While the Auckland Business Chamber celebrates what it sees as a win on surcharges, here's what nobody's talking about: New Zealand is haemorrhaging businesses at the fastest rate since the pandemic.

The country ended 2025 with 15.5 million business units, down from 15.8 million in 2024. That's a drop of 251,516 units in a single year. (Source: Stats NZ, business-units-by-area)

To put that in human terms: 690 business units disappeared every single day last year. While you slept, had breakfast, went to work, came home, and went to bed again, New Zealand lost another 690 pieces of economic activity.

This isn't a blip. After three years of steady growth from 2021 to 2024, the trajectory reversed hard. We added business units every year through COVID, through the cost-of-living crisis, through the inflation spike. Then 2025 hit and the graph turned sharply downward.

The timing matters. These closures happened while businesses were fighting multiple battles: rising costs, falling consumer spending, and interest rates that only started dropping in the second half of the year. By the time the Reserve Bank moved, thousands of businesses had already made their exit decision.

Some of these closures were inevitable. Some were probably good ideas. But a quarter of a million in one year isn't normal churn. That's a contraction.

Consider what's happening in places like Hicks Bay, where tourism operators are fighting for survival after being cut off during peak season. They're not just battling road closures. They're operating in an economy where business failures are becoming the norm, not the exception.

The scale of this decline shows up starkly when you compare it to previous years. From 2021 to 2022, we added 545,007 business units. From 2022 to 2023, another 415,516. From 2023 to 2024, we added 236,939. Then 2025 arrived and we lost 251,516.

That's a swing of nearly half a million units in two years.

And while lobby groups debate surcharge policies and ministers manage tariff uncertainty, the underlying story is straightforward: New Zealand's business ecosystem shrank in 2025. Not by a little. By the most it has in years.

The question isn't whether this matters. It's whether anyone with the power to change it is paying attention to the right numbers.