How Much Does It Cost to File Bankruptcy? 6 Costs Compared Across Chapter 7, 11, and 13

The cheapest bankruptcy on paper is frequently the dearest one in practice, and the reason lies in who signs the petition. An owner filing as an individual and the company she owns pay different fees, take different courses, answer to different trustees, and surrender different things, even when the debts that brought them to court are the same merchant cash advance and the same bank line.

Every figure below comes from the federal fee schedule or the Bankruptcy Code. Where a cost cannot be quoted, because it rests on a lawyer's engagement letter or on what a trustee eventually distributes, the rule that governs it appears in place of a guess.

1. Three Filing Fees, and Only One Kind of Debtor May Pay Slowly

On the schedule in force in September 2026, a Chapter 7 petition costs $338, a Chapter 13 petition $313, and a Chapter 11 petition $1,738. Each is a sum of parts. The Chapter 7 total joins the $245 statutory fee in 28 U.S.C. 1930(a) to a $78 administrative fee and a $15 trustee fee; Chapter 13 omits the trustee item; Chapter 11 pairs a $1,167 filing fee with a $571 administrative charge. The pieces are itemized on the judiciary's Bankruptcy Court Miscellaneous Fee Schedule, and each number carries a date whether or not anyone prints it.

A Subchapter V case is a Chapter 11 case, and it pays the Chapter 11 fee.

The terms matter more to an owner than the amounts. Bankruptcy Rule 1006(b) directs the clerk to accept an individual's petition accompanied by an application to pay in installments, and the court may then allow as many as four payments, all due within 120 days of filing (the court may stretch the last one to 180 days for cause). An individual in Chapter 7 whose income sits below 150 percent of the poverty line, and who cannot manage installments, may ask the court to waive the fee under 28 U.S.C. 1930(f). A limited liability company can do neither of these things. It pays the whole fee on the day it files, from an account that is, by the nature of the occasion, nearly empty.

2. Counsel Is a Choice for a Person and a Requirement for a Company

In Rowland v. California Men's Colony, decided in 1993, the Supreme Court restated a rule it described as the law "for the better part of two centuries": a corporation may appear in the federal courts only through licensed counsel. Bankruptcy courts apply that principle to the LLCs and corporations that come before them, so a lawyer's fee is built into every business petition before a single schedule is drafted.

An individual may file without one. The judiciary's guidance on filing pro se says so plainly, while adding that the advice of a qualified attorney "is strongly recommended" and that court staff are barred from giving legal advice.

This page does not quote a lawyer's fee, because no honest figure exists apart from the engagement. What can be said is that the fee is never private. Section 329 requires every attorney for a debtor, in every chapter, to file a statement of what was paid or promised in the year before the petition, and by whom.

3. Two Courses the Company Never Takes

Credit counseling comes first. Under 11 U.S.C. 109(h), an individual may not be a debtor unless, within the 180 days before the petition, he or she received a briefing from an approved nonprofit budget and credit counseling agency, and the statute permits that briefing by telephone or over the Internet. The second course follows the filing: section 727(a)(11) withholds a Chapter 7 discharge from an individual who fails to complete an instructional course in personal financial management, and the U.S. Trustee Program states that, with limited exceptions, debtors must finish it to receive a discharge.

The Trustee Program approves and monitors the providers, more than 200 of them, and the providers set their own charges. Those charges are modest beside the rest of this list. They are also the one item on it that a corporation never pays, since section 109(h) speaks only of "an individual," and a company has no household budget to analyze.

4. The Trustee Is Paid From the Money the Trustee Distributes

The ceiling on a Chapter 7 trustee's compensation in section 326(a) of the Code reads like a graduated tax table: 25 percent of the first $5,000 disbursed, 10 percent of amounts above $5,000 up to $50,000, 5 percent of amounts above $50,000 up to $1,000,000, and no more than 3 percent above that, computed on all money the trustee turns over to parties other than the debtor, secured creditors included. The court still decides what is reasonable under section 330. The table marks only the top.

Take a hypothetical LLC whose trustee sells a delivery van and a walk-in freezer, collects the open receivables, and disburses $60,000. The ceiling on the commission is $1,250 on the first $5,000, $4,500 on the next $45,000, and $500 on the last $10,000, or $6,250 in all. No one mails the owner an invoice for that figure (it leaves the estate before the creditors are paid, which is why owners seldom count it and why creditors, who absorb it dollar for dollar, never forget it).

A cost that falls on the creditors is still part of the price of the case. It is paid by the people least consulted about the filing.

Chapter 13 runs on another principle. The standing trustee takes a percentage of each plan payment, and 28 U.S.C. 586(e) caps that percentage at 10 percent for a debtor who is not a family farmer; the Attorney General fixes the actual figure district by district, and it varies.

Subchapter V has a trustee too, appointed under section 1183 to help develop a consensual plan, and paid what the court awards under section 330 rather than under the Chapter 7 table. A traditional Chapter 11 case has no trustee unless the court appoints one for cause such as fraud or gross mismanagement, at which point the 326(a) ceilings govern again.

Whether a percentage fee in Chapter 13 bears any relation to the work the trustee performs in a particular case is something the statute never addresses.

5. Only a Traditional Chapter 11 Pays the Quarterly Fee

Outside Subchapter V, a Chapter 11 debtor owes the U.S. Trustee Program a fee for every quarter the case stays open, measured by its disbursements, with a $250 floor and a $250,000 ceiling under the quarterly fee schedule effective April 1, 2026. Chapters 7 and 13 owe nothing of the kind, and Subchapter V is exempt by statute.

The fee runs until the case is closed, converted, or dismissed. A case that lingers is charged for lingering.

6. The Largest Cost Is What Each Chapter Takes Away

A company in Chapter 7 does not pay for its bankruptcy so much as it is spent on it. A trustee collects and sells what the business owns, section 727(a)(1) denies a discharge to any debtor other than an individual, and the owner's personal guaranty of the merchant cash advance survives the company's case untouched. The price of bankrupting a company, then, is $338 and the company, with the guaranty left over for the owner to answer separately.

For a period of three years or more, up to five, a span that turns partly on how the debtor's income compares with the applicable state median, an individual in Chapter 13 pays a trustee under a plan instead of surrendering property. If the trustee or an unsecured creditor objects, the plan must devote the debtor's entire projected disposable income for that period to unsecured creditors or pay them in full, and in every case each unsecured creditor must receive at least what a Chapter 7 liquidation would have produced. The cost of Chapter 13 is, if we are being exact, measured less in fees than in years of income committed to a schedule.

Subchapter V borrows the same idea for a business. A plan confirmed over creditor objection must apply the company's projected disposable income over a period of at least three and at most five years, but the owner may keep the equity. The business survives, and its surplus belongs to the plan for the duration.

Where the Arithmetic Points Somewhere Else

Delancey Street is a debt settlement company, not a law firm; filing cases, appearing in court, and advising anyone on which chapter fits all lie outside its work. It offers owners carrying merchant cash advance and similar business balances a free, confidential review of whether a negotiated settlement is realistic, a review that can come before or alongside a meeting with bankruptcy counsel, and it brings in independently licensed counsel once a question turns legal. A business that needs the automatic stay, or a plan binding a dissenting creditor, needs bankruptcy counsel, because no private agreement supplies either. For everyone else the comparison is worth making with the whole ledger in view, including the costs that appear on no invoice the owner will ever receive.