Company failures in New Zealand reached their highest level in a decade in the year to the end of September 2026, with 1072 winding up applications advertised and no sign the pace is slowing, according to figures reported by RNZ.
Keaton Pronk, an insolvency practitioner at McDonald Vague, said the nine months to September saw more winding up applications than any full year between 2017 and 2023. A winding up application is typically filed when a company cannot pay its debts and creditors ask the High Court to place it into liquidation.
Who is driving the wave of liquidations
The taxman is doing much of the pushing. Inland Revenue was responsible for 80 percent of winding up applications in September, Pronk said, a legacy of tax debt that quietly accumulated during the softer Covid-era approach to collection.
Alan McDonald, head of advocacy and strategy at the Employers and Manufacturers Association, said small businesses in particular are struggling to clear those arrears.
“The two biggest things we're hearing at the moment are that they're cutting back on memberships because times are tough, or they're going out of business,” he said.
Corporate insolvency appointments are on track for their highest annual total since the global financial crisis, with 2411 recorded to the end of September. Centrix data showed 3105 liquidations in the year to August, 14 percent higher than a year earlier.
Restructuring rarely attempted
Pronk said the pattern is not simply one of failure, but of missed opportunities to rescue viable firms.
“Despite ongoing discussion around business restructuring and rescue, New Zealand companies facing financial distress are still far more likely to end up in liquidation than attempt a formal turnaround process,” he said.
That imbalance matters for a small economy where every surviving firm anchors jobs and local supply chains. It also sits oddly with the government's stated interest in productivity reform, since liquidation destroys working relationships that took years to build.
Is this recession worse than 2009?
By some measures, no. Shamubeel Eaqub, chief economist at Simplicity, put the insolvency rate at 4.1 per 1000 registered companies, well below the 6.6 recorded in 2009.
But the composition of the failures has shifted. Court ordered liquidations reached 1047 in the year to September, up from 280 in 2022 and the most since 2009. Company formation has also slowed sharply: 61,648 companies were incorporated in the year to September against 52,168 removed, leaving net growth of 9480, the lowest since 2016.
Eaqub noted the median age of insolvent businesses was 7.2 years, compared with about six in 2019.
“It's not just newbies or Covid,” he said.
There are early hints of relief. Centrix data showed business credit defaults down 1 percent on a rolling 12 month basis, which Eaqub said could signal improvement ahead. The pattern echoes global trends: PR Newswire reported that