Benchmark your business

What this is measuring

Statistics Canada counts businesses that have employees, and publishes those counts by municipality and by how many people each business employs. This tool reads those published counts and nothing else.

The reference period is 2025-01, from table 33-10-1016-01, retrieved 2026-08-03. Every municipal total shown here matches the figures independently verified on our Fraser Valley Small Business Report.

What this is not measuring

This compares business counts and composition only. It says how many businesses are your size. It does not say what they earn, what they pay, or what they are worth, and it should not be read as though it does.

There is no revenue benchmark here, no margin comparison and no salary guide — because there is no public data for any of them at municipal level. A tool that offered them would be inventing the numbers, and a benchmark you cannot trace to a source is worse than no benchmark.

Two further limits worth stating plainly. These are businesses with employees: Statistics Canada counts businesses without employees separately, so the true number of businesses in each municipality is higher than shown, often substantially. And where a count is small, Statistics Canada withholds it for confidentiality — the tool shows those as not published rather than as zero.

How to read your result

The useful figure is usually not the raw count but the position. Knowing that 929 businesses in Abbotsford employ 10 to 19 people is context; knowing that being that size puts you in the upper fifth of employers in your market is a different kind of information, and it is the one that tends to change how an owner thinks about the next hire.

Growth across a band boundary is where the operational changes cluster too. Moving from four employees to six is the point where informal payroll stops working; moving past twenty is usually where someone has to own scheduling full time.