Picture a Christchurch couple launching a mobile coffee cart in February. A Tauranga web designer going solo in May. A Queenstown couple opening a boutique accommodation in September. Every 10 minutes, all year long, someone in New Zealand filed the paperwork to start a business.

That's 914,266 new business births in 2025 (Source: Stats NZ, business-births-deaths). On the same day Contact Energy announced its profit jumped 44 percent and tourist arrivals topped 3.5 million for the first time since COVID, this number quietly told a different story: fewer Kiwis are taking the leap.

It's the lowest count in five years. You have to go back to 2020 — the year we locked down — to find anything comparable. In 2022, at the peak, 1,032,893 businesses started. That's 118,627 more than last year. The equivalent of an entire city's worth of entrepreneurship just... not happening.

The drop isn't a blip. It's a trend. After the post-lockdown surge when everyone with a redundancy payout or a WhatsApp side hustle formalised their operation, the numbers have been sliding. From 1.03 million in 2022, to 988,445 in 2024, to 914,266 now.

Here's what makes this figure sting: those tourism and energy profit numbers suggest the economy is roaring back. Tourists are spending. Big companies are banking record returns. But the pipeline of new small businesses — the cafe that employs three locals, the landscaping crew that hires apprentices, the consultancy run from a spare bedroom — is thinning out.

Starting a business has always been a gamble. But right now, the math is brutal. Commercial rents are up. Business lending is tighter. The cost of everything from insurance to compliance has climbed. And if you're thinking about leaving your job to go solo, you're staring at the highest mortgage rates in a decade.

The 914,266 who did start businesses last year? They're competing in an economy where the winners — Contact Energy, the big tourism operators — are doing extremely well, while the marginal player faces costs that didn't exist five years ago.

New business creation isn't just a feel-good stat. It's how economies stay dynamic. It's how workers who get made redundant from a dying industry find a path forward. It's how small towns get a new cafe when the old one closes. When that number drops for three straight years, you're watching the economy's capacity for renewal shrink in real time.

Every 10 minutes, someone still takes the leap. But far fewer than before. And in an economy where the big players are thriving, that gap tells you who's really winning right now.