Engineering services — NAICS 541330 industry report

01

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

1–47,46863%

5–91,34911%

10–191,1289%

20–491,1179%

50–995244%

100–1992182%

200–499851%

500+210%

Of 11,910 Canadian establishments with employees, 74% have fewer than ten — mostly small operators.

Where they areA

Ontario4,11535%

Alberta3,10826%

British Columbia1,93616%

Quebec1,64214%

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

Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services, US · opened 2020

83.3%

1 year

64%

3 years

50.8%

5 years

34.3%

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.

02

How businesses here compete

The structural profile of subsector 541, 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 competitionlow capitalUNVERIFIEDinherited from 541 Professional, scientific and technical services

Professional licensing is the barrier and the principal's time is the ceiling. Firms are built from a book of clients, and an aging partner group makes acquisition and succession the common entry.

Who sets the price: The firm, by reputation, against hourly-rate comparison.
The software it runs on: Practice management, time and billing, and a specialist tool per profession — the densest vertical-software territory in the economy.

03

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 5413 Architectural, engineering and related services covers it.

Vertical softwareScreenedfiled at 5413

AEC Design & Engineering SoftwareOne thing must be true

binding constraint: incumbent vulnerability

Incumbent Autodesk (NASDAQ: ADSK)

Autodesk's AECO line alone runs at $3.583B and grew 22%, Trimble's AECO segment adds $1.499B and Bentley carries $1.46B of ARR in infrastructure engineering, and the file formats are the lock — RVT and DGN are read properly only by their owners. An entrant does not compete on features but on interoperability it does not control. Note the sizing here is a floor of $5.1B from Autodesk's and Trimble's disclosed AECO revenue alone, not a market estimate.

NAICS 54134 vendors named6 sourced figuresOpen →

Vertical softwareScreenedfiled at 541370

Geospatial & GIS PlatformsOne thing must be true

binding constraint: incumbent vulnerability + distribution

Incumbent Esri (private, Redlands CA — ArcGIS)

A $12.35B software market in 2026 growing 15.5% a year, and the two ends of it are both closed. Esri holds an estimated 35-40% of it with ArcGIS and does not disclose a revenue figure, so the leader cannot even be sized from filings; beneath it QGIS is a mature, free, OGC-compliant desktop and the open-source stack (PostGIS, GeoServer, Leaflet, MapLibre) sets the price of the core capability at zero. An entrant is squeezed exactly as in enterprise search: free below, an unpriceable incumbent above. Distribution is the harder cut. The paying buyer is a municipality, utility or provincial agency that buys on a multi-year Enterprise Agreement through procurement, and Esri Canada sells that agreement plus its own consulting practice into the same account — the channel and the incumbent are the same organisation. Note what this record is not: 541370 is surveying and mapping SERVICES, and the fragmented implementation layer sitting on top of ArcGIS is a different market with different economics. That layer is a services business, not a software business, and is not screened here.

NAICS 5413706 vendors named6 sourced figuresOpen →

04

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 5413 Architectural, engineering and related services

AEC Design & Engineering SoftwareOne thing must be true

binding constraint: incumbent vulnerability

Incumbent Autodesk (NASDAQ: ADSK)

Autodesk's AECO line alone runs at $3.583B and grew 22%, Trimble's AECO segment adds $1.499B and Bentley carries $1.46B of ARR in infrastructure engineering, and the file formats are the lock — RVT and DGN are read properly only by their owners. An entrant does not compete on features but on interoperability it does not control. Note the sizing here is a floor of $5.1B from Autodesk's and Trimble's disclosed AECO revenue alone, not a market estimate.

NAICS 54134 vendors named6 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.

05

Who works here

The occupations employed in Professional, scientific and technical services, 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

Judges, lawyers and Quebec notaries One industry 71.1%

Computer, software and Web designers and developers Mostly one sector 55.4%

Architects, urban planners and land surveyors Mostly one sector 54.7%

Technical occupations in architecture, drafting, surveying, geomatics and meteorology Mostly one sector 51.2%

Photographers and support occupations in arts and culture Mostly one sector 50.3%

Graphic and interior designers Mostly one sector 48.9%

Civil and mechanical engineers Mostly one sector 45.2%

Electrical, electronics and computer engineers Mostly one sector 40.3%

Managers in engineering, architecture, science and information systems Mostly one sector 40.2%

Natural resources engineers Mostly one sector 39.2%

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

Technical occupations in computer and information systems Across the economy 29.6%

Accounting, insurance and related business administrative occupations Across the economy 24.9%

Technical inspectors and regulatory officers Across the economy 23.1%

Office administrative assistants - general, legal and medical Across the economy 16.8%

Financial, insurance and related administrative support workers Across the economy 16.6%

Legislative and senior managers Across the economy 16.2%

Technical occupations in electronics and electrical engineering Across the economy 11.8%

Survey, statistical and data entry occupations Across the economy 11.5%

Administrative services managers Across the economy 10.7%

Administrative, property and payroll officers Across the economy 9%

Found across at least fourteen of the twenty sectors. But note the shape of this industry: 74% of establishments have fewer than ten employees, and at that size most of these roles are one person wearing several hats, or bought in from outside.

All 162 occupations →