Canadian business counts, December 2023

The Canadian business counts are produced semi-annually for each June and December, and the data are released in August and February. They can be used to compare the number of businesses across industries, employment-size categories, provinces and territories, census metropolitan areas (CMAs) and the census subdivisions (CSDs) within them, as well as every CSD in Canada with 10 or more active businesses with employees.

The counts include businesses identified as "active" on the Business Register (BR), Statistics Canada's internal listing of Canadian businesses. Compiled primarily from Canada Revenue Agency tax records, the BR changes the status of a business to "inactive" only once tax accounts are formally closed or become dormant over an extended period.

Businesses are usually counted on the basis of the statistical concept of "location." Each operating location is counted separately, including cases where one business comprises multiple locations.

Businesses are categorized as employer or non-employer depending on whether they have paid employees for whom payroll deduction remittances were filed with the Canada Revenue Agency at any point during the previous 12-month period.

Statistics Canada advises cautious interpretation of period-to-period changes in these counts because they can be affected by administrative or methodological changes in the underlying BR data.

Starting with the December 2021 counts, refinements to the geographic coding of business locations were made, which improved the geographic classification of some businesses at low levels of geography. Generally, the reclassification is to nearby zones, resulting in only minor impacts on counts for CSDs. There are no impacts on the overall counts for CMAs and census divisions and, by extension, for the provinces and territories.

Further information regarding these modifications is available upon request.