Ukraine’s business ledger, wartime edition

Ukraine’s registry of individual entrepreneurs grew by just 0.39% in 2025 — its weakest calendar-year growth since 2022’s invasion-year stall, and a sharp deceleration from over 5% growth in 2023 and 3.5% in 2024. Yet the first half of 2026 reversed that slide: a net 39,214 more sole proprietors — Ukraine calls them FOPs — opened than closed between January and June, against a net loss of 20,048 over the same months in 2025. The swing was not built by a wave of new founders: openings rose only 2.8%, from 137,557 to 141,472. It was built by fewer people quitting — closures fell 36%, from 157,605 to 102,258. Four years into the war, Ukraine’s business registry still tells two stories at once: individual entrepreneurship has essentially clawed back to its pre-war rhythm, while company formation and three front-line regions have not.

A closures slowdown, not a founding boom

The reversal is visible almost entirely in the churn, not in enthusiasm. Openings barely moved between the two half-years, but closures cratered. Much of the 2025 spike traces to a single policy shock: Kyiv reinstated pre-war unified social contribution rules for dormant FOPs at the start of that year, which pushed closures to 119,895 in the first quarter alone, before easing to 51,830 by the second quarter — 27% below the equivalent 2024 quarter. The overall FOP count kept compounding regardless: the register held 2,181,217 active entrepreneurs in January 2026, about 6,000 more than at the end of 2025 and 194,000 more than when the invasion began, even as the annual growth rate cooled from over 5% in 2023 to 3.5% in 2024 and 0.39% in 2025 — a slower pace than every year of the war except 2022 itself, when the registry grew barely 0.1% amid the initial invasion shock.

Sole traders recovered pace; companies did not

Weekly averages make the pre-war comparison cleanest. In 2021, Ukraine registered an average of 5,676 new FOPs and 1,077 new companies every week. The invasion’s first year cut both: FOP openings fell 28%, company openings fell 40%, and in the first week the registries reopened after the initial shutdown, only 3,565 new FOPs were filed. Recovery came in bursts — by autumn 2023, a single week logged 12,534 new FOPs, the highest weekly count in the data reviewed here. By 2025 the weekly average had settled at 5,579 FOPs, 98% of the 2021 baseline, but only 717 new companies, a third below where the country stood before the war. Individual entrepreneurship, in other words, is the war-resilient format; incorporating a company is not.

The front line writes its own ledger

The H1 2026 gain concentrated almost entirely away from the front. Kyiv city added a net 5,058 entrepreneurs, Dnipropetrovsk region 4,284, Lviv region 4,254, Kyiv region 3,756 and Odesa region 2,955. Sector growth was led by education, up a net 3,902 FOPs — a repeat performance, after leading H1 2025’s growth sectors too, with a net 2,541 — followed by retail trade (+3,596), postal and courier services (+2,558), real estate (+2,504) and wholesale trade (+2,391). Only three of Ukraine’s 25 regions shrank: Donetsk (-569), Kherson (-293) and Luhansk (-93), all under sustained Russian pressure. Analysts covering the release caution against reading the national total as a verdict on entrepreneurial health: a tax-policy overhaul expected after 2027 is likely to reshape the incentive to register a FOP at all.

Who is actually registering

Women opened 61% of new FOPs in the first half of 2025 — 83,700 registrations. Churn has also grown more visible at the margin: 5,323 FOPs closed within two weeks of opening in H1 2025, versus just 96 in all of 2021 — a signature of quick tax-registration manoeuvres rather than durable businesses, and a reminder that a rising net count is not the same thing as a rising count of going concerns.

Methodology

Sources

Opendatabot, Unified State Register (EDR) analytics — “2.1m FOPs in the EDR” (opendatabot.ua/analytics/edr-alive-2026, published 20 Jan 2026) and the H1 2026 “foponomics” report (opendatabot.ua/analytics/foponomics-2026-6, published 2 Jul 2026), the latter cross-checked against AUB.org.ua coverage of the same release (aub.org.ua, 6 Jul 2026). H1 2025 figures via Minfin.com.ua and Ekonomichna Pravda (both 17 Jul 2025), citing Opendatabot’s Unified State Register analysis. Pre-war 2021 weekly baseline and the 2022 wartime shock via Dengi.ua (23 Feb 2026), citing Opendatabot. Registry-reopening and record-week figures via Vector Media (23 Feb 2026), citing Opendatabot’s “Economics in War 2025” report.

Scope limits

All figures describe individual entrepreneurs (FOPs) and, where noted, legal entities registered in Ukraine’s government-run EDR register; they measure registrations and closures, not revenue, employment, or business survival beyond the closure event itself. Regions under Russian occupation are undercounted or unregisterable by definition, so decline figures for Donetsk, Luhansk and Kherson reflect only the government-controlled portion of those oblasts. The 2021 and 2025 weekly figures are annual means and smooth over within-year swings that the half-year and single-week figures above show directly. Minfin’s Q1 2025 (119,895) and Q2 2025 (51,830) closure figures, as published, sum to roughly 14,000 more than the same source’s stated H1 2025 total of 157,605 — most likely a gap between preliminary quarterly snapshots and a later-revised half-year count; both are reported here as published, unreconciled.

Updates

This brief will be revised as new data is published. Corrections are handled under our corrections policy.