Last year, 13,586 stores closed, averaging about 38 per day. This is the highest figure in recent years, according to data provided by the Union of Professionals and Self-Employed Workers (UPTA). Not even the Christmas campaign managed to mask the figures or save face: in December 2025, 2,347 businesses shut down, compared to 1,748 in the same month of 2024. This latest figure confirms that the “bleeding” of the retail trade—a sector closely linked to self-employment—is worsening, as reported by the newspaper Público.
At the start of 2026, which has just begun, local commerce accounts for 716,637 self-employed workers, nearly 24% of the country’s total self-employed, according to UPTA calculations based on data from the Special Regime for Self-Employed Workers (RETA). This is 7,513 more than there were at the start of 2025.
But looking further back, the hemorrhage is enormous: in the last ten years, 150,000 self-employed workers have stopped working in small retail—100,000 of them since 2019—according to data from the National Statistics Institute (INE) endorsed by UPTA. “The decline has been resounding. The data shows that the small retail sector is exhausted,” confirms Eduardo Abad, president of UPTA.
The Union of Associations of Self-Employed Workers and Entrepreneurs (UATAE), another of the country’s major associations for the self-employed, denounces this trend as a “ceaseless hemorrhage” and warns that the decline of small businesses has “direct effects on neighborhood life, the local economy, and the country’s productive fabric.” “Small retail continues in freefall,” state sources from this association.
