A Wellington café near the Moa Point sewage spill watched its sales plummet as customers stayed away. It's a specific, localized disaster. But zoom out, and the business landscape across New Zealand tells a story of widespread retreat.

In 2025, New Zealand recorded 914,266 business births. That's the lowest figure in five years. (Source: Stats NZ, business-births-deaths)

To find a comparable number, you have to go back to 2020, when COVID-19 lockdowns froze the economy. But 2020 had an excuse. What's ours?

The peak was 2022, when 1,032,893 businesses started up. Since then, we've lost momentum steadily. That's 118,627 fewer business births in just three years. The equivalent of every single business in Taranaki and Gisborne combined just not starting.

This isn't about one sewage spill killing foot traffic. This is about an economy where fewer Kiwis are willing to take the risk of starting something new.

Think about what a business birth represents: someone quitting their job, someone refinancing their house, someone believing they can make something work. In 2022, over a million people made that bet. In 2025, 86,627 fewer people thought it was worth trying compared to just two years ago.

The trajectory is clear. After rebounding post-COVID in 2021 (925,089 births), we surged in 2022, then began sliding: 936,657 in 2023, 988,445 in 2024, and now 914,266 in 2025.

This drop comes as interest rates stay elevated and the Reserve Bank holds the OCR steady. Borrowing costs matter when you're trying to start a business. But so does confidence. And right now, the data suggests New Zealand is running low on both.

The sewage spill is a visible crisis: raw waste, closed beaches, customers who won't come back. The business birth decline is invisible until you look at the numbers. But it's a crisis too, just slower, quieter, and spreading across every region.

Fewer businesses starting means fewer jobs created, less competition driving innovation, less economic churn. It means the economy calcifying rather than renewing itself.

Wellington's café near Moa Point might recover when the sewage problem is fixed. But what fixes this? What makes 118,000 potential business owners decide to take the leap again?