The mental image of a construction company is a firm with an office, a controller and a fleet. The data says the typical one is four people or fewer — and most have no employees at all.
Headline figure
61.9%
The share of Canadian construction employer establishments with just 1 to 4 employees — 98,773 of 159,514 — per ISED’s Canadian Industry Statistics profile for construction (NAICS 23), reference year 2025, built on a Statistics Canada special tabulation of the Business Register.
What the data says
Two facts do most of the work here. First, the majority of construction establishments in Canada are not employers at all — 255,892 of 415,406 are recorded as non-employer or indeterminate, a little over 60% of the total. Second, among the 159,514 that do employ people, the largest single group by a wide margin is 1 to 4 employees.
| Employment size | Establishments | Share of employers |
|---|---|---|
| Micro (1–4 employees) | 98,773 | 61.9% |
| Small (5–99 employees) | 58,956 | 37.0% |
| Medium (100–499 employees) | 1,674 | 1.0% |
| Large (500+ employees) | 111 | 0.1% |
| All employer establishments | 159,514 | 100% |
| Non-employer or indeterminate | 255,892 | n/a |
| All establishments | 415,406 | n/a |
Source: Innovation, Science and Economic Development Canada, Canadian Industry Statistics — Construction (NAICS 23), Establishments by employment type and province/territory (2025), footnoted to “Statistics Canada, special tabulation, unpublished data, unclassified excluded, 2025”. Shares are of employer establishments, so they do not apply to the non-employer row.
It is worth checking a figure like this against an independent cut before relying on it. ISED’s Key Small Business Statistics 2025, Table 3 uses December 2024 Business Register data and slightly different size bands, and reports construction as 154,179 small businesses (1–99 employees, 99.0%), 1,386 medium (100–499, 0.9%) and 144 large (500+, 0.1%), from a total of 155,709.
The two do not match line for line, and should not be expected to — different reference dates, different bands, and one counts establishments while the other counts businesses. What they agree on is the conclusion: on either measure, essentially the entire industry sits under 100 employees.
This is not merely a demographic curiosity. Statistics Canada published an analysis in February 2026, Firm size and labour productivity growth in Canadian residential construction, examining exactly this. It finds that in residential construction, firms employing fewer than 20 workers account for 66.1% of total industry employment as of 2023 — meaning the productivity of very small firms largely is the productivity of the sector.
A firm of four people carries much the same regulatory surface as a firm of four hundred. The same lien and holdback rules apply, the same prompt-payment notice deadlines run, the same safety obligations attach, and the same contract payment reporting obligation lands on any business whose income comes primarily from construction activities — a requirement set out in section 238 of the federal Income Tax Regulations. What differs is that the four-person firm has nobody whose job it is to handle any of it.
That asymmetry is the most commercially useful thing to understand about this industry. It explains why administrative burden, rather than demand, is the binding constraint for most construction businesses, and it is the context for the industry’s opening and closure record and where construction employment actually sits.
A 30-minute call is enough to tell you where AI pays for itself in a construction or property business.
