Reading the register
I pulled every company on the NZ Companies Office register, all 1.8 million records, and built a dashboard to explore them. Here is what the data says about how New Zealand's companies have changed since 2000.
Still growing, at half the pace
There were about 242,000 live companies at the end of 2000 and there are roughly 750,000 now. The count has gone up in almost every year.
The clear exception is after the GFC. From 2010 to 2014 the total sat at around 550,000 to 560,000, and in 2011 and 2013 more companies closed than opened.
The more recent slowdown is easier to miss, because the total keeps rising. Net growth was 28,000 in 2020 and 26,800 in 2021, then between 6,700 and 14,800 a year from 2022 to 2025. That's roughly half the earlier pace.
Closures up 64% since 2020
Removals from the register have gone up every year since 2020, from 30,600 to 50,100 in 2025. That's just short of 2016 (50,300) and still under the 2013 peak of 54,500.
Openings have held up too, at 60,900 in 2025, which is why the total keeps creeping up. What has changed is the churn: more companies starting and more stopping each year.
A removal isn't always a failure. Plenty are owners winding up a company they no longer need, or the Companies Office striking off ones that stopped filing. Insolvencies (section 07) are the better read on business stress.
The biggest sector is property
Rental, Hiring and Real Estate Services is the largest sector by industry code, with 95,500 live companies. That's 16% of every company with a code.
Very little of it is real estate agents. Most of it is property held in a company: 23,314 in residential property investment, 22,165 renting residential property and 21,262 investing in or renting commercial property. Together that's about 70% of the sector.
About one in five live companies (162,000) has no industry code. They average 21.6 years old, against about 8 for companies with a code, so the sector figures mostly describe companies registered in the last decade or two.
Three of the top five lean on property
The top five sectors are Rental, Hiring and Real Estate, then Professional, Scientific and Technical, then Construction, then Financial and Insurance, then Retail. Three of those rise and fall with the property market.
Financial and Insurance makes the same point. More than half of it, 40,900 companies, is "trustee service": mostly corporate trustees for family trusts, which often hold property. Another 7,100 are passive holding companies.
Manufacturing is ninth of nineteen sectors, with 24,800 companies. These are counts of companies, not their size, so a sector with fewer, larger employers looks smaller here than it is.
Canterbury, just in front
Auckland has 44% of all live companies and leads on nearly every raw count. Measured as new companies against the number already live, though, Canterbury comes out top: 8.9% of its live companies opened in the last 12 months, against 8.7% for Auckland.
It's close. Over 2022 to 2026 Auckland is fractionally ahead (32.8% against 32.6%). At the other end, Marlborough is lowest at 5.6%.
What the sector map shows
- Southland is the farm. 25% of Southland's companies with a code are in agriculture, forestry and fishing. That's the biggest share any single sector has in any region.
- Agriculture barely registers in the cities. It's 2.0% of companies in Wellington and 1.2% in Auckland, against 13.5% to 15.6% in Gisborne, Marlborough and the West Coast.
- No manufacturing district. Manufacturing sits between 3.6% (Wellington) and 7.7% (Marlborough) in every region. Auckland has 39% of all manufacturing companies, a little under its 44% share of companies overall.
- Finance follows the advisers. Financial and insurance companies are 3.8% of companies on the West Coast and 4.4% in Gisborne, with Southland (5.7%) and Marlborough (7.5%) also low. Taranaki is highest at 15.7%. Most of these are trustee companies, which are often registered at a lawyer's or accountant's office, so the count likely tracks where those firms are rather than where the money is.
Region is where the registered office is, which for a lot of small companies means their accountant.
The most since 2010, and still climbing
2025 had 3,117 insolvencies (liquidations, receiverships and voluntary administrations), the most since 2010's 3,415. They were low through COVID, about 1,500 a year in 2020 and 2021, and have gone up every year since.
2026 is running ahead of 2025. Comparing the same months, January to September 2026 had 2,381 insolvencies against 2,161 a year earlier, about 10% more. If the last quarter follows recent years, 2026 will finish somewhere around 3,200 to 3,450, and the top of that range would pass 2010.