While the Auckland Business Chamber celebrates the government's stalled efforts to ban surcharges, New Zealand's workforce just experienced something that hasn't happened since the pandemic: it shrank.

The country lost 1,075,525 employee positions between 2024 and 2025. That's the first year-on-year decline since 2021, when the entire economy was being turned on and off by lockdowns. (Source: Stats NZ, business-units-by-area)

Here's the tension: businesses are fighting to protect their right to add fees to your transactions at the exact moment they're shedding jobs at a rate we haven't seen in peacetime.

The trajectory tells the story. From 2021 to 2024, New Zealand added nearly four million employee positions. The count climbed steadily: 46.3 million in 2021, then 47.9 million, then 49.3 million, peaking at 50.1 million in 2024. Every year, more jobs. Every year, growth.

Then 2025 arrived and the number dropped to 49 million. Not a slowdown. An actual reversal.

This isn't about small businesses struggling to survive, like the operators in Hicks Bay cut off by road closures. This is economy-wide. Over a million positions vanished while business lobby groups spent their energy defending surcharges rather than addressing why their sector is contracting.

The timing matters. The surcharge debate centres on businesses claiming they need to pass on payment processing costs to stay viable. Fair enough. But if viability was the real concern, you'd expect those same groups to be raising alarms about a 2.1% drop in the national employee count. Instead, the Auckland Business Chamber's big win this week was keeping those fees in place.

You can't have it both ways. You can't argue that 50-cent surcharges are essential for business survival while presiding over the loss of a million jobs and staying quiet about it.

The data doesn't explain why this happened. It could be automation. It could be businesses closing. It could be a shift to contractors who don't show up in employee counts. Or it could be the first signal of something bigger: an economy that grew throughout the recovery but has now peaked and started to slide.

What we know for certain is this: the business lobby just won a battle over fees. Meanwhile, the war over jobs is being lost, and nobody's talking about it.