Told you make too much for Chapter 7? Check again.

A few years back, a Largo warehouse manager sat across from me and repeated what another office had told him: "You make too much for Chapter 7." He'd taken it as final — the way you take a diagnosis. He spent the next two years juggling minimum payments on $41,000 of cards instead.

Here's the thing: that number isn't carved anywhere. It moves. It moved up on April 1, 2026 — and as of this week, the other half of the math moved too.

Chapter 7 eligibility starts with something called the means test. Step one is simple: compare your household's gross income over the last six months to the median income for a household your size in Florida. Under the median, you generally pass. That's it — no judgment call, no lawyer's trick.

As of April 1, 2026, the Florida medians are about $69,876 for a single filer and about $123,681 for a family of four. If you were told "no" in 2023 or 2024, you were measured against smaller numbers. Different year, different answer.

Above-median income is where the means test starts, not where it ends. Step two subtracts real-life expenses — mortgage or rent, cars, taxes, health insurance, childcare — before deciding anything. Plenty of people who "make too much" on paper still qualify once the math reflects their actual life. And if Chapter 7 truly isn't the fit, Chapter 13 restructures the debt into one court-protected payment over three to five years. Bankruptcy is one tool, not a verdict — and there's more than one tool in the box.

The second half of the means test runs on the IRS's cost-of-living standards — set allowances for food, clothing, housing and utilities (down to the county level, so Pinellas and Hillsborough get their own numbers), transportation, and out-of-pocket health care. The IRS refreshed those standards effective June 29, 2026, and for bankruptcy cases the U.S. Trustee Program applies the new numbers to filings on or after July 15, 2026. For a sense of scale: the national food-and-clothing allowance alone is now $594 a month for one person and $1,527 for a family of four — before housing, transportation, or health care are counted.

Why that matters: these allowances are deductions. When the cost of living rises, the standards rise with it — and every dollar the standards allow is a dollar of income the means test doesn't count against you. If your last "you don't qualify" came from math run on older numbers, both halves of that math have changed this year.

Our home court — the Middle District of Florida, covering Tampa Bay — is now the second-busiest bankruptcy district in the entire country, with filings roughly doubled since 2022. That's not a statistic about "other people." It's teachers, retirees squeezed by insurance premiums, one-income families in Pinellas and Hillsborough making a calm, legal decision to stop the bleeding. In my 13+ years doing this, I've watched more than 4,000 Florida clients make that call — and the ones who regret it usually regret only the waiting.

If a past "you don't qualify" is the reason you're still treading water, that answer has an expiration date — and it has expired twice this year already: once on April 1 when the income medians rose, and again on July 15 when the IRS expense allowances reset. The math takes one conversation to run. Good people fall behind. Smart people re-check the numbers.

Bring us your last six months of income and we'll run the means test with you, walk through what Chapter 7 or Chapter 13 would really look like, and tell you straight if neither one is the right move. That's the whole point of a Free Debt Freedom Strategy Session.

Wondering if the new numbers change your answer? Call (727) 761-5894 for a Free Debt Freedom Strategy Session.

P.S. — The six-month lookback means timing matters: a recent layoff, retirement, or drop in hours can change your means-test math right now, even if last year's income was high. If your income just went down, that's exactly the moment to run the numbers — send us your situation and we'll tell you what we see.