While the Auckland Business Chamber celebrates stalling government efforts to ban surcharges, the numbers behind New Zealand's business landscape tell a quieter, more concerning story. We're creating fewer new businesses than at any point since COVID restrictions lifted.

In 2021, as the country emerged from lockdowns, 925,089 new businesses launched. The following year, that figure jumped to 1,032,893. That's the peak. That's when entrepreneurship in New Zealand hit its highest point in recent memory. (Source: Stats NZ, business-births-deaths)

Then something changed. By 2023, new business creation had dropped to 936,657. In 2024, it recovered slightly to 988,445, suggesting maybe the trend was reversing. But 2025 has delivered the reality check: just 914,266 new businesses, the lowest figure since 2021.

Break that down to daily terms and you're looking at roughly 2,500 new businesses launching every day in 2025. Compare that to 2022, when nearly 2,830 businesses were being created daily. We've lost 330 business births per day in three years.

The trajectory is unmistakable. From that 2022 high of over one million new businesses, we've shed 118,627 annual business births. That's an 11.5% decline in entrepreneurial activity in just three years.

What happened between 2022 and now? The cost-of-living crisis hit hard. Interest rates climbed from near zero to over 5%. Commercial rents didn't fall when retail foot traffic disappeared. The exact overheads that make businesses want to pass on surcharge costs to customers, those same pressures make would-be entrepreneurs think twice about starting up at all.

And while existing businesses in places like Hicks Bay fight for survival after being cut off during peak season, the bigger picture shows fewer Kiwis are willing to take the entrepreneurial risk in the first place.

The 2025 figure sits just below the 2021 number, which makes sense contextually. In 2021, we were still dealing with lockdown uncertainty and border closures. But that was supposed to be the aberration. The expectation was that business creation would stabilise or grow as the economy normalised. Instead, we've circled back to COVID-era levels without COVID-era excuses.

Every one of those 914,266 businesses represents someone who looked at the current economic environment and said yes anyway. The question is: why are fewer Kiwis saying yes than three years ago?