In Ukraine, from January to September 2026 there were 30 033 repeated registrations of individual entrepreneurs (sole proprietors), which is about 14% of all new registrations. Thus, every seventh entrepreneur who registered a sole proprietor this year had previously had their own business, according to data from the Unified State Register, published by the OpenDataBot service 2 November.
According to the study, 29,382 people who had previously closed their sole proprietorships returned to business during the first nine months of 2026. The number of repeat registrations in the incomplete current year has already exceeded the total for 2025.
The share of repeated sole proprietor openings in Ukraine has been increasing for the third year in a row. If in 2023 it was about 5% of all registrations, in 2024 it reached 7%, and in 2025 it increased to 10%, then over nine months of 2026 the indicator reached 14%.
The largest number of repeated registrations was recorded in Kyiv - 3 862, or almost 13% of the national indicator. In second place is Dnipropetrovsk region with 2 861 registrations, in third place is Odesa - 2 226. The top five also includes Lviv region with 2 115 repeated openings and Kyiv region with 2 032.
According to the head of the parliamentary committee on financial, tax and customs policy Danil Getmantsev, the increase in the number of repeated registrations is explained by several factors, including simplification of administrative procedures, financial burden on entrepreneurs, and opportunities for tax optimization.
In particular, since June 2023 entrepreneurs have been able to automatically cease operations through the Diia portal, and since November of the same year, the registration of a sole proprietor and the choice of a taxation system have been combined into one application.
An additional factor has been the increase in costs for maintaining a sole proprietor even in the absence of income. According to Getmantsev, since January 2025 the corresponding financial burden for certain categories of entrepreneurs may exceed 30 thousand hryvnias per year due to the payment of a single social contribution and a military tax. This prompts some entrepreneurs to temporarily cease operations and resume them after new orders appear or the business stabilizes.
At the same time, repeated registration can be used to change the place of business and switch to other local tax rates.
Hetmantsov noted that he does not see a systemic problem in the repeated opening of sole proprietorships, provided that tax legislation is observed. At the same time, he did not rule out the use of such procedures in individual business fragmentation schemes or the concealment of employment relationships, but assessed the share of such cases as insignificant.
The study also identified entrepreneurs who repeatedly ceased and resumed operations. The record belongs to a 25-year-old entrepreneur from Dnipropetrovsk Oblast, who has eight repeated registrations, carried out in 2021, 2022 and 2024. His activities are related to real estate and advertising.
Another four entrepreneurs from Kharkiv, Volyn, Rivne and Khmelnytskyi Oblasts have seven repeated registrations each. They worked in the fields of trade, programming, design, computer repair and healthcare.
In "OpenDatabot," they clarified that repeated registration is considered each new opening of a sole proprietorship by an individual who previously already had the status of an entrepreneur. The first registration is not included in the statistics, and one individual can carry out several repeated registrations over different years.
"OpenDatabot" is a Ukrainian service for monitoring open government data, which analyzes information from state registers, including information about entrepreneurs, companies, court decisions and the financial activities of businesses.
