Contact Energy just announced a 44% profit jump to $205 million, and tourist arrivals just topped 3.5 million for the first time since COVID. The economic recovery story sounds great — until you look at what's happening to the businesses actually trying to operate in this economy.

In 2025, 836,210 businesses died. That's not closed, pivoted, or restructured. Died. Gone from the register. (Source: Stats NZ, business-births-deaths)

It's the highest number ever recorded in the 24 years Stats NZ has tracked this data. And it's not even close.

Let's walk back through how we got here. In 2001, when this dataset begins, 456,387 businesses died. For most of the 2000s, that number hovered in the low-to-mid 500,000s. Nothing dramatic. The churn you'd expect in a functioning economy.

Then 2020 hit. COVID slammed the economy, and business deaths spiked to 699,618 — the highest on record at that point. By 2021, with lockdowns and wage subsidies still in play, deaths climbed further to 725,370.

Here's where it gets strange. In 2022 — the year we were supposed to be bouncing back — business deaths actually dropped to 597,615. The lowest figure since 2015. For a brief moment, it looked like maybe we'd weathered the storm.

We hadn't. 2023: 705,996 deaths. 2024: 779,969. And now 2025: 836,210.

That's a 40% increase in just three years. From the apparent recovery low of 2022 to today, nearly a quarter of a million more businesses are dying each year.

What changed? The wage subsidies ended. Inflation hit. Interest rates went from near-zero to over 5%. The cost of doing business — rent, power, wages, supplies — all climbed faster than most businesses could raise prices. And crucially, consumer spending tightened. Kiwis started cutting back.

So yes, tourists are coming back. Yes, some big companies are posting record profits. But for hundreds of thousands of small businesses — cafes, tradies, retailers, consultancies — 2025 has been a year of just trying to survive. And for 836,210 of them, that survival didn't happen.

This isn't a temporary blip. This is the steepest, most sustained rise in business mortality New Zealand has seen in a generation. And it's happening right now, while the headline numbers tell a very different story.