The number of non-commercial borrowers who resorted to bankruptcy last month leapt by more than a quarter from the previous month.
Bankruptcy filings, including commercial and consumer filings, totaled 102,627 during March.
Activity reflected chapter 7 liquidation filings, reorganization filings under chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code and payment plans made under chapter 13 of the Bankruptcy Code.
Filings jumped from February, when the total was a revised 82,304.
However, the elevated level of filings was still less than in March 2012, when a revised 122,238 bankruptcies were filed.
The statistics were reported by the American Bankruptcy Institute, which derived the numbers from data supplied by Epiq Systems Inc.
Non-commercial bankruptcies accounted for 98,553 of March’s filings.
Consumer activity soared from a month earlier, when filings totaled a revised 78,603.
But like overall bankruptcy activity, non-commercial filings were lower than in March 2012, when the total was 116,537.
During the first three months of 2013, non-commercial bankruptcy filings amounted to 251,995 bankruptcies.
The first-quarter per-capita rate, including commercial and non-commercial filings, was 3.40 total bankruptcy filings per 1,000 in population, worse than the 3.11 per-capita rate in the first two months of 2013.
Tennessee’s 6.70 per-capita filing rate was the worst of any state. Georgia, Alabama, Illinois and Nevada all had per-capita rates in excess of five filings per thousand consumers.
