A crash, a long calm, then the climb back
Liquidations topped 3,000 for three years after the global financial crisis, drifted down for a decade, hit a floor during the pandemic, and have doubled since 2021.
Companies placed in liquidation, 2005 to August 2026
Companies Office, yearly and monthly company statistics. Calendar years; 2026 is January to August only. Hover a symbol for the count.
Show the full table, with receiverships and voluntary administrations
| Year | Liquidations | Receiverships | Vol. admin. | New companies | Removed |
|---|
Receiverships, the big-company tool, peaked at 388 in 2010 and were 171 in 2025. Voluntary administration arrived in late 2007.
On a rolling count credit bureau Centrix puts the year to June 2026 at 3,073 liquidations, up 15%, alongside 52,050 company closures of every kind and 62,100 new registrations. The country keeps starting businesses faster than it loses them.
Builders bring the numbers, cafés bring the speed
Construction lost 755 firms in the year to June 2026, more than any other trade, but its trend has flattened. Hospitality lost 419 cafés, bars and restaurants, up 47% in a year.
Liquidations by sector, twelve months to June 2026
Centrix Credit Indicator, July 2026. "Weight" is a sector's share of liquidations divided by its share of all businesses: 1.0× means failing in proportion to its size.
Show every sector, with credit demand and defaults
| Sector | Liquidations | % of sector | Change | Weight | Credit demand | Defaults |
|---|
Year-on-year change on twelve-month rolling averages. Centrix reports easing in six of nineteen sectors, including agriculture, wholesale and media. Business credit defaults overall fell 13%.
Mostly one person and a laptop
Nobody publishes liquidations by staff size. But the businesses at risk are tiny: of every twenty enterprises in New Zealand, fifteen employ nobody at all.
Enterprises by people employed
Stats NZ Business Demography, February 2025, via MBIE's Small Business Factsheet. 617,334 enterprises: 74% no employees, 16% one to five, 7% six to nineteen, 3% twenty or more.
Still trading five years on
Firms born in 2020, by staff at birth. MBIE. The smaller the firm, the less likely it makes five.
Seven times out of ten, it's the tax department
The surge is not only weak demand. Inland Revenue is chasing $9.3 billion of overdue tax and, with $35 million a year of new enforcement money, has become the petitioner in most winding-up cases.
Winding-up applications by applicant, 2025
McDonald Vague, Insolvency by the Numbers #61. 1,289 applications in 2025. IR's share was 63% in 2024 and 55–60% over the five years before.
The tax bill behind it
2009 was bigger names, smaller numbers of them
Between 2006 and 2012, 67 finance companies collapsed or froze, costing up to 200,000 depositors more than $3 billion. That downturn was led from the top. This one is thousands of small companies, one at a time.