Ukraine is losing business: a record number of individual entrepreneurs closed in January
17 February 10:09
An anti-record was set in January 2025: after a break of almost a month of non-working registers, 61,455 fops were closed in a few weeks in January. By comparison, only 21,358 entrepreneurs started their own business. This was reported by "Komersant Ukrainian" with reference to Opendatabot.
Despite the risks of war, foponomics has broken all records: since the registers were launched in March 2022, more fops have opened than closed every month.
However, at the end of 2024, the situation changed, probably due to the growing tax burden on entrepreneurs.
“An anti-record was set in January 2025: after a break of almost a month of non-working registers, 61,455 sole proprietorships were closed in a few weeks in January. For comparison, only 21,358 entrepreneurs started their own business,” the report says.
Entrepreneurship trends in 2022-2025
According to the Unified State Register, since the beginning of the full-scale invasion, 763,759 individual entrepreneurs have been opened in Ukraine, while 684,995 entrepreneurs have ceased operations.
Despite the general challenges, the share of women among new entrepreneurs has been increasing over the past three years. While in 2022 women accounted for 40% of registered sole proprietors, in 2025 this figure rose to 61%.
Most new businesses were opened in the capital, Dnipro and Lviv regions.
The most popular areas of activity of sole proprietorships
Most new entrepreneurs who started a business after 2022 chose the following areas:
- Retail trade – 28.1% (214.2 thousand individual entrepreneurs);
- IT sector – 9.1% (69.5 thousand individual entrepreneurs);
- Wholesale trade – 7.2% (54.6 thousand individual entrepreneurs).
Compared to the pre-war period, the number of sole proprietorships in the postal and courier services sector has tripled, 2.6 times in the education sector, and 2.5 times in the finance sector.
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The full-scale war and mobilization have significantly affected the gender distribution of entrepreneurs. While in January 2022, every second new business was started by women, now the share of such cases is 61%. It is worth noting that the largest number of women entrepreneurs among new sole proprietors is in Khmelnytsky (60.5%), Kirovohrad (60.1%), and Poltava (59.4%) regions.
Women are more likely to start businesses in the service, education, and clothing sectors, while men dominate in construction, transportation, and logistics.
| Year | 2017 | 2018 | 2019 | 2020 | 2021 | 2022 | 2023 | 2024 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Women | 93 632 | 166 763 | 162 411 | 146 315 | 145 749 | 95 140 | 174 916 | 173 365 |
| Men | 104 744 | 161 164 | 163 868 | 139 633 | 138 422 | 102 871 | 129 858 | 111 794 |
Geography of business: where there are the most and least sole proprietors
Most new sole proprietors were registered in:
- Kyiv – 108,536 entrepreneurs;
- Dnipro region – 68,377;
- Lviv region – 60,009.
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At the same time, business registration has significantly decreased in the regions close to the hostilities:
- Luhansk region – 85% decrease;
- Kherson region – decrease by 67%;
- Donetsk region – by 60%.
Instead, an increase in the number of individual entrepreneurs was recorded in Rivne (25%), Ivano-Frankivsk (10%), and Chernihiv (10%) regions.
Tax revenues and changes in dynamics
During almost three years of full-scale war, individual entrepreneurs have paid UAH 126 billion in taxes to the budget. Single tax revenues have been growing annually, with the exception of 2022.
In 2023, this amount amounted to UAH 55.1 billion, which is 1.6 times more than in 2021 (UAH 34.8 billion).
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It should be noted that in 2024, almost 210 thousand individual entrepreneurs were closed in Ukraine. This is the highest rate of closures in the last 5 years. Most of the closures were in the retail and IT sectors.
As you know, taxes for individual entrepreneurs have been raised since January 2025. on December 25, President Volodymyr Zelenskyy signed a law that, among other things, increases the military tax for employees from 1.5% to 5% and expands the range of its payers to include sole proprietors.
Also, as reported by Kommersant Ukrainsky, sole proprietorships that belong to the 1st taxation group and were opened less than 6 months ago may be subject to particularly close scrutiny by banks. The Memorandum “On Ensuring Transparency of the Banking Payment Services Market” was recently signed by Oschadbank, PrivatBank, Raiffeisen Bank, Universal Bank, and two banking associations: The Independent Association of Banks of Ukraine and the Association of Ukrainian Banks, provides for the use of new criteria to identify risky individual entrepreneurs.
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