them. That distinction matters the moment you start searching, because searching one district's docket will never surface a case filed three states away.
Registration is free and takes a few minutes at pacer.uscourts.gov. You create one account, provide a credit card for billing purposes, and receive credentials that work across every district court, appellate court, and bankruptcy court in the country. No fee is charged at signup, and you are only billed when you actually pull records.
The fee structure is per page rather than per search: $0.10 per page retrieved, capped at $3.00 for any single document (roughly 30 pages), with the cap not applying to name-search results, transcripts, or full case reports. Audio recordings are billed at a flat rate. Critically, if your total quarterly usage stays under $30, the fees are waived automatically — most casual researchers never pay a cent. Court opinions are always free.
The two access routes are easy to confuse. The PACER Case Locator (pcl.uscourts.gov) is the nationwide index: it tells you whether a person or company has a bankruptcy case anywhere in the federal system, and in which district. An individual court's docket, reached through that district's CM/ECF site, is where the actual filings live — petitions, schedules, motions, trustee reports, discharge orders. The normal workflow is to find the case in the Case Locator, then open the district docket to read the documents.
A debtor-name search is the default starting point when you know who but not where. The Case Locator accepts last name and first name for individuals, or the legal entity name for businesses, and lets you narrow by court region, filing date range, and case type. Names are indexed exactly as filed, so a debtor who filed as "Robert J. Alvarez" will not always appear under "Bob Alvarez," and a company that filed under a holding-company name will not appear under its trade name. Search a shortened surname-only string first, then narrow.
A case-number search is the fastest and cheapest route when you already have the citation. Bankruptcy case numbers follow a year-chapter-sequence pattern such as 24-10567, and are only unique within a district — you must pair the number with the correct court. If someone hands you a case number without a district, the Case Locator can resolve it.
A filing-date search is how professionals monitor activity: restrict the Case Locator to a district and a date window to see everything filed in that period. This is how commercial credit teams and lien-search analysts spot new filings against their portfolio.
Results typically return the debtor's name and city, the district and judge, the chapter filed (7, 11, 13, or 15), the filing date, the current case status (open, closed, dismissed, discharged), the case number, and the assigned trustee. Opening the docket adds the petition, the schedules of assets and liabilities, the creditor matrix, meeting-of-creditors notices, trustee reports, and any discharge or dismissal order.
Bankruptcy is one of the most transparent areas of federal law. The petition, schedules of assets and liabilities, statement of financial affairs, creditor lists, monthly operating reports in Chapter 11 cases, and the final discharge order are all public by default, and remain publicly accessible for years after the case closes.
But not everything is open. Under Federal Rule of Bankruptcy Procedure 9037, filers must redact all but the last four digits of Social Security and taxpayer ID numbers, minors' names, financial account numbers, and dates of birth. Courts routinely seal or restrict material under 11 U.S.C. § 107(b) — commercial trade secrets, confidential customer lists in retail liquidations, some medical and adoption records, and settlement terms subject to protective orders. Documents filed by a party's counsel under seal appear on the docket as an entry without a retrievable PDF.
Due diligence before a business deal is the single most common reason. Before extending trade credit, signing a supply agreement, or acquiring assets, a buyer checks whether the counterparty — or its principals — has an open or recent filing. A pending Chapter 11 triggers an automatic stay under 11 U.S.C. § 362 that freezes collections and litigation, and asset sales inside bankruptcy require court approval, which changes the entire structure of a transaction. Pair a bankruptcy search with a state business entity lookup to confirm the entity is still active and in good standing, and with a UCC filing search to see who already holds a security interest in the collateral.
Tenant and landlord screening is a legitimate but legally regulated use. A landlord may look at a public bankruptcy docket, but the moment you obtain a consumer report from a screening company, or use a report to make a housing decision, the Fair Credit Reporting Act applies: you need a permissible purpose, and adverse-action notice obligations attach. Bankruptcy filings also cannot be used as a blanket reason to deny housing in a way that violates state or local law. If your screening process is systematic, use an FCRA-compliant provider rather than raw docket research.
Skip tracing and asset recovery relies on the schedules. A debtor's Schedule A/B lists real property, vehicles, and accounts; the creditor matrix lists mailing addresses that are often more current than a credit header. Judgment creditors and collection attorneys check for filings first, because an active case makes direct collection unlawful.
Verifying a claim in a dispute is the fourth pattern. When a party in litigation, a negotiation, or a licensing review claims they never filed, the docket settles it quickly. Practitioners often follow a filing search with a licensing check in the professional license lookup directory or a state-level review through the state records directory to see whether related regulatory actions exist.