Court fines, traffic tickets, and restitution in bankruptcy
Mostly survivors. Criminal fines, restitution, and penalties payable to the government don't discharge in Chapter 7, and criminal restitution survives Chapter 13 too. But the map has real openings: some civil and older government penalties can discharge in Chapter 13, parking and traffic fines vary by how your jurisdiction classifies them, and bankruptcy can still stop license suspensions over unpaid *judgments* and clear the debts around the fines so they're payable.
In this answer
What survives, where
Chapter 7: fines, penalties, and forfeitures payable to a governmental unit, criminal fines, criminal restitution, most court-imposed penalties, ride through untouched. Chapter 13’s discharge is slightly broader on paper (criminal restitution and criminal fines are expressly excluded, while some civil penalties and older tax penalties that would survive a 7 can discharge in a 13), which occasionally makes the chapter choice matter for someone whose debt pile is penalty-heavy. Two categories that follow their own articles: DUI injury debts survive everything, and support-related court obligations live under the support rules.
The classification quirks
“Is a parking ticket a fine?” turns out to be a real legal question with jurisdiction-specific answers: penalties owed to private parties (a red-light-camera contractor, some toll operators) and charges structured as compensation rather than punishment sit closer to ordinary debt, and outcomes vary by how your state writes its statutes. Municipal court debt is a live enough issue that this is genuinely worth an attorney’s local knowledge rather than a national generalization: bring the actual tickets.
Licenses, the practical stakes
Split the suspension by its cause. Suspended for an unpaid civil judgment (the uninsured accident you couldn’t pay for): bankruptcy is the classic fix, the debt discharges, and federal law then bars the state from keeping your license hostage over it. Suspended for unpaid criminal fines or child support: the debt survives, and the suspension usually rides with it; the path there is payment plans with the court, not discharge. A meaningful share of “I need my license back” consultations are the first kind wearing the costume of the second, so have the suspension notice decoded before assuming the worst.
What bankruptcy still does when the fine survives
The triage logic from the support article applies with full force: discharge the cards, medical debt, and payday loans, and the fine or restitution that survives becomes an obligation your income can actually meet, often through the court’s own payment plan, sometimes structured inside a Chapter 13 where the stay holds enforcement pressure at bay while you pay. Surviving a bankruptcy is not the same as being unaffected by one.
The bottom line
If punishment-debt is part of your pile, sort it precisely: what’s criminal versus civil, owed to the government versus a private party, punishment versus compensation, because the dischargeability answer lives in those distinctions, and so does the strategy when the answer is no.
Sources
This is general information, not legal advice. The right answer for you depends on details a website cannot see, and rules vary by state and by court.
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