Freight transportation arrangement
This industry 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. This industry also includes establishments primarily engaged in arranging and coordinating the transportation and storage of goods without themselves providing actual transportation and storage services. — 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
Of 3,020 Canadian establishments with employees, 67% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.
Where they areA
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.
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.
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.
Screened one level up. Nothing is filed at this exact code; the screen for 4885 Freight transportation arrangement covers it.
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.
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.
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
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 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
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
Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. In a small establishment several of these are usually one person, or an outside provider.
Inside this industry
2 rows sit directly beneath 48851. Each has a base report of its own.
| Code | Industry | Establishments · CA | What is known |
|---|---|---|---|
| 488511 | Marine shipping agencies | 140 | screened at 4885 |
| 488519 | Other freight transportation arrangement | 2,880 | screened at 4885 |