Annual Enterprise Survey: 2025 Financial Year

The annual enterprise survey (AES) is New Zealand’s most comprehensive source of financial statistics covering more than 500,000 businesses. It provides annual information on the financial performance and financial position for industry groups operating in New Zealand. AES is a key source of data for Stats NZ national accounts publications.

Key facts

Provisional results for all AES industries are for the 2025 financial year, compared with the 2024 financial year.

• Total income decreased by $4.2 billion (0.4 percent) to $976 billion. A $16 billion fall in interest, dividends, and donations received contributed to this fall in total income.
• Total expenditure increased by $10 billion (1.2 percent) to $868 billion.
• Businesses earned $110 billion in surplus before income tax – down $11 billion (9.4 percent). This decrease was mainly driven by a fall in interest, dividends, and donations received, as well as a fall in non-operating income.
• Operating surplus (excludes non-operating income and expenses) decreased by $6.3 billion (5.9 percent) to $101 billion. This fall was driven by an $8.9 billion decrease in operating surplus for the financial and insurance services industries.
• Total assets increased by $117 billion (4.0 percent) to $3.1 trillion.
• Businesses made a 4 percent return on assets – unchanged from 2024.

The decrease in total surplus before income tax in 2025 was mainly driven by a fall in interest, dividends, and donations received, and a decrease in non-operating income. Non-operating income decreased by $4.3 billion (15 percent) compared with 2024.

Interest, dividends, and donations received decreased by $16 billion (14 percent) in 2025, with $14 billion of that decrease in the financial and insurance services industries. Dividends received can vary from year to year – in the 2025 financial year the financial and insurance services industries had large decreases in dividends received compared to 2024.

Mixed results across industries

Outside of the financial and insurance services industries, surplus before income tax increased by $1.3 billion (1.8 percent) to $73 billion, while operating surplus (excludes non-operating income and expenses) increased by $4.2 billion (6.3 percent) to $71 billion.

The largest changes in operating surplus between 2024 and 2025 were in:

• finance and insurance services, down $8.9 billion (22 percent)
• agriculture, forestry, and fishing, up $4.2 billion (117 percent)
• electricity, gas, water and waste services, up $1.9 billion (69 percent)
• construction, down $1.7 billion (20 percent)
• rental, hiring, and real estate services, down $1.5 billion (13 percent).

Sales up 1.9 percent in 2025

Sales, including government funding, grants, and subsidies, increased by $16 billion (1.9 percent) in 2025. This followed an increase of 2.4 percent in 2024. Sales growth has slowed in the last two years following price-led increases in 2022 and 2023. The largest industry changes in 2025 were seen in:

• construction, down $8.1 billion (7.9 percent)
• agriculture, forestry, and fishing, up $6.2 billion (12 percent)
• manufacturing, up $6.1 billion (4.9 percent), led by food manufacturing
• finance and insurance services, up $2.4 billion (8.1 percent)
• rental, hiring, and real estate services, up $2.4 billion (6.5 percent).

Residential care services and social assistance – data improvement

Data for the residential care services and social assistance industries has been improved. This was mainly due to better incorporation of data for larger retirement village operators and the reclassification of some asset types. The most notable effects of these changes are increases in values for fixed assets and other liabilities compared with previous years. The improvement was made to data for the AES 2024 and the AES 2025 years.

Size bands

Here are some key insights about income and sales size bands (available in size bands files under Download data).

• 49 percent of businesses in the 2025 AES population earned a total income between $100,000 and $1 million.
• Businesses earning over $200 million in sales contributed the largest proportion to the total operating profit of 30 percent ($30 billion), total equity of 22 percent ($230 billion), and total assets of 34.5 percent ($1.1 trillion).
• 23 percent of businesses in the 2025 AES population made an operating deficit before tax. This is the same percentage as in the 2024 AES population.
• Nearly 129,000 businesses had sales between $100,000 and $250,000 in 2025. Of these businesses, 22 percent had an operating profit before tax of between $0 and $10,000, while a further 19 percent had an operating profit of between $10,000 and $50,000.

Business performance benchmarker

Business performance benchmarker has key financial performance and benchmark statistics for business planning or comparisons of similar businesses.

Financial information for over 480 industries and financial ratio benchmarks for over 200 industries are now available.

Revisions

In the two CSV files under Download data, we revised the following series:

• 2023 and 2024 financial years, previously published as provisional.

Definitions and metadata

Annual enterprise survey 2025 – Datainfo+ gives information specific to this year’s survey, such as population, and the methodology and questionnaires used.

Annual enterprise survey – Datainfo+ gives information such as the general methodology used to produce the annual enterprise survey, how to interpret the data, data limitations, and survey definitions.

Technical enquiries

Annual national accounts team
[email protected]
04 931 4600

ISSN 1178-041X

Next release

Annual enterprise survey: 2026 financial year (provisional) will be released in July 2027.