Progressive changes in many areas of the business environment and internal processes in business entities are increasingly the cause of crises occurring in them, in extreme cases resulting in the need to declare bankruptcy. Bankruptcies can be considered, on the one hand, as a manifestation of maladaptation to the requirements and transformations of the market, but more and more often they become a derivative of phenomena over which entrepreneurs have absolutely no influence. The paper attempts to analyze the scale of business bankruptcies in Poland in 2009-2021, which was based on data from the Central Statistical Office and the Central Economic Information Center. Exploratory research was carried out on a time sample of 12,960 entities for the years 2009-2021, which declared bankruptcy in the analyzed period and represented all enterprises of the Polish market from the time period adopted for the research. The analyzed sample took into account the number of bankruptcies of enterprises falling on particular years. The purpose of the article is to analyze the scale of the bankruptcy phenomenon in Poland over the period 2009-2021 and to try to identify the existing dependencies.