A café owner in Taranaki closes the doors for the last time, staff paid out, lease terminated, dreams shelved. A building firm in Christchurch winds down after 15 years. A retail store in Wellington that survived COVID can't survive what came after.

In 2025, 836,210 New Zealand businesses officially died (Source: Stats NZ, business-births-deaths). That's 2,290 closures every single week. It's the highest number in 24 years of records — and it's not even close. The previous peak was 779,969 in 2024. We've blown past that by 56,000.

This isn't an abstract economic indicator. These numbers are showing up in your news feed right now. KiwiSaver providers are reporting a spike in hardship applications (as reported by RNZ, February 2026) — people raiding their retirement savings because the business failed, because the income dried up, because there's no other option left.

Look at the trajectory. In 2021, business deaths sat at 725,370. Then came the post-COVID hangover: costs surged, customers tightened budgets, commercial rents kept climbing. By 2022, deaths had actually dropped to 597,615 — a brief, false reprieve. Then reality hit. 2023: back up to 705,996. 2024: 779,969. And now 2025: 836,210.

That's a 40% increase in business closures in just three years. For context, we're now closing businesses at nearly the same rate we were during the Global Financial Crisis — except this time, there's no single shock event to blame. This is a slow grind.

Every one of those 836,210 closures represents someone who borrowed against their house, convinced their family to invest, worked 70-hour weeks. Most small business owners don't have KiwiSaver balances to raid — they sank everything into the business itself. When it dies, so does their retirement plan.

Here's what makes this number even grimmer: these are official closures. Companies House records, IRD deregistrations, formal wind-downs. The actual number of businesses that simply stopped trading — shut the website, stopped answering the phone, walked away — is certainly higher. These 836,000 are just the ones that went through the paperwork.

The café owner, the builder, the retailer — they're not asking for sympathy. They took the risk. But when more than 2,000 businesses close every week, that's not just individual failure. That's an economy under serious strain. And it's showing up in every hardship withdrawal, every second mortgage, every retirement plan that just evaporated.