Before you can size a market, you need to know how many businesses actually sit in the band you can buy. Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada publishes the count every year, straight off the Statistics Canada Business Register.
Headline figure
1.10M
Employer businesses operating in Canada as of December 2024, per ISED’s Key Small Business Statistics 2025: 1,099,521 in total, of which 1,079,188 (98.2%) are small (1–99 employees), 16,953 (1.5%) medium (100–499) and 3,380 (0.3%) large (500+).
What the data says
ISED's Key Small Business Statistics 2025 is built on Statistics Canada's Business Register, the same administrative dataset that underlies most other national small-business statistics, and it is republished roughly annually. The size bands are drawn on payroll employment, so a business with no employees on payroll (a large share of unincorporated sole proprietors) is not in this count at all — it sits in a separate non-employer count StatCan publishes twice a year.
A fund with a $2–$10M EBITDA mandate is not competing for a share of 1.1 million businesses — it is competing for a share of the 16,953 medium-sized (100–499 employee) businesses, and even that overstates it, since employee count and EBITDA correlate loosely at best. The honest use of this table is bracket-sizing a market before you build a thesis, not sizing a specific target.
| Size band | Businesses | Cumulative share |
|---|---|---|
| 1–4 employees | 649,780 | 59.1% |
| 5–9 employees | 199,963 | 77.3% |
| 10–19 employees | 122,278 | 88.4% |
| 20–49 employees | 79,387 | 95.6% |
| 50–99 employees | 27,780 | — |
| 100–499 employees (medium) | 16,953 | — |
| 500+ employees (large) | 3,380 | — |
Source: ISED, Key Small Business Statistics 2025, citing Statistics Canada's Business Register; data as of December 2024. Cumulative share shown where the release states it directly.
Size band is not just a headcount, it is an economic-weight signal. The same ISED release reports that as of 2024, small businesses employed 5.8 million people in Canada — 46.6% of the total private labour force — against 2.1 million (17.0%) at medium-sized businesses and 4.5 million (36.4%) at large ones. Over the 2018–2022 period, SME contribution to gross domestic product averaged 50.2% in the goods-producing sector and 46.4% in services; in 2022 alone, small businesses contributed 33.2% of private-sector GDP and medium-sized businesses a further 14.0%. Read against the count table, the picture is blunt: the 16,953 medium-sized businesses are a rounding error of the total count but carry a GDP share several multiples larger than their share of the business register.
Pair this with the province-level stock in enterprise openings and closures by province to see where the businesses in your target band actually sit, and with the age profile of Canadian business owners to gauge how much of that stock is likely to be for sale in the next decade.
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