Business survival
Nearly a million Australian businesses have closed in four tears. The growth numbers are hiding it.
Nearly a million Australian businesses have closed in four tears. The growth numbers are hiding it.
Business counts are the headline figure everyone reaches for. More businesses trading looks like a healthy economy.
It isn't telling the whole story.
New research from Airteam, conducted by Primara Research using ABS business survival data, finds that of the 2,539,724 businesses trading in June 2022, 968,275, or 38.1%, had stopped trading by June 2026. Nearly a million businesses, gone in four years.
The overall count still grew. That's exactly what makes the number easy to miss.
Growth is real. So is the churn underneath it
The total business count climbed to 2,814,778 by June 2026. On its own, that reads as expansion.
- 968,275 businesses from the 2022 cohort stopped trading by 2026.
- 1.74 million new businesses started over the same period.
- Net national business count still rose, from 2,539,724 to 2,814,778.
Replace the businesses that close fast enough, and the topline number keeps climbing even while survival gets worse underneath it. The headline growth figure is concealing the trend, not describing it.
Survival is falling, and it's falling everywhere
Four-year survival for the 2022 cohort dropped to 61.9%, down from 63.1% for the cohort measured a year earlier. That alone would be worth noting. What makes it structural is where the decline shows up.
- Every industry tracked by the ABS
- Every state and territory
- Every institutional sector
- Every legal structure
Only one group in the entire dataset moved the other way: businesses with 200 or more employees. Nearly every segment of the Australian business population is getting worse at staying open, at the same time.
The worst reading in a decade of data
Zoom out to ten consecutive four-year cohorts and 61.9% isn't just a bad year. It's the floor.
Seven consecutive cohorts, covering windows ending between 2017 and 2023, held survival in a narrow band between 64.1% and 65.1%.
Survival has now fallen for four years running.
61.9% sits 2.2 points below the bottom of that decade-long band, the lowest reading on record.
A band that held steady for seven straight readings doesn't move by 2.2 points without something changing underneath it.
The stimulus years flattered the numbers. The comedown is real.
“The three cohorts covering the stimulus period recorded the highest survival rates in the entire series, and that's JobKeeper and the insolvency moratorium holding businesses up rather than a sign of underlying strength,” says Peter Drennan, Head of Research and Data at Primara Research. “Survival has since fallen not just below those inflated readings, but well below the genuine pre-pandemic baseline. The last two readings, 63.1% and 61.9%, both sit under that pre-pandemic level of 64.5%. Conditions for businesses have clearly become harder over that time.”
That's the more damning comparison. This isn't a retreat from an artificially high number. It's a retreat below where things stood before the pandemic ever hit.
What the gap actually costs
Run the counterfactual and the scale of the shortfall becomes concrete. Had survival held at the pre-pandemic average of 64.5% instead of falling to 61.9%, around 66,000 more Australian businesses would still be trading today.
Sixty-six thousand businesses is not a rounding error in an economic dataset. It's a number of closures large enough to represent employers, suppliers, and jobs that a stable pre-pandemic trend would have kept in place.
Visibility is the variable that's missing
“In our experience, the businesses falling away are often the ones running on ageing systems with limited visibility over business fundamentals like cash flow, while the ones holding steady have modern platforms that let them see problems coming and act on them early,” says Rich Atkinson, Executive Director of Airteam.
The businesses closing aren't failing for one universal reason spread across every industry, state and structure. But a common thread runs underneath the data: the ones surviving are the ones that can see trouble before it arrives. The ones that can't, don't get the chance to fix it.
About the data
Analysis for this release was completed by Primara Research for Airteam, using publicly ABS Counts of Businesses datasets from 2017 to the current dataset with data as at June 2026.
Update
News24.com.au published the article on August 22nd, it’s available here.
