This paper examines the impact of the global financial crisis on firm exit and corporate deleveraging in Slovenia during 2008‒2014 using firm-level data. Firms are classified according to whether they increased their leverage, decreased their leverage or ceased operation during the specified time interval, and the likelihood of being in these three states are estimated. Deleveraging likelihood is analyzed separately for total debt, business-to-business debt, bank debt, and non-bank financial debt. The empirical exercise shows that the influence of covariates on firm exit was different from that on deleveraging, and the impact on deleveraging differed between different types of debt. © 2021 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.