NAICS 23731Industry · 5-digitregional market

Highway, street and bridge construction

SoftwareHeavy Civil Construction Estimating & Operations 237

This industry comprises establishments primarily engaged in the construction of highways (including elevated), streets, roads, airport runways, public sidewalks, or bridges. The work performed may include new work, reconstruction, rehabilitation, and repairs. Specialized trade activities related to highway, street, and bridge construction (e.g., installing guardrails on highways) are included. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A

Establishments · CanadaA: 2,092
Under 10 employeesA: 46%
Establishments · USA: 9,202
Employment · USA: 306,947
Payroll · USA: $28.3B

Size and shape

How many businesses there are and how small they are. Fragmentation is the first thing an entrant — or anyone selling software into this industry — needs to know, and it is one of the few things that is actually measured.

Canadian establishments by number of employeesA

1–464431%

5–932415%

10–1933816%

20–4936718%

50–9923611%

100–1991236%

200–499492%

500+111%

Of 2,092 Canadian establishments with employees, 46% have fewer than ten — weighted toward mid-sized establishments.

Where they areA

Ontario58428%

British Columbia45022%

Quebec37018%

Alberta30214%

Largest four provinces by establishment count. Establishments with employees only — sole operators with no payroll are not in this table, so in trades and personal services the true number of businesses is higher.

How many new establishments are still tradingA

Construction, US · opened 2020

83.2%

1 year

68.2%

3 years

56.5%

5 years

42.6%

10 years

opened 2015

Measured, not forecast: the share of US establishments opening in one year that were still active later. It counts good operators and bad ones together, which is exactly why it is the honest answer to “what are the odds”. It is for the whole sector rather than this market, and the ten-year figure comes from an older cohort because no younger one has reached ten years.

How businesses here compete

The structural profile of subsector 237, which every industry beneath it inherits. This is analyst judgment from how the subsector is organised — not research into this industry, and not a measurement.

regional competitionhigh capitalUNVERIFIEDinherited from 237 Heavy and civil engineering construction

Equipment-heavy and bonded, won on the lowest compliant bid. A market of established regional firms with their own pits and plants.

Who sets the price: Public owners, by low-bid tender.
The software it runs on: Heavy-civil estimating, fleet telematics, project controls.

Market screens and studies

Market-entry records filed along this branch of the hierarchy. A record at or beneath this code is about this industry; one above it is about something wider that contains it.

Screened one level up. Nothing is filed at this exact code; the screen for 2373 Highway, street and bridge construction covers it.

Operating businessScreenedfiled at 2373

Road Paving & Highway ContractingStructure decides

binding constraint: capital intensity

Roads are rebuilt whether or not the economy is growing, the owner is a government that pays, and the record at Utility System Construction already covers the prequalification-and-bonding gate that guards all public civil work. This group has a second, harder gate behind that one. Public paving is awarded to the lowest compliant bid, and the lowest bid belongs to whoever has the cheapest hot-mix asphalt delivered to the job — which means whoever owns the asphalt plant, the quarry feeding it and the liquid-asphalt supply nearest the road. The consolidators say so in their filings. Construction Partners describes its strategy as vertical integration across hot-mix plants, paving, aggregates and liquid asphalt; in fiscal 2025 it grew revenue 54% to US$2.81B, only 8.4% of it organic, by buying five companies that brought 27 asphalt plants, four aggregate facilities and an asphalt terminal [A]. In Ontario, Colas paid C$913M for Miller McAsphalt — about C$1.3B of revenue at a 7% operating margin — to get road crews and the national bitumen terminal network together [A]. An entrant with pavers and a bond but no plant buys its mix from the firm it is bidding against. The size bands fit: 38% of the 2,092 establishments have twenty or more employees, and the US average is 33 per establishment. The reachable fringe — driveways, parking lots, sidewalk work — is real but is private paving, not this market.

NAICS 23735 vendors named11 sourced figuresOpen →

Software serving this industry

The vertical software markets filed along the same branch — who sells to these businesses and who they would have to displace — and then the generic categories every business buys whatever it does.

Sold across the wider branch

Vertical softwareScreenedfiled at 237 Heavy and civil engineering construction

Heavy Civil Construction Estimating & OperationsOne thing must be true

binding constraint: incumbent vulnerability

Incumbent HCSS (Thoma Bravo) and Trimble B2W

The switching cost is the estimating database, not the software — a contractor's historical production rates live inside HCSS and are the asset that wins bids. Trimble and Kiewit's InEight have the rest. The building-construction record at 2362 faced Procore; this one faces a data moat that is older and harder to copy. Nothing is disclosed here. Every vendor named on this record is private, or sits inside a parent that does not break the line out, so no revenue floor can be built and the market size is genuinely unknown rather than estimated.

NAICS 2374 vendors namedOpen →

And what every business buys · 25 generic categories

Sold to every industry rather than this one, so they are filed against the software industry's own code. The same few vendors recur across most of them.

Who works here

The occupations employed in Construction, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.

Concentrated in this sectorA

Concrete finishers, tilesetters and plasterers One industry 94.3%

Bricklayers and insulators One industry 87.5%

Trades helpers and labourers One industry 80.7%

Carpenters and cabinetmakers One industry 79.9%

Plumbers, pipefitters and gas fitters One industry 79.8%

Roofers, glaziers, painters, decorators and floor covering installers One industry 73.7%

Contractors and supervisors, technical industrial, electrical and construction trades and related workers One industry 70.5%

Technical electrical trades and electrical power line and telecommunications workers Mostly one sector 60%

Managers in construction and facility operation and maintenance Mostly one sector 57.7%

Crane operators and water well drillers Mostly one sector 48.9%

These jobs are mostly done here. An operator in this industry is competing for them against others in the same industry, not against the whole economy.

And the jobs every business has

Building maintenance installers, servicers and repairers Across the economy 24.7%

Technical inspectors and regulatory officers Across the economy 14.4%

Technical occupations in electronics and electrical engineering Across the economy 12.7%

Legislative and senior managers Across the economy 10.4%

Administrative, property and payroll officers Across the economy 7.4%

Financial, insurance and related administrative support workers Across the economy 7.4%

Accounting, insurance and related business administrative occupations Across the economy 6.7%

Other technical trades Across the economy 6.1%

Office administrative assistants - general, legal and medical Across the economy 5.6%

Administrative services managers Across the economy 4.3%

Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. In a small establishment several of these are usually one person, or an outside provider.

All 162 occupations →

Inside this industry

1 row sits directly beneath 23731. Each has a base report of its own.

Code	Industry	Establishments · CA	What is known
237310	Highway, street and bridge construction	2,092	screened at 2373