Business insolvencies in France since 2000

Where the figures come from

Banque de France, Department of Enterprises, raw monthly count of business insolvencies. The 12-month total is the figure the Banque de France publishes. Scope: France, all firm sizes, all sectors; the breakdown by size is described below. See full series.

Updates

Monthly data, checked against the Banque de France every day. The latest month published is shown on the page.

What we calculate

• "Avoided" insolvencies during the pandemic: the difference between each month's observed count and the average for the same month in the baseline period, from March 2020 through December 2022. The series is raw, so comparing each month with the same month cancels the August dip.
• The "excess": the same calculation, from January 2023 onward.
• The cumulative balance: the algebraic sum of the two.
• This is the approach used by the Banque de France, BPCE (France's second-largest banking group), the DGE (the Finance Ministry's business directorate) and Crédit Agricole's economic research team in their respective publications.

The breakdown by firm size

• Banque de France, number of insolvencies over 12 months, raw, in five sizes: "micro-enterprises and unknown size", "very small enterprises", small, medium-sized, mid-cap and large. The five add up exactly to the published total (71,139 over the 12 months to September 2026).
• Our "micro-enterprises" combine the first two series: the Banque de France files very small firms in one or the other without publishing where the line falls. "Excluding micro-enterprises" combines small, medium-sized, mid-cap and large firms.
• By size, the Banque de France only publishes the 12-month total, never the single month. The balance therefore compares each 12-month period ending in the same month as the latest one published with the 2015-2019 annual average, from 2020 onward: it cannot be compared with the balance of the total, computed month by month since March 2020.
• Before 2006, the size breakdown swings erratically (small firms over 12 months: 839 at end-2003, 233 at end-2004, 1,184 at end-2005) while the total stays stable. The chart and the size records therefore start in 2006; the 2010-2019 and 2015-2019 averages do not depend on it.