Which coding bootcamps have closed heading into 2026 (and a lower-risk way to learn)
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The closures are real and recent, but the timeline matters: Turing School and the Lighthouse Labs/Uvaro group went under in 2025, 2U wound down its university bootcamps in December 2024, and Codeup, Kenzie Academy, and Launch Academy folded across 2023 and 2024. There is no fresh collapse happening in 2026 itself; what you are watching is a multi-year shakeout in the full-time, in-person immersive tier, not the death of the model. If you are a career changer weeks away from wiring five figures to a program, the number that should worry you is not the closure count. It is that you usually pay everything upfront, and a school that goes bankrupt owes you nothing.
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Which coding bootcamps have closed or downsized (tracker, last verified 2026-06-29)
Here is the sourced list. Every closure below verifies to a dated news report or to Course Report's year-in-review records, so you can check each one yourself rather than trusting a roundup.
| Program | What happened | When | Source |
|---|---|---|---|
| Turing School | Denver nonprofit told its 37 students and staff it would wind down and stop new enrollments | Announced April 2025; closed by June 2025 | BusinessDen (Apr 17, 2025); Course Report 2025 Year in Review |
| Lighthouse Labs (Uvaro) | Filed for bankruptcy and ceased operations immediately, leaving students mid-program | Acquired by Uvaro Jan 2025; bankruptcy Aug 1, 2025 | Vancouver Tech Journal; BetaKit (Aug 2025) |
| 2U bootcamps | Wound down its university-partnered bootcamps to pivot to microcredentials | Announced December 2024 | Higher Ed Dive; Inside Higher Ed (Dec 2024) |
| Launch Academy | Paused its Boston immersive program, citing a saturated market | May 2024 | BestColleges; Course Report 2024 Year in Review |
| Codeup | Shut down, citing tech-sector hiring freezes | Late December 2023 | BestColleges; Course Report |
| Kenzie Academy | Closed by Southern New Hampshire University, which explicitly cited AI and competition | Announced August 2023 | Inside Higher Ed; Granite Geek (Aug 24, 2023) |
| Dev Bootcamp (historical anchor) | Kaplan-owned school closed all six US campuses; the early template for this pattern | Announced July 2017 | GeekWire (July 2017) |
A few of these deserve a sentence of their own. The 2U wind-down landed only five years after the company paid about $750 million for Trilogy Education Services in 2019 (Higher Ed Dive and Inside Higher Ed, December 2024), which tells you how fast the economics turned. Kenzie Academy's closure is the one to remember, because Southern New Hampshire University did not blame the usual hiring slump alone. It named the rise of AI and increased competition directly when it announced the shutdown of the roughly 1,090-student program in August 2023 (Inside Higher Ed and Granite Geek, August 24, 2023). And Dev Bootcamp belongs in a different column entirely: Kaplan closed all six of its US campuses back in 2017 (GeekWire, July 2017), which is the historical anchor for this whole pattern, not a 2026 headline.
Not every well-known name closed. App Academy, Hack Reactor (now under Galvanize), and Tech Elevator are downsized but still operating. Hack Reactor shut its part-time program and refunded those students before going full-time only, Tech Elevator merged into Galvanize after layoffs, and App Academy cut staff but still enrolls (Class Central; Course Report). Keep those three in your mind as "smaller, still running," not as casualties.
Why coding bootcamps are closing
The closures trace to a demand shock landing on an oversupplied premium tier, and the timing lines up with the schools' own stated reasons. When the easy junior-developer job dried up, the programs whose entire pitch was a fast outcome lost the thing they were selling.
The hiring side of that is measurable. Software-development job postings on Indeed were down about 36% from their pre-pandemic (February 2020) level as of October 2025, and an earlier-2025 Indeed Hiring Lab reading put postings under the "software engineer" title down roughly 49% versus early 2020. A bootcamp that promised a developer job in six months had built its model on a market that, for entry-level roles, contracted hard. Codeup said as much when it cited tech-sector hiring freezes on its way out in late 2023, and Launch Academy pointed to a saturated market and a weaker value proposition when it paused in May 2024.
The federal funding that might have steadied the model arrives too late to have saved any of them. Workforce Pell was signed into law on July 4, 2025, but the Department of Education only published the final rule on May 19, 2026, and the program does not take effect until July 1, 2026 (U.S. Department of Education final rule, May 2026). The eligibility window is narrow on purpose. A program has to run 150 to 599 clock hours and take at least 8 but fewer than 15 weeks, be offered by a Title IV-eligible (generally accredited) institution, and clear new completion and earnings thresholds. That combination excludes most full-time immersive bootcamps and helps no learner enrolling today.
Are coding bootcamps dying, or just consolidating?
Consolidating, and partly through a healthy shakeout rather than a death spiral. The full-time, in-person immersive tier is shrinking while the broader category keeps growing, and those two facts only sound contradictory if you treat "bootcamp" as one thing.
Course Report's directory lists more than 600 bootcamp-style programs as of 2026, and it is still growing. Of those 600-plus, only about 100 are full-time, in-person immersive coding bootcamps in the US and Canada, and that is exactly the segment where the closures concentrated (Course Report, 2026). So this is not a dwindling industry at all. What is actually happening is online, university-affiliated, and international bootcamp-style programs proliferating while the expensive full-time immersive format thins out.
The money tells the same story. Research and Markets puts the global coding-bootcamp market, on a broad bootcamp-style definition, at roughly $2.65 billion in 2024, rising toward $3.28 billion in 2025, while Course Report's narrower US figure is about $350 million in annual tuition across roughly 25,000 graduates. Revenue going up while a premium tier consolidates is what a correcting market looks like. My read is that a lot of the schools that folded were the weakest ones, selling a job guarantee they could not honor once the entry-level door narrowed. The market clearing those out is not the same as the market collapsing.
The risk nobody prices in: paying upfront for a program that might close mid-cohort
Here is the structural problem that no comparison chart of curricula will show you: with most bootcamps you pay a large sum upfront, or you sign an income-share agreement or loan, before the school has taught you anything. If that school becomes insolvent halfway through your cohort, you are an unsecured creditor of a failed business. You do not get to the front of the line, and you do not get your seat back.
Lighthouse Labs is the example that makes this concrete. Uvaro acquired Lighthouse Labs in January 2025, and on August 1, 2025 both companies filed for bankruptcy and ceased operations immediately, halting classes and mentoring and leaving students mid-program (Vancouver Tech Journal and BetaKit, August 2025). Students who had paid upfront lost access overnight, about seven months after the acquisition. There was no warning that let them finish, and a refund from a company in bankruptcy is a claim, not a check.
The guarantees that are supposed to protect you are weaker than they look even when the school is solvent. Springboard reports that of its Software Engineering Career Track students from 2020 to 2022, only about 1.2% received a job-guarantee tuition refund, which it attributes to roughly 95.8% reportedly finding work (Springboard outcomes, via Course Report). Those are Springboard's own self-reported figures, and the guarantee carries strict eligibility conditions, so read them as the company's account rather than an audited one. The point stands either way: a money-back guarantee rarely pays out when the school is healthy, and it pays out never when the school is gone.
I want to be fair here, because the easy version of this argument is dishonest. Bootcamps are not a scam. Plenty of people changed careers through one and would do it again, and the strong programs delivered real outcomes for years. What went wrong was never fraud. The upfront-payment model loads solvency risk onto the learner at the worst possible moment, usually right after they have quit a job to commit to the change.
When a bootcamp still makes sense in 2026
A bootcamp can absolutely be the right call, and the destination job is still real. BLS projects employment of software developers, QA analysts, and testers to grow 15% from 2024 to 2034, much faster than average, with about 129,200 openings per year and a 2024 median wage of $133,080 for software developers specifically (BLS Occupational Outlook Handbook). The separate computer-programmers line is projected to decline, but the developer track that bootcamps aim at is growing. The question is never "is the job worth having," it is "is this route's risk priced fairly for you."
A bootcamp earns its premium when a few things are true at once. You need an external deadline and live cohort accountability to stay consistent, and you know that about yourself. The program defers payment until you are employed, or uses an income-based plan, so the solvency risk sits with the school instead of you. And the school is established, with a multi-year track record and outcomes you can actually verify rather than a freshly minted guarantee. When those line up, paying for structure is reasonable. When they do not, you are buying risk you could have avoided.
The lower-risk way to learn the same skills
The lower-risk route is simple: pay as you go for the same curriculum instead of committing five figures before your first lesson. The skills a frontend or full-stack bootcamp teaches, HTML and CSS, JavaScript, React, a backend, and a portfolio of shipped projects, are the same skills you can learn month to month, and the month-to-month structure is what removes the risk that sank the students at Lighthouse Labs.
Start free, on purpose. The sensible first move is to confirm a learning format actually works for you before any money changes hands, and interactive courses you can begin today let you do that. From there, a low monthly subscription means the worst case is that you pause or change direction and stop paying. There is no lump sum to lose and no cohort to be stranded in if a school files for bankruptcy. That is the whole argument: the thing that made bootcamps dangerous in 2025 was the upfront commitment, and a subscription does not have one.
Scrimba's interactive courses include free ones you can start right now, and if the edit-the-code format clicks, Scrimba Pro is a low monthly subscription (see current Scrimba pricing) with 20% off through our link. For a side-by-side of how that subscription stacks up against bootcamp tuition and income-share agreements, our Scrimba vs bootcamps breakdown runs the comparison in detail.
Start Scrimba Pro with 20% off (opens in a new tab)How to decide in 5 minutes
Run one test before you sign anything: would you be paying upfront, and can you independently verify the outcomes? If a bootcamp defers payment until you are employed, has audited outcomes spanning several years, and you genuinely need the deadline to stay on track, the premium can be worth it. If you would be handing five figures to a school whose results you cannot check, and the only safety net is a guarantee from a company that could fold, start with a low-cost subscription and a portfolio instead.
Do the arithmetic rather than guessing at it. Our Scrimba vs bootcamps cost write-up and the bootcamp cost calculator let you plug in a real tuition figure and compare it against a year of a subscription plus the projects you would build anyway. If you want the wider set of options, I keep a list of coding bootcamp alternatives, and the honest take on whether the entry door is even open lives in the junior developer job market in 2026. For the human side of the decision, career change to coding and how to get your first developer job cover what actually moves a hire, and is Scrimba worth it is my unsentimental answer on the tool I recommend here.
So here is the concrete next step. Before you put down a deposit this week, open the cost calculator, enter the bootcamp's tuition, and compare it against twelve months of a low monthly subscription and a portfolio. If the bootcamp wins on structure and shifts the risk off you, pay for it with clear eyes. If it does not, you just saved yourself from being an unsecured creditor.
Frequently asked questions
Which coding bootcamps closed in 2025? Two notable closures happened in 2025. Turing School, the Denver nonprofit, told its 37 students and staff in April 2025 that it would wind down by June and stop new enrollments. Lighthouse Labs and its parent company Uvaro both filed for bankruptcy on August 1, 2025 and ceased operations immediately, leaving students mid-program.
What happened to Turing School? Turing School, a Denver nonprofit bootcamp, announced in April 2025 that it would wind down between April and June 2025 and stop accepting new students, after a long period of financial struggle. This was reported by BusinessDen on April 17, 2025 and recorded in Course Report's 2025 Year in Review.
Are coding bootcamps dying in 2026? No, they are consolidating rather than dying. The closures cluster in 2023 to 2025 and concentrate in the full-time, in-person immersive tier, where Course Report counts only about 100 programs in the US and Canada. Its wider directory of more than 600 bootcamp-style programs is still growing, and global market revenue rose across 2024 and 2025.
Is it safe to pay a coding bootcamp upfront? Paying a large sum upfront concentrates the risk on you. If the school becomes insolvent mid-cohort, as Lighthouse Labs did in August 2025, you are an unsecured creditor and a job guarantee from a bankrupt company is worth nothing. Prefer deferred payment, income-based plans, or low monthly options you can stop if the program stalls.
Does Workforce Pell make bootcamps affordable in 2026? Not for current learners. Workforce Pell was signed on July 4, 2025, but the final rule was published on May 19, 2026 and the program only takes effect July 1, 2026. Eligibility is narrow (150 to 599 clock hours and at least 8 but fewer than 15 weeks at a Title IV-eligible institution), which excludes most full-time immersive bootcamps.
What is a lower-risk way to learn to code than a bootcamp? Pay as you go for the same curriculum instead of committing five figures before the first lesson. Free courses let you confirm the format works for you, and a low monthly subscription means you stop paying if you pause or change direction, so no school can strand you mid-cohort.