The number of new sole proprietors in Ukraine has increased: what areas do they choose
31 December 13:40
At the end of 2025, small businesses in Ukraine experienced some revival: for the first time in recent years, the number of newly registered individual entrepreneurs exceeded the number of those who ceased operations in the fourth quarter. This is reported by "Komersant Ukrainian" with reference to YouControl.
In October-December 2025, approximately 58.2 thousand new individual entrepreneurs appeared in Ukraine. This is one of the highest quarterly figures in recent years. At the same time, 50.5 thousand stopped working. Thus, the growth of new entrepreneurs is 40% – 7-8 thousand entrepreneurs.
Compared to the fourth quarter of 2024, there were 18% fewer business closures, while at the end of 2024, there were almost 150 closed businesses for every 100 new ones. Now there are about 87.
The most active entrepreneurs registered in retail – 16.5 thousand, almost a third of all new businesses in the quarter. This is followed by IT (7.7 thousand) and other services (6.9 thousand).
Transportation and logistics and educational services showed the fastest growth, up 60-70% over the year, which may indicate increased demand for transportation, couriers, and educational services.
At the same time, IT remains an exception: despite the large number of new individual entrepreneurs, more businesses closed than opened in the industry during the quarter.
Regional distribution
According to analysts, the city of Kyiv remains the leader in the number of registered sole proprietorships (almost 8 thousand registrations in Q4 2025). This is 20% more than in the same period in 2024 (6.6 thousand).
Dnipropetrovs’k region is in second place with 5.8 thousand registrations (46% year-on-year). The third position is held by Lviv region (about 4.8 thousand sole proprietorships, 43%). This is followed by Kyiv region (4.4 thousand registrations, 32%), Kharkiv region (4 thousand, 41%) and Odesa region (4.2 thousand, 52%).
In total, these six regions accounted for more than 53% of all new sole proprietorship registrations in Ukraine during the quarter, meaning that more than one in two entrepreneurs registered in one of these economic centers.
