Somewhere in New Zealand, a café owner in Tauranga is turning off the lights for the last time today. By the time you finish reading this sentence, three more businesses will have joined them. While the Auckland Business Chamber celebrates its success in stalling government surcharge bans, 836,210 businesses closed their doors in 2025. (Source: Stats NZ, business-births-deaths)

That's not a typo. That's one business death every 38 seconds, every single day, for an entire year. It's the highest number ever recorded since Stats NZ started tracking business deaths in 2001. And it's not slowing down: it's accelerating.

Four years ago, in 2021, New Zealand saw 725,370 business deaths. That felt catastrophic at the time, coming off the back of COVID lockdowns and Delta disruptions. But 2025 makes 2021 look stable. We've added another 110,840 business deaths in just four years. That's a 15% increase in the death rate.

The trajectory tells the story. After a brief dip to 597,615 deaths in 2022, when the economy briefly looked like it might recover, the numbers climbed again: 705,996 in 2023, then 779,969 in 2024, and now 836,210 this year. Every single year since 2022 has been worse than the one before.

Think about what that means for small business owners right now. When Hicks Bay businesses say they're fearing for survival after being cut off during peak tourist season, they're not being dramatic. They're part of a wave. When trade uncertainty looms and the Trade Minister warns of ongoing volatility, these aren't abstract economic headwinds. They're death sentences for businesses already hanging on by their fingernails.

The Chamber's win on surcharges might feel like a victory for business flexibility. But it's happening against a backdrop where more than two thousand businesses are closing every single day. That's 2,290 closures daily, if you want the exact figure. That's more than 95 every hour.

This isn't about COVID anymore. This isn't about lockdowns or supply chain disruptions or Delta. This is about an economy where the survival rate for businesses is getting worse, not better, four years after we supposedly returned to normal. The business death rate in 2025 is 40% higher than it was in the pre-pandemic year of 2020, when 597,408 businesses closed.

Every one of these 836,210 closures represents someone's dream, someone's mortgage, someone's plan to hire their first employee or expand to a second location. And right now, in 2025, those dreams are dying faster than they ever have before.