The Fraser Valley Small Business Report
How many businesses actually operate in each Fraser Valley municipality, which sectors they are in, and what that means for the owners running them — built from Statistics Canada’s Canadian Business Counts rather than estimates.
Frequently asked questions about Fraser Valley Small Business Report
How many small businesses are there in British Columbia?+
How big is agriculture in Abbotsford?+
How fast is the Abbotsford-Mission area growing?+
Quick answer: Across the seven Fraser Valley census subdivisions in this report there are 46,670 businesses with employees. Surrey holds 24,124 of them — more than the other six combined. Construction is the single largest sector in 6 of the 7 municipalities.
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The three findings that matter
1. Construction leads almost everywhere: it tops 6 of the 7 municipalities, all but the City of Langley, where “other services” edges ahead, with 8,426 construction businesses with employees valley-wide. This is a trades economy.
2. Surrey is not simply the largest. It is the majority. At 24,124 businesses it accounts for roughly 52% of the total, against 22,546 for the other six municipalities combined. Any “Fraser Valley” average that includes Surrey is really describing Surrey.
3. Agriculture is concentrated, not general. Abbotsford (621) and Chilliwack (302) carry the agricultural base; it does not appear in the top six sectors for Maple Ridge, Mission or either Langley. The “agricultural Fraser Valley” is a real thing, but it is two municipalities rather than a region.
Every municipality, side by side
| Municipality | CSD | Businesses with employees | Largest sector |
|---|---|---|---|
| Surrey | 5915004 | 24,124 | Construction (4,682) |
| Abbotsford | 5909052 | 7,266 | Construction (1,116) |
| Langley (Township) | 5915001 | 6,347 | Construction (1,052) |
| Chilliwack | 5909020 | 3,644 | Construction (645) |
| Maple Ridge | 5915075 | 2,873 | Construction (555) |
| Langley (City) | 5915002 | 1,225 | Other services (except public administration) (157) |
| Mission | 5909056 | 1,191 | Construction (222) |
Surrey — 24,124 businesses with employees
Surrey has 24,124 businesses with employees, more than all the other municipalities here combined (22,546). Its 4,682 construction businesses outnumber every business in Abbotsford. For owners, that means competition: you rarely bid alone, and margin discipline beats volume.
The professional-services count (2,212) is the second largest, reflecting a mature service economy rather than a bedroom community. Businesses here tend to hit payroll, subcontractor and equipment questions earlier than elsewhere in the valley, simply because they scale faster.1
Abbotsford — 7,266 businesses with employees
Abbotsford has 7,266 businesses with employees, second only to Surrey. What distinguishes it is the agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting count of 621 — the highest of any municipality here and roughly double Chilliwack’s. That sits alongside 1,116 construction businesses and a substantial health-care sector.
The mix matters for accounting: farm operations, the trades and the businesses supplying both run on cycles rather than steady monthly revenue, which makes instalment planning and inventory or equipment timing more consequential than they would be for a service business. It is also why an accountant here sees quota, equipment and seasonal cash-flow questions far more often than the national average would suggest.1
Langley (Township) — 6,347 businesses with employees
The Township of Langley has 6,347 businesses with employees — more than five times the City of Langley’s 1,225, which is worth knowing before drawing conclusions about “Langley” from a single figure. Construction leads at 1,052, but professional services (575) and wholesale trade (338) are both strong, reflecting the industrial and distribution corridor rather than the retail core. Businesses holding stock are disproportionately represented here compared with the rest of the valley, which puts inventory valuation and the cost composition of goods squarely into the year-end conversation.1
Chilliwack — 3,644 businesses with employees
Chilliwack has 3,644 businesses with employees. Construction leads at 645, and agriculture, forestry, fishing and hunting is third at 302 — the second-highest agricultural count in the valley after Abbotsford, and a far larger share of the local total than in Surrey or either Langley. The combination of a growing residential build-out and an established agricultural corridor produces a specific pattern: contractors doing agricultural-adjacent work for incorporated farm customers, with payment cycles that follow the farm year rather than a builder’s draw schedule. That affects when revenue is earned and when instalments should realistically be paid.1
Maple Ridge — 2,873 businesses with employees
Maple Ridge has 2,873 businesses with employees, with construction at 555 and professional services at 267. The professional-services share is proportionally higher than Mission’s or Chilliwack’s, consistent with a commuter economy where a meaningful number of residents incorporate to contract for employers elsewhere in Metro Vancouver. That structure carries a specific and often unexamined risk: a one-person corporation billing a single client for the owner’s own time is the fact pattern the personal services business rules exist to catch, and the cost of getting it wrong exceeds any deduction on the return.1
Langley (City) — 1,225 businesses with employees
The City of Langley is a genuinely different market from the Township: 1,225 businesses with employees against 6,347. It is also the only municipality in this report where construction is not the largest sector — “other services”, which covers repair, maintenance and personal services, edges it at 157 against 154. That reflects a compact, service-dense commercial core rather than an industrial base. For owners, it means a business community weighted toward smaller storefront and service operations, where the accounting questions are more often about GST treatment on a mixed offering than about equipment schedules.1
Mission — 1,191 businesses with employees
Mission is the smallest business base in this report at 1,191 businesses with employees, with construction at 222 — proportionally the highest construction share of any municipality here. The absolute numbers are small, but the concentration is the point: a market this size means the local business community is genuinely interconnected, and reputation travels. It also means many operations are owner-run rather than staffed, with equipment carried personally or through a small corporation. Where that is the case, capital-asset decisions — what to buy, when, and what happens on disposal — tend to move the tax outcome more than anything on the expense side.1
Methodology, and what these numbers are not
All figures come from Statistics Canada, Canadian Business Counts, with employees, census metropolitan areas and census subdivisions — table 33-10-1016-01, reference period 2025-01, retrieved 2026-07-27. The underlying dataset was downloaded in full and filtered by census subdivision; no figure on this page is estimated, interpolated or rounded for effect.
Four limitations worth stating plainly:
- These are businesses with employees. Statistics Canada counts businesses without employees separately, and they are not included here. The true number of businesses in each municipality is therefore higher than shown — often substantially, since sole proprietors and owner-only corporations are a large share of any local economy.
- Langley is two municipalities. The District municipality (Township, CSD 5915001) and the City (CSD 5915002) are separate census subdivisions with very different profiles. They are reported separately here rather than combined, because combining them produces a figure that describes neither.
- Counts are of business locations, by census subdivision. A business operating across several municipalities may appear in more than one.
- Sector labels are NAICS two-digit sectors. “Other services (except public administration)” is a genuine NAICS category covering repair, maintenance and personal services, not a residual bucket for anything unclassified.
Where a figure could not be verified against the source dataset, it is not on this page. The full extracted dataset backing every chart is published at /data/fv-business-counts.json.
Republishing this data
All charts may be republished free, including commercially, with attribution to EverStone CPA and a link to this report; each “Embed this chart” snippet includes it. Journalists, chambers of commerce and economic development offices are welcome to the figures, and for other cuts of the data, the dataset is linked above.
What this means if you run one of these businesses
The headline, that construction leads almost everywhere, has a practical edge. Trades carry problems general advice skips: subcontractor classification, T5018 reporting, holdbacks that shift revenue across a year-end, and equipment that is capital, not expense. Here they are the median file.
For the 46,670 businesses counted here, the useful questions are structural: are workers classified defensibly, when should equipment be bought relative to year-end, and does your pay still fit what the business earns? We work in all seven municipalities. See accounting in the Fraser Valley, or Surrey, Abbotsford, Langley, Chilliwack, Maple Ridge and Mission.
Keep reading
Fraser Valley accounting services How to choose an accountant here Accounting for incorporated contractorsThe Fraser Valley inter-municipal business licence →Fractional CFO Services in the Fraser Valley →We work with the CPA firm — same fixed-fee approach, entirely remote.