Economic report 2026: margins up, profits down, a country split in two

Belgian companies charged more, paid more in wages and earned less in 2025. That is the blunt summary of the 515,835 sets of 2025 annual accounts already filed with the National Bank of Belgium (NBB), which Rovalta combed through as at 22 September 2026. Beneath the average, the country splits in two: half of all companies are growing, the other half are standing still, and around ten large accounts, holding companies first among them, are enough on their own to swing the national result.

This report reads the economy from the ground up: company by company, from the business register kept by the Crossroads Bank for Enterprises (KBO/BCE) and from filed accounts, before Statbel and the NBB publish their aggregates. It is written for anyone who needs to benchmark a company, their own or a client’s, against the rest of Belgian business.

Key points

• SME gross margin is up 5% for the second year running, but the wage bill keeps pace at +4.5%. Only one company in two sees its margin rise.
• Combined profit is down 10% at this stage, and probably by more. A false signal for SMEs: 52% of companies improved their result, and the median company made €17,596 of profit against €17,350 a year earlier. A true signal for around ten large accounts, mostly holding companies: between them they lost €20.8bn, more than the national fall.
• Belgium has never created so many businesses. But they are self-employed people trading in their own name, not companies. Company incorporations are falling.
• Wallonia is the only region where profits are rising. Brussels has the highest shares of loss-making companies and of companies with negative equity.
• Hospitality (horeca) and construction account for four bankruptcies in ten and the worst health scores. Legal services, healthcare and IT are the soundest sectors.

Margins up, profits down

Every set of annual accounts contains the figures for the year and those for the year before, so each company can be compared with itself. Across the 453,334 companies concerned, combined gross margin rose from €93.2bn to €97.8bn. Staff costs rose almost as fast. Combined EBITDA barely moved, up 4.1%, while net profit fell by 10%.

That last figure needs the caution official aggregates build in by publishing six months later. It is read on 82.4% of the financial year and it is still moving: our 8 September edition, at 85% of filings, showed -16%. Two findings still give the direction. The first half of filings, complete for months, carries almost all of the national result, because it is the large companies that file early. And over the previous year, now closed, the last filers took €5.4bn off the total between them: they deepen the fall, they do not reverse it. Read on the 2024 filings themselves rather than on the comparative column of the 2025 ones, the fall comes out at 8% instead of 10. So the fall is established, its size sits between 8 and 15%, and any decimal published today would be wrong tomorrow.

It is also why this total does not describe your company. 20.8% of the profit declared in Belgium sits in ten companies, 41% in a hundred. Measured company by company, the country says the opposite: the median company made €17,596 of profit against €17,350 a year earlier, or 1.4%. The nuance is in the ratio: the share of gross margin that ends up as profit slipped from 37.3% to 36.5%. The typical company takes in a little more, then, but keeps a slightly smaller share of what it produces, and the proportion of loss-making companies rose from 25.8% to 26.5%. Nothing like a collapse, and nothing like an upturn either.

The fall in profit is happening at the top: the ten largest declines add up to €20.8bn, more than the entire national fall. Most are holding companies, whose results follow the timing of the dividends their subsidiaries pass up (Taminco, Titan, Avnet, Nayarit, Sofina), alongside a few large groups: Electrabel still earns €5bn, but €2.85bn less than in 2024, and Carglass, D’Ieteren and KBC Groupe each shed more than €1bn. Take those large accounts out and profit at Belgian SMEs is flat to slightly up: 52% of companies did better than in 2024, and combined cash rose by 4.5%.

Run the same exercise on last year’s accounts, with the same method, and the result is gross margin +5.9% and profit +11%. The 2025 reversal is therefore entirely a reversal in the biggest results, not in the wider business base.

Four trajectories

A single median can only describe part of a country. A percentage growth does not exist for a company that had no profit last year, and the word “loss-making” confuses a loss that is shrinking with one that is deepening. Between two financial years a company can only do four things. Here are all four.

The loss-making tissue is not sinking further. Of the 72,908 companies that made a loss two years running, 51.3% reduced theirs, and the median loss narrowed by 2.3%. A coin flip: no broad recovery, no worsening either. Until now “loss-making” covered a company climbing out and a company getting stuck in exactly the same word.

The churn is heavy and balanced. More than a hundred thousand companies change camp in a year, almost as many each way and for similar amounts: they fall from a median profit of €14,281 into a loss of €12,575, and they climb from a loss of €11,650 to a profit of €15,112.

New businesses: the self-employed boom

137,947 businesses still registered today started trading in 2025, a record and 14% more than in 2024. And 2026 is accelerating further: 100,679 business starts from January to August, against 86,616 over the same period of 2025.

But these are not companies. Incorporations of legal entities over the eight months fell by 2.6% (40,146 against 41,232). All of the growth comes from self-employed individuals, whether as a side activity or as their main occupation. The share of companies in new businesses, still 58% in 2019, fell to 48% in 2025 and to 40% in the first months of 2026.

For the accountants, banks and insurers who make a living from company incorporations, the message is clear: the flow of new company clients is flat, while the flow of self-employed people is booming. For policymakers, the ‘entrepreneurial dynamism’ of 2026 is a story of side activities, not of job creation.

Bankruptcies: hospitality and construction

2,729 bankruptcies were published in the register between June and August 2026, around 910 a month, with June including a backlog. Four in ten hit restaurants or construction. Flanders accounts for nearly half, in line with its weight in the business base.

The signal is consistent with the accounts: 34% of restaurant companies are loss-making and 23% have fragile health scores, and accommodation is worse still (45% loss-making). Daily tracking is on the Bankruptcies page.

Wallonia, Flanders, Brussels

Wallonia had the best year: published turnover up 3.2%, combined profit up 8.8%, the only region in positive territory on both. Flanders, which accounts for 64% of filings and €644bn of equity, took the hit from a handful of large groups and their holding companies: combined profit down 18%. The ten largest Flemish declines (led by Taminco, Carglass, Unilin and Janssen Pharmaceutica) add up to €14.5bn, more than the fall for the region as a whole. Brussels grew only slightly and piles up weaknesses: 32% of companies loss-making and 17% with negative equity, a reflection of the many holding company head offices and property companies based there.

Winning and losing sectors

We no longer publish a ranking of winning and losing sectors. Our September edition carried one, built on profit totals by sector, and it did not hold: three points of completeness were enough to turn IT from a winner, with profit reported up 30%, into a loser at -6%, without a single company changing its result. Only the composition of the measured group had moved. A sector is often fewer than a thousand companies, and its total is decided by the three largest.

The last column of the table explains why. It gives the share of the sector's companies that have already filed their 2025 accounts, and it runs from 73.9% in transport and food service to 89.6% among holding companies. The direction of that gap matters: companies in difficulty file late, so the most fragile sectors are the least complete, and any reading of their totals flatters them. The change columns stay in the table; they are not a conclusion.

What can be read without waiting for the rest of the filings is the shares. Human health and the legal professions have fewer than one loss-making company in ten. Hospitality has more than four in ten, food service and personal services a third. The most instructive case is pharmaceuticals: €2.6bn of combined profit, and 39% of companies loss-making. A few giants there hide a majority of small structures in the red, which no sector total will ever say.

Restaurants as a whole still make a small profit (€0.3bn, slightly less than in 2024), but remain, with accommodation and personal services, the sector with the most loss-making companies. In real estate, 38% of companies are in the red: most are holding vehicles whose book loss is a choice, not an accident.

The giants’ club

The country’s ten largest statutory turnovers add up to more than €190bn. Most belong to the purchasing centres and invoicing platforms of foreign groups (Toyota, ExxonMobil, Cargill, Mastercard): the turnover passes through Belgium, the jobs much less so. Antwerp refining is falling with oil prices; Electrabel, Mastercard and Colruyt are growing.

Biopharma carries Belgian results: UCB Pharma quadrupled its profit to €4.2bn, argenx increased its own fivefold and GSK Biologicals stays above €2bn. On the loss side, the figures reflect impairments and restructurings at subsidiaries of international groups, not operating difficulties.

Where the jobs are

88,659 companies publish an average headcount for 2025, a total of 2,236,182 full-time equivalents (FTE). Concentration is extreme: 1,158 companies with 250 FTE or more employ 48% of that total and generate 48% of published turnover. The 45,473 companies with 1 to 9 people together employ fewer than a sixth of the workforce of the 1,191 largest.

The ten largest employers

Rail, post, temporary staffing, retail, public transport: the ranking of employers looks much as it did twenty years ago. Staffing agencies appear because the temporary workers they place count in their own headcount. GSK Biologicals is the only manufacturer in the top 10.

How sound is Belgian business?

Rovalta scores 684,543 companies from 1 to 5 on solvency, liquidity, profitability and trend. The verdict: nearly one in two (49%) scores above 4, one in seven (14%) below 2. Negative equity is receding, from 13.0% of 2024 filers to 12.0% in 2025, and so is the share of loss-making companies. The business base is getting healthier, with one caveat: late filers, who file in the autumn, are on average more fragile than early ones.

The geography of fragility: 9.1% of Flemish companies score below 2, against 12.8% in Wallonia and 14.2% in Brussels. The Altman Z-score, for its part, puts 29% of companies in the distress zone: that reflects a business base made up of undercapitalised micro-companies, not a forecast of defaults. Only 2,134 companies report social security arrears (ONSS/RSZ) in their accounts.

The register in 2026

2,059,556 company numbers, 1,974,478 of them active, 1,196,562 of those legal entities. The BV/SRL (private limited company) has become Belgium’s default form: 45% of legal entities, far ahead of the non-profit association (VZW/ASBL) and the NV/SA (public limited company). A curiosity of the register: the 112,954 associations of co-owners, the country’s third-largest ‘legal form’, which are not businesses at all.

How we counted

• Every comparison between two financial years rests on a fixed panel: the 575,449 companies that filed for 2024, a closed year. Without a constant pool, a change mixes how companies evolved with new ones entering the calculation. 82.4% of the panel has filed for 2025 so far. Do not measure completeness as 2025 filings over 2024 filings: that ratio counts companies absent from the panel and reads 88%, seven points too high. The panel leaves out companies created since 2024 and those that stopped filing: it describes the economy that continues. New businesses and bankruptcies are counted separately, on the register.
• Sources: KBO/BCE Open Data and the NBB’s Central Balance Sheet Office: 7,485,569 filings covering 685,955 companies, extracted on 22 September 2026. Financial year 2025 means a year-end between 1 January and 31 December 2025; around 11% of filings are still missing.
• Filings carrying amounts impossible for their format were excluded from every calculation (over €20m in a micro filing, over €500m in an abridged one): around thirty filings, one of which showed €12bn of gross margin, EBITDA and profit for the previous year.
• Turnover and headcount are published only in full-format accounts and some abridged ones; 70% of 2025 filings use the micro format. Implausible headcounts were excluded and changes in headcount are not discussed.
• Sectors are based on the main activity recorded in the KBO/BCE, which is missing for a quarter of filers.

Read next: Belgian start-ups: what their accounts really say, the same method applied to young, venture-backed companies.