NAICS 4885Industry group · 4-digitregional market2 market records

Freight transportation arrangement

SoftwareFreight Visibility & Transportation Management

This industry group comprises establishments primarily engaged in acting as intermediaries between shippers and carriers. These establishments are usually referred to as freight forwarders, marine shipping agents or customs brokers. They may offer a combination of services which may span transportation modes. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A

Establishments · CanadaA: 3,020
Under 10 employeesA: 67%
Establishments · USA: 22,383
Employment · USA: 323,348
Payroll · USA: $24.3B

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

1–41,41247%

5–961720%

10–1947516%

20–4931610%

50–991234%

100–199552%

200–499201%

500+20%

Of 3,020 Canadian establishments with employees, 67% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.

Where they areA

Ontario1,41947%

Quebec66222%

British Columbia47816%

Alberta2057%

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

Transportation and Warehousing, US · opened 2020

84.1%

1 year

67.4%

3 years

52.7%

5 years

36.1%

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 488, 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 competitionmedium capitalUNVERIFIEDinherited from 488 Support activities for transportation

A varied set of intermediaries. Brokerage is asset-light and contested by software; towing, marine services and airport handling are local and licence-bound.

Who sets the price: Carriers and shippers; brokers earn a spread.
The software it runs on: Freight brokerage and visibility platforms, port and airport systems, towing dispatch.

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.

Operating businessScreened

Freight BrokerageExecution decides

binding constraint: distribution

Asset-light and therefore crowded. The broker's product is a shipper relationship and a carrier list, and both sit with incumbents who have been building them for decades while double-brokering fraud has made shippers less willing to try an unknown name. Working capital is the quiet killer: carriers expect quick pay and shippers pay in 45 days, so growth consumes cash. The visibility and TMS software above this market is screened separately. Update, 2026-09-16 — the capital barrier is genuinely low, and that is not the problem. Federal authority plus $75,000 of financial security is the whole regulatory entry [B], which makes this one of the few markets in this research a person can legally enter with five figures. But active broker authorities stood at about 25,271 in a January 2025 update, down 9.9% year over year [C] — an industry shedding intermediaries — and in 2025 the listed brokers' shares fell on the argument that AI removes the matching work a brokerage sells. The margin here is an information asymmetry, and entering a business whose product is an asymmetry while that asymmetry is being automated is a timing bet rather than a market.

NAICS 48854 vendors named10 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.

Vertical softwareScreened

Freight Visibility & Transportation ManagementOne thing must be true

binding constraint: incumbent vulnerability

Incumbent project44 and FourKites

Two heavily funded visibility platforms plus a public Canadian consolidator (Descartes) already own the carrier-integration graph, which is the actual asset — thousands of carrier connections that take years to build and cannot be copied quickly. The fleet-side record at 4841 is cut for the same underlying reason. 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 48856 vendors named4 sourced figuresOpen →

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.

Companies in this industry · 13

Every company this research names that is filed here or beneath — the operators, and the vendors that sell to them — largest disclosed revenue first. The rank is within the company’s own six-digit industry.

Company	Filed under	Revenue	Rank
C. H. RobinsonNASDAQ:CHRW	Freight transportation arrangement4885	$16.2B	1/13
RXOPrivate	Freight transportation arrangement4885	$5.7B	2/13
LandStar SystemNASDAQ:LSTR	Freight transportation arrangement4885	$4.7B	3/13
E2openPrivate	Freight transportation arrangement4885	—	4/13
Descartes MacroPointPrivate	Freight transportation arrangement4885	—	5/13
FlexportPrivate	Freight transportation arrangement4885	—	6/13
FourKitesPrivate	Freight transportation arrangement4885	—	7/13
LogixboardPrivate	Freight transportation arrangement4885	—	8/13
MVMNTPrivate	Freight transportation arrangement4885	—	9/13
Project44Private	Freight transportation arrangement4885	—	10/13
ShippeoPrivate	Freight transportation arrangement4885	—	11/13
TivePrivate	Freight transportation arrangement4885	—	12/13
TransfixPrivate	Freight transportation arrangement4885	—	13/13

Who works here

The occupations employed in Transportation and warehousing, 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

Mail and message distribution occupations One industry 90.8%

Train crew operating occupations One industry 90.7%

Transportation officers and controllers One industry 75.7%

Transport truck and transit drivers Mostly one sector 65.4%

Managers in transportation and postal and courier services Mostly one sector 63.9%

Taxi, personal service and delivery service drivers Mostly one sector 57.7%

Contractors and supervisors, technical maintenance trades and heavy equipment and transport operators Mostly one sector 22.6%

Water and rail transport operators and labourers and related occupations Mostly one sector 11.4%

Automotive service technicians Mostly one sector 9.1%

Crane operators and water well drillers Mostly one sector 6.6%

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

Administrative and financial supervisors Across the economy 13.9%

Customer and information services representatives Across the economy 5.8%

Financial, insurance and related administrative support workers Across the economy 5.1%

Survey, statistical and data entry occupations Across the economy 5%

Technical inspectors and regulatory officers Across the economy 3.9%

Technical occupations in electronics and electrical engineering Across the economy 3.7%

Legislative and senior managers Across the economy 3.3%

Administrative services managers Across the economy 3.1%

Administrative, property and payroll officers Across the economy 2.7%

Shoe repairers, shoemakers and upholsterers Across the economy 2.7%

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 4885, and 3 in all once every level is counted. Each has a base report of its own.

Code	Industry	Establishments · CA	What is known
48851	Freight transportation arrangement	3,020	screened at 4885

Alongside it, under 488 Support activities for transportation

Code	Industry	Establishments · CA	What is known
4881	Support activities for air transportation	1,084	Airport Operations & Ground Handling Systems
4882	Support activities for rail transportation	249	Rail Contract Services & Terminal Operation
4883	Support activities for water transportation	735	Marina Services & Boatyard Operation
4884	Support activities for road transportation	3,629	Towing & Roadside Dispatch Software Towing & Roadside Recovery
4889	Other support activities for transportation	1,208	Packing, Crating & Driving Services