Last year 153 thousand companies were discontinued, the highest number since the Central Bureau of Statistics (CBS) that keeps track of figures in this way. That reports The office Tuesday. That means that in 2024 6 percent of companies stopped.
Corrected for the total number of companies, a little more stopped in 2022: that year the so -called “lifting ratio” was 6.1 percent. But the number of companies has been increasing for years, CBS researcher Marjolijn Jaarsma explains when asked. “As a result, we see an increase in the number of stopped companies in an absolute sense.”
Statistics Netherlands sees a company as ‘lifted’ when it plays out from the Chamber of Commerce (Chamber of Commerce), or if it is still registered, but no longer has a turnover.
Flexibilisation
The vast majority of companies voluntarily stopped last year: only in 1.3 percent of the 153 thousand cases were this bankruptcy. That is a lot lower than, for example, in 2015. That year, the share of bankruptcies at the stopped companies was 3.4 percent.
Also a record: 9 out of 10 companies that stopped in 2024 was a sole proprietorship. That was 83 percent in 2015, and in 2008 only 75 percent, according to the CBS. According to Jaarsma, this development has to do with the flexibilisation of the labor market: “You can see that there are more and more self -employed people at the established companies. Then it makes sense that there are also more sole traders with the cancellations. “
That is also apparent from figures from Statistics Netherlands. Not only does the number of sole traders are growing fast, they also make up an increasing proportion of the total. In 2007, the more than 600,000 sole traders in the Netherlands formed 62 percent of all companies. There are now almost 2 million one -man businesses, 82 percent of the total.
False self -employed
However, that may change. According to an estimate by ABN AMRO, around 250,000 self -employed people work as a false self -employed: that means that they are freelancer on paper, but in practice do the same work as employees employed.
Such constructions were already forbidden, but from January 1, 2026, the Tax and Customs Administration will actually impose fines for it. In response, many companies choose to stop using freelancers and hiring more people, it was previously apparent from a tour of this newspaper.
However, Statistics Netherlands cannot say whether the (threat of) enforcement makes more freelancers stop their sole proprietorship, according to Jaarsma. “We don’t ask entrepreneurs why they stopped their business. For the time being we are not seeing a sharp increase in the number of one -man companies with it. ”
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