The dashboard provides data on business counts across Canada disaggregated by North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) classification. It displays the number of business locations within each geographic area. Data is organized by provinces and territories, census divisions, and census subdivisions, and includes both community profiles for a selected year and comparisons over time, as well as cross-geography comparisons.
This dashboard uses the 2022 1.0 versions of the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). The changes introduced in 2022 mean there may be differences between 2019 and later years (2022 and 2025) in how businesses are defined and organized. For consistency and clearer visualization, the dashboard applies the most recent 2022 labels to all years, including 2019. Some updates involved adjustments to how business activities are grouped or categorized, or just revisions to titles.
To view recent methodological changes, please refer to the Data variations caused by methodological changes, by year.
To open this dashboard, you will need Tableau Reader installed on your computer. Tableau Reader can be downloaded here.
Information on installing and using Tableau Reader can be found here.
If any text in the dashboard appears cut-off or does not display correctly, please set the display scaling for your computer to 100% while viewing the dashboard, or disable scaling for Tableau Reader.
If you have any questions, comments or issues related to the dashboard, please let us know at information@communitydata.ca.
Canadian business counts data provide counts of active establishments by industry classification and employment size categories. The data are compiled from the Business Register, which is a repository of information on the Canadian business population.
Included in the Business Register are all Canadian businesses which meet at least one of the three following criteria:
- Have an employee workforce for which they submit payroll remittances to CRA; or
- Have a minimum of $30,000 in annual revenue; or
- Are incorporated under a federal or provincial act and have filed a federal corporate income tax form within the past three years.