Rental and leasing services
This subsector comprises establishments primarily engaged in renting or leasing tangible goods, such as automobiles, computers, consumer goods, and industrial machinery and equipment, to customers in return for a periodic payment. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A
- Establishments · CanadaA
- 5,976
- Under 10 employeesA
- 66%
- Establishments · USA
- 50,983
- Employment · USA
- 492,141
- Payroll · USA
- $31.9B
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 5,976 Canadian establishments with employees, 66% 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 532, 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 fleet bought with debt and earned back by utilisation. National consolidators buy independents, which is both the competitive threat and the exit.
- Who sets the price
- Utilisation against the local competitor's fleet.
- The software it runs on
- Rental management — contracts, availability, maintenance and telematics.
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.
It looks like retail and behaves like a consumer-credit book. The operator buys the furniture, the appliance or the television, keeps it on the balance sheet, and collects weekly — so growth consumes cash and the real skill is underwriting and collections rather than merchandising. Upbound Group, the largest operator, turned $4,695.1M of revenue in 2025, up 8.7%, and was carrying $1,202.3M of on-rent merchandise at year end to do it [A]: about 26 cents of depreciated inventory standing behind every dollar of annual revenue. Scale decides the rest. The same filing shows the Rent-A-Center store estate going backwards — same-store sales down 2.2% and segment revenue down about $83.2M on store closures and refranchising — while the group still grew, because the growth came from Acima's virtual lease-to-own placed at a third-party retailer's checkout. That channel reaches the same credit-impaired customer without a store at all, which removes the one advantage a local entrant had. A single store can be opened; it competes for that customer against a national book with better loss data, and against fintechs Upbound's own 10-K names as competitors.
A rental yard is a balance sheet with a counter attached: utilisation on depreciating equipment is the only number that matters, and it is lowest in the first two years while the customer base is being built. The national chains buy equipment at fleet prices and can sustain lower utilisation. The equipment-rental software at 5324 is screened separately, and reached the same conclusion about how few yards there are to sell to.
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.
Above the independents sit three companies — Enterprise, Hertz, Avis — that build in-house, and below them a long tail of single-location operators at ACVs in the low thousands. The reachable middle is small enough that the ceiling is a lifestyle business, the same arithmetic that cut the equipment-rental record at 5324. 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.
Genuinely underserved and genuinely small. North American rental yards number in the low thousands at achievable ACVs, and the largest — United Rentals, Sunbelt — build in-house. A workable lifestyle business, not a venture-scale one, and the same conclusion the funeral-home record reached at 812210. 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.
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 · 26
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| United RentalsPrivate | General rental centres5323 | $16.1B | 1/7 |
| Upbound GroupPrivate | Consumer goods rental5322 | $4.7B | 1/7 |
| HercNYSE:HRI | General rental centres5323 | $4.4B | 2/7 |
| PROG HoldingsPrivate | Consumer goods rental5322 | $2.4B | 2/7 |
| KatapultPrivate | Consumer goods rental5322 | $292M | 3/7 |
| Aaron'sPrivate | Consumer goods rental5322 | — | 4/7 |
| Alert EMSPrivate | Commercial and industrial machinery and equipment rental and leasing5324 | — | 1/7 |
| Bluebird Auto Rental SystemsPrivate | Automotive equipment rental and leasing5321 | — | 1/5 |
| EasyhomeEHMEF | Consumer goods rental5322 | — | 5/7 |
| FlexshopperNASDAQ:FPAY | Consumer goods rental5322 | — | 6/7 |
| GoodShufflePrivate | Commercial and industrial machinery and equipment rental and leasing5324 | — | 2/7 |
| Home Depot rental countersPrivate | General rental centres5323 | — | 3/7 |
| HQ RentalPrivate | Automotive equipment rental and leasing5321 | — | 2/5 |
| Lou-TecPrivate | General rental centres5323 | — | 4/7 |
| Point of RentalPrivate | Commercial and industrial machinery and equipment rental and leasing5324 | — | 3/7 |
And 11 more on the companies page.
Who works here
The occupations employed in Real estate and rental and leasing, 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
4 rows sit directly beneath 532, and 21 in all once every level is counted. Each has a base report of its own.
| Code | Industry | Establishments · CA | What is known |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5321 | Automotive equipment rental and leasing | 1,959 | Vehicle Rental & Car-Share Operations Software |
| 5322 | Consumer goods rental | 1,018 | Rent-to-Own & Consumer Goods Rental |
| 5323 | General rental centres | 296 | General Rental Centres |
| 5324 | Commercial and industrial machinery and equipment rental and leasing | 2,703 | Equipment Rental Management Software |