If you were paid before they filed
Yes, and most suppliers find out from a demand letter a year later. The reach-back is 90 days, it is written into the Bankruptcy Code, and there are real defences that suppliers win on.
Everything on this page is quoted from the statute and the rules, with links. None of it is legal advice. If a demand letter has already arrived, the useful next call is a bankruptcy lawyer and the second is your own payment history.
A trustee can sue to undo a payment a company made to you if it was made “on or within 90 days before the date of the filing of the petition” (11 U.S.C. 547(b)(4)(A)). The point is not that you did anything wrong. Preference law exists so that one creditor who got paid in the final scramble does not do better than everybody else who did not.
The petition date, backwards. Not the date the debt was incurred, not the date you invoiced, and not the date you found out. Every case page on this site prints that window as two real dates when we hold the petition date, so you can go and look at your own payment history against it rather than working it out.
If you were an insider of the company the reach-back is a full year (11 U.S.C. 547(b)(4)(B)). An insider of a corporation means a director, an officer, a person in control, a general partner or a relative of one of those (11 U.S.C. 101(31)(B)). An arm's-length supplier is not an insider, so 90 days is the number that applies to a trade creditor.
A widely upvoted version of this doing the rounds says a company “is considered insolvent 90 days before they file”. The statute says something weaker, and the difference matters if somebody is asking you for money back. 11 U.S.C. 547(f) reads:
“For the purposes of this section, the debtor is presumed to have been insolvent on and during the 90 days immediately preceding the date of the filing of the petition.”
Three differences. It is a presumption and not a status, so it can be met with evidence. It applies “for the purposes of this section”, meaning inside a preference action and nowhere else. And it does nothing at all until a petition is actually filed. A company is not legally insolvent for the 90 days before it files. It is presumed insolvent in a lawsuit about clawing back a payment.
A preference claim is not a foregone conclusion. The exceptions live in 11 U.S.C. 547(c) and three of them do most of the work for a supplier.
The one most trade creditors rely on (11 U.S.C. 547(c)(2)). The debt has to have been incurred in the ordinary course of business between you and this customer, and then the payment has to have been either made in the ordinary course between the two of you or made according to ordinary business terms. It is written with an “or”, so it is not a single test, and a payment history that looks like every other month of that relationship is what the argument is built out of.
A payment intended as, and actually being, a substantially contemporaneous exchange for new value is outside the reach (11 U.S.C. 547(c)(1)). This is why COD and deposits are not just cashflow tools.
New value given to the company after the payment reduces the exposure (11 U.S.C. 547(c)(4)). A supplier who kept delivering has usually cut the number a long way.
In a case where the debts are not primarily consumer debts, a transfer below a threshold amount in aggregate value cannot be avoided under this section (11 U.S.C. 547(c)(9)). Which amount depends on when the case was commenced, and getting that wrong is worse than not knowing it.
Two rules do the work. 11 U.S.C. 104(a) adjusts the figure “on April 1, 1998, and at each 3-year interval ending on April 1 thereafter” (11 U.S.C. 104(a)). And 104(c) says each adjustment “shall not apply with respect to cases commenced before the date of such adjustments” (11 U.S.C. 104(c)). So the current figure is the wrong figure for an older case, and it is wrong in the direction that tells a supplier a payment is out of reach when the statute actually reaches it.
| Case commenced | 547(c)(9) floor |
|---|---|
| on or after 1 April 2025 | $8,575 |
| on or after 1 April 2022 and before 1 April 2025 | $7,575 |
| before 1 April 2022 | not published here |
We publish two tiers because two primary sources fix them, and we refuse to reconstruct the earlier ones from memory. The February 2025 Judicial Conference notice states both the new and the previous amount in its own table row (90 Fed. Reg. 8941 (Feb. 4, 2025), effective April 1, 2025; adjustment authority 11 U.S.C. 104(a)), and 104(a) fixes the dates. Earlier tiers exist and their amounts are not in front of us, so a case commenced before 1 April 2022 gets the rule and no number. The $5,000 printed inside the statute itself is the un-adjusted figure and has not been the operative amount since 2007.
Note also that the threshold is written against “the aggregate value of all property that constitutes or is affected by such transfer”, so it is not a simple total-per-creditor safe harbour.
The opening words of 547(b) were amended to require the trustee to act “based on reasonable due diligence in the circumstances of the case and taking into account a party's known or reasonably knowable affirmative defenses under subsection (c)” (11 U.S.C. 547(b)). That is an obligation on the trustee rather than a defence you assert, and it is a reason to put your ordinary-course evidence in front of them early.
While the 90-day window looks backwards at money you received, the claim deadline looks forwards at money you are still owed. In a voluntary chapter 7, 12 or 13 case a proof of claim is timely if filed “within 70 days after the order for relief” (Fed. R. Bankr. P. 3002(c)), which is the petition date in a voluntary case. An involuntary chapter 7 runs 90 days, and a governmental unit gets 180.
No page on this site prints the resulting date, and the reason is not caution. Two paragraphs of the same rule can put a trade creditor's deadline EARLIER than 70 days from the petition. If your claim arises from a judgment to recover money or property from you, which is exactly what losing a preference suit produces, it may be filed “within 30 days after the judgment becomes final” (Fed. R. Bankr. P. 3002(c)(3)). If it arises from a rejected contract or lease, it may be filed “within the time set by the court” (Fed. R. Bankr. P. 3002(c)(4)). Neither is knowable from a docket caption, so a computed date is not a floor and it would be read as one. A no-asset chapter 7 that later finds assets also triggers a fresh notice with at least 90 days (Fed. R. Bankr. P. 3002(c)(5)). The notice the court mails you carries the controlling date.
Chapter 11 has no statutory date. The judge sets the bar date (Fed. R. Bankr. P. 3003(c)(3)) and the clerk must mail creditors at least 21 days notice of it (Fed. R. Bankr. P. 2002(a)). Anyone printing a chapter 11 claim deadline computed from the petition date is inventing it, and we do not.
In chapter 11 you may also not need to file at all. If the company scheduled your claim in the right amount and did not mark it disputed, contingent or unliquidated, that entry is prima facie evidence of your claim (Fed. R. Bankr. P. 3003(b)(1) and (c)(2)). Filing anyway is cheap insurance, because the alternative is trusting the company that owes you to have written your number down correctly.
Ask them for the case number and the court. A filed case has both, and a filing date, so asking for them is a reasonable request rather than a confrontation. Bear in mind that in the first days of a case the information often sits with the company's lawyer, so a delay in answering is not itself a sign of anything.
Whether a notice reached you is worth checking. A debtor must file a list of its creditors with the petition, naming every entity that belongs on the unsecured-creditor schedule (11 U.S.C. 521(a)(1) and Fed. R. Bankr. P. 1007(a)(1)), and the clerk mails notice to everyone on that list (Fed. R. Bankr. P. 2002(a)). So if you are owed money and nothing has arrived, that is worth investigating. It is evidence of very little on its own. Creditors get left off, addresses go stale, schedules are amended later, and mail goes to a head office rather than to the person chasing the invoice.
Once you have a case number you can check it yourself for almost nothing. PACER charges $0.10 a page for a docket, capped at $3.00 per document, and bills nothing at all until you run up more than $30.00 in a quarter (Electronic Public Access Fee Schedule, effective January 1, 2020). Search carefully though: PACER charges for a name search by the page of results "even if the search displays 'no matches found'" and that charge has no cap (PACER, "How fees work").
On what a false claim of bankruptcy is worth legally, ask a lawyer. That is a real question with a real answer and it depends on facts, on your state, and on what was said to whom. This page deliberately does not name a statute for it. A page that hands a creditor something that reads like a criminal accusation to send is a page that gets its reader into trouble, whatever the small print says.
Search one company → or paste a whole customer list →. Both free, no account.