More businesses are closing. Fewer new ones are opening.
Eurostat’s second-quarter figures show bankruptcy declarations in the EU at their highest level since early 2019, while new business registrations fell for a second consecutive quarter. What the numbers measure — and what they do not — determines what a company should do about them.
Eurostat published quarterly figures for business registrations and bankruptcy declarations on 17 August 2026, covering the second quarter (dataset sts_rb_q, seasonally adjusted, index 2021 = 100). Two movements stand out, in opposite directions: bankruptcy declarations reached their highest level since the beginning of 2019, and fewer new firms were entered in business registers than in the quarter before.
Neither movement is dramatic on its own. Read together with the euro area’s credit conditions and an unusual set of Swiss figures published the same month, they describe a counterparty environment that has turned — one that most companies will encounter first in their customers’ accounts, not their own.
Exits rose to a seven-year high while entries fell again
Bankruptcy declarations increased by 5.7% in the EU in Q2 2026 compared with the previous quarter, and by 6.9% in the euro area, taking the EU series to its highest level since Q1 2019. The rise covered five of eight sectors, led by education and social activities (+21.1%), transport (+11.4%) and financial services (+6.8%); declarations fell in accommodation and food services (-2.6%), construction (-1.7%) and trade (-1.2%). In every sector they remain above their pre-pandemic level of Q4 2019.
The longer arc matters as much as the quarter: declarations rose continuously from Q4 2021 to Q3 2025, eased slightly in the two quarters that followed, then turned up again. Q2 2026 is not a spike but the resumption of a four-year trend after a pause.
Registrations of new businesses moved the other way: down 0.5% in the EU and 0.1% in the euro area, after a 0.9% EU decline in Q1. The decline starts from a high point: registrations climbed through 2025 past their previous peak of Q4 2024, then slipped in both quarters of 2026. Five of eight sectors registered fewer new firms, led by industry (-3.6%), accommodation and food services (-3.4%) and education and social services (-3.2%); information and communication rose sharply (+8.8%) and construction gained 1.0%.
Behind the aggregates, dispersion is wide: registrations rose 20.4% in Ireland and fell 24.2% in Luxembourg; declarations rose 31.8% in Estonia and halved in Malta.
The figures count declarations and register entries, not confirmed closures
Eurostat’s definitions repay attention. A registration is a legal unit entered in a national business register during the quarter; a bankruptcy is a legal unit that has started the procedure of being declared bankrupt by court declaration. The quarterly data, Eurostat states, reflect the intention of a business to start or to close down activities: confirmed births and deaths, measured through turnover and employment, appear only later in annual business demography; bankruptcies are one subset of enterprise deaths, not a synonym for them.
The aggregate carries a second caution. Because national legislation and administrative practice differ, absolute counts are not added together: EU figures weight national index series by each country’s 2021 stock of active enterprises, and in small countries — Eurostat names Cyprus and Malta — low quarterly counts make the indices volatile.
The series is thus an early, directional indicator with legal procedure inside it — exactly what this month’s Swiss figures illustrate.
Credit tightened in the same quarter, for the same reasons
The financing backdrop moved in parallel. In the European Central Bank’s July 2026 bank lending survey — 159 euro area banks, fieldwork 15 to 30 June — a net 7% of banks reported tightening credit standards on loans to enterprises, citing perceived risks to the economic outlook and lower risk tolerance. The tightening was most pronounced in the car industry and energy-intensive manufacturing, and rejection rates rose for all borrower groups.
Firms’ loan demand increased slightly (a net 3% of banks), supported by inventories and working capital, fixed investment by large firms, and debt refinancing and restructuring. Borrowing to bridge and to restructure rather than to expand is the pattern of a cycle in which exits concentrate where liquidity gives way, not where demand disappears. For the third quarter, banks expect credit standards to tighten further across all loan categories.
Switzerland is recording record exits and record entries at the same time
Switzerland sits outside the Eurostat series; its own half-year figures, published on 12 August, cut across the EU picture instructively. According to Dun & Bradstreet, 7,496 corporate insolvency proceedings were opened in the first half of 2026 — roughly 41 a day — an increase of just under 55% on the same period of 2025 and the highest half-year figure since 1994. At that pace the full year would approach 15,000 cases, against 11,856 in 2025. Skilled trades (1,053 cases), hospitality (770) and retail (626) were most affected, every canton except Schwyz recorded an increase, and companies more than ten years old accounted for the largest share of cases (37.5%).
The headline is not primarily an economic reading. Since 1 January 2025, the Federal Act on Combating Abusive Bankruptcy has required public creditors such as tax and social insurance authorities to enforce outstanding claims against companies in the commercial register through bankruptcy proceedings, as private creditors must, rather than through seizure. The Federal Office of Justice presents the change as closing an era in which a company could continue trading despite chronically unpaid public-law debts, and Dun & Bradstreet attributes much of the increase to it, alongside high financing costs and weaker demand in parts of construction, retail and hospitality.
Entry, meanwhile, tells the opposite story from the EU: Creditreform counted 28,516 new companies in the Swiss commercial register in the first half of 2026, 2.5% more than a year earlier and a record for a first half-year, even as deletions rose 5.2% to 18,458. Germany sits between the two: Creditreform’s half-year analysis records around 12,900 corporate insolvencies, up 7.8% and the highest since 2013, with insolvencies among firms up to two years old rising 25.3%.
The lesson is not that one country is faring worse than another: bankruptcy statistics are produced by legal procedure as much as by economic distress, and must be read through that procedure before they enter a credit decision or a board paper.
The exposure that moves first is trade receivables
For an operating company, two exposures now move together. The first is counterparty credit. Trade receivables are typically the largest unsecured credit position on a company’s balance sheet, and the cycle behind them has turned: declarations at a seven-year high in the EU, rejection rates rising at the banks, and loan demand driven by working capital — frequently another firm’s unpaid invoice. Payment behaviour deteriorates well before any court declaration; the filing is the last event in the sequence, not the first.
The second is replacement risk. Entry is weakening where substitution is hardest: industry recorded the steepest decline in new registrations. A customer lost to insolvency, or a single-source supplier that fails, is harder to replace when fewer firms are entering the market behind them.
What a leadership team can decide now, and what to watch
Most of the response lies within a company’s own control.
- Rank customers by consequence, not revenue. The ordering question is which counterparty would hurt most after 90 days of non-payment; cap exposure accordingly through limits, deposits, shorter terms or credit insurance.
- Treat payment behaviour as a leading indicator. A drift in days-to-pay across several customers is information about the cycle, not an administrative nuisance, and deserves a standing place in the monthly management pack.
- Map single-source dependencies before they are tested. Where a supplier has no qualified alternative, the exposure is operational as well as financial — and a thinner entry pipeline makes replacement slower.
- Arrange financing before it is needed. Rejection rates are rising and banks expect further tightening; a credit line negotiated from strength costs less than one sought under pressure.
Three releases will show whether the turn extends: Eurostat’s next quarterly figures in the autumn; the ECB’s next lending survey, which will show whether the expected tightening materialised; and the Swiss full-year count, due early in 2027, which will show whether the first half’s pace held and how much of it was procedure rather than distress. Registrations and bankruptcy declarations are, in Eurostat’s framing, statements of intent — to start and to stop. What changed in 2026 is the balance between them; the companies best placed for the coming quarters are those that watch their customers’ balance sheets as attentively as their own.