Federal Judicial Center Integrated Database (FJC IDB), public release. Contains one record per bankruptcy case per fiscal-year snapshot. Deduplicated by CASEKEY (latest snapshot retained) to count each case exactly once.
Chapter 13 cases filed FY 2008–2024 (post-BAPCPA). 4,895,163 unique cases across 94 federal districts. Mature cohort (FY 2008–2019, sufficient time for plan completion): 4,060,721 cases, 55.9% dismissal rate (51.3% conversion-adjusted).
Dismissal Rate: Dismissed cases / (Dismissed + Discharged). Disposition codes: Discharged = A, B, 1; Dismissed = H, I, J, K, T, U, 5. Pending/open cases excluded.
Prior Filer Rate: Cases where PRFILE=Y / Total cases. FJC flags any debtor with a prior bankruptcy filing regardless of chapter or timing.
Discharge Despite Prior: Prior filers discharged / Prior filers with known dispositions. This is the unscreened pool — cases where discharge eligibility should have been verified but no mechanism required it.
Pro Se Rate: Cases where D1FPRSE=Y at time of filing / Total cases.
PACER docket screening of 7 federal districts. For each prior filer, actual filing dates were retrieved and checked against statutory bar windows: 4 years for Ch.13→Ch.13 (11 U.S.C. §1328(f)(1)), 6 years for Ch.7→Ch.13 (§1328(f)(2)). Measured filing-to-filing per In re Blendheim. Cases within the bar window that received discharge = verified violations.
Projection: (Prior filers discharged per district) × 43% verified hit rate from 7-district PACER sample. The 43% rate represents the proportion of prior-filer discharges where the prior case fell within the §1328(f) bar window. Actual rates vary by district. This is an estimate, not a verification.
Maturation bias: Cases filed after FY 2019 have not had sufficient time to complete a 3–5 year Ch.13 plan. Recent-year dismissal rates are artificially inflated because the only closed cases are early failures. The “All Years” aggregate is reliable because older cohorts have fully resolved. Year-by-year trends after 2019 should be interpreted with this caveat.
Conversions: 368,997 cases filed as Ch.13 and converted to Ch.7 received a discharge but are counted as Ch.7 outcomes in the FJC data. If these are included as Ch.13 successes, the national dismissal rate adjusts from 58.3% to approximately 53.6%. The dashboard uses the FJC’s current-chapter classification (crntchp), which excludes these conversions from the Ch.13 discharge count.
Pro se attrition: The pro se rate reflects status at filing. Many pro se cases dismiss before the 341 meeting, so the surviving pro se rate at confirmation is substantially lower than at filing.
The discharge eligibility check under §1328(f) is purely mechanical: prior filing date + disposition + current filing date. No legal judgment required. Yet no automated screening exists in CM/ECF, no rule mandates it, and no court systematically performs it. The result: an estimated 163,000+ ineligible discharges over 12 years. The proposed amendment to Rule 4004 would require this check.
The §1328(f) discharge bar screener is open source and available for any district to run against their own docket data. Source code and documentation at the public repository.