Administrative and support services
This subsector comprises establishments primarily engaged in activities that support the day-to-day operations of other organizations. This includes activities such as administration, hiring and placing personnel, preparing documents, taking orders from clients, collecting payments for claims, arranging travel, providing security and surveillance, cleaning buildings, and packaging and labelling products. These activities are often undertaken in-house by establishments found in many sectors of the economy. The establishments of this subsector specialize in one or more of these activities and can therefore provide services to clients in a variety of industries and, in some cases, to households. The individual industries of this subsector are defined on the basis of the particular process in which they are engaged and the particular services they provide. — Statistics Canada, NAICS 2022A
- Establishments · CanadaA
- 50,768
- Under 10 employeesA
- 73%
- Establishments · USA
- 421,862
- Employment · USA
- 13,100,276
- Payroll · USA
- $731.5B
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 50,768 Canadian establishments with employees, 73% 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 561, 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.
Janitorial, landscaping, security and staffing: low capital and easy to start, so margins are competed down to labour cost. Route density and contract retention decide the outcome.
- Who sets the price
- Tender and the client's procurement; labour is most of the cost.
- The software it runs on
- Workforce scheduling, route and work-order management, staffing front and back office.
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.
Running another company's administration is a real recurring-revenue services business with almost no capital requirement, and the screen does not cut it on demand. It cuts on what the work is worth once it is automated by someone else. The disclosed players are large and growing slowly: Concentrix did $9.8B in fiscal 2025, up 2.2%, and Genpact $5.08B, up 6.6% [A]. TaskUs shows the margin the work carries at scale — $995.0M of 2024 revenue at a 21.1% adjusted EBITDA margin [A]. A small entrant has none of that scale and the same exposure: the tasks that are cheap enough to outsource are also the tasks most exposed to automation, and the customer captures that saving at renewal, not the provider. A services business whose price falls as its delivery improves is a treadmill.
The work exists, and it is all already under contract. This is a bid market: buildings are cleaned and maintained under multi-year master agreements held by a handful of operators who can staff a national portfolio, and a new entrant does not compete on price so much as on the ability to survive a procurement process. ABM turned $8.75B of fiscal 2025 revenue, up 4.6%, and booked a record $1.9B of new sales in the same year [B] — the incumbents are winning the renewals. The visible per-contract economics are unusually clear for a fragmented industry: Sodexo's expansion of one health-system environmental-services contract from 11 to 26 sites in January 2026 carried a portfolio value of about $70M, roughly $2.7M per site [derived]. A small contractor can win one building; the step from one building to a portfolio is the part that is closed.
Recruiting is reachable — a founder with a phone can bill a placement fee in the first month, and the 4,708 Canadian establishments in this group are evidence of how little it costs to start. The cut is where the value is settling. AI screening is not a product an entrant can own; it is a feature the employer's system of record is absorbing, and that layer is the one growing. Workday's revenue rose 13% to $9,552M in the year to 31 January 2026, while the agencies sitting above it went backwards: Robert Half's revenues fell to $5,379M from $5,796M, with permanent placement down 10%, and ManpowerGroup's were down 2.1% in constant currency. A screening tool that does not hold the requisition has to buy distribution from the vendor that does, and that vendor ships the same feature to every customer it already bills. The agency side is no kinder: the fee follows the placement, not the brand, a client can run three agencies at one requisition and pay only the one that lands it, and 1,466 of the 4,708 Canadian establishments have fewer than five people. There is no scale position here to buy into, and the layer that is accumulating one is not for sale to an entrant.
The business funds payroll before the invoice clears, which makes it a working-capital business wearing a services costume — every new placement consumes cash and factoring takes the margin that would otherwise fund growth. Gross margins are thin, clients switch on price, and workers switch for a dollar an hour. Screened alongside the general employment-services record at 5613.
Luxury travel is the one part of the travel trade that grew rather than disintermediated — Virtuoso's network reports about $90B of transactions with sales up 12% in the first half of 2025 and hotel sales up nearly 30% year over year — but the demand reaches advisors through the consortium, not the market. Virtuoso, Internova and Travel Edge control supplier commissions, preferred-partner rates and the client relationships that make the model work, and a new advisor must join one to be competitive. That is a licensing arrangement wearing the clothes of a business. Note the contrast with the software screened at 561510, where published pricing shows the tooling around this trade is worth almost nothing.
Recurring monthly revenue is the whole asset and the incumbents buy it by the account, at multiples a start-up cannot outbid while also paying for installation up front. Attrition is the number that decides everything, and it is worst in the first two years — exactly when a new entrant's book is young. DIY cameras have meanwhile taken the residential entry point where a small operator would have started.
The barrier that lets a founder in with a vacuum and a truck lets in everyone behind them. Contracts are re-tendered annually on price, the labour is scarce and increasingly expensive, and nothing accumulates except route density in one city — which is a real asset and takes a decade to build. The version that works is a disciplined roll-up of small routes, which is a capital-allocation business rather than an operating one.
The asset is route density in one suburb and nothing else, and it takes years to build while any competitor with a trailer can undercut a single stop. Snow is the profitable half and it is a weather derivative: a warm winter on a seasonal contract book is a loss the summer has to carry. The industry's software is screened separately at the same code.
A residual code holding packaging and labelling services, convention and trade show organisers, and a long tail of unlike activities. The screen's finding is that the code is not a market and cannot be screened as one. Packaging and labelling is contract work sold to manufacturers on price per unit against a machine's throughput; trade show organising is an events business whose economics are venue deposits and exhibitor deposits, and whose 2020–2021 revenue went to zero — a risk profile that belongs nowhere near the same screen. Anything genuinely attractive inside 5619 needs its own record at the four-digit-plus level, and this record exists to say so rather than to pretend a residual was assessed.
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.
NiCE at $2.95B and Five9 at $1.15B are both growing double digits and both now selling AI deflection into the same seat count — which is the harder fact for an entrant: the incumbents are already pricing the transition away from per-seat licensing, and they hold the telephony and compliance-recording integrations that make a contact centre switchable at all.
Heavily funded on both sides, with SAP Concur bundling expense and travel into ERP relationships already signed. The category's revenue depends on booking commission, so it is exposed to both travel volume and supplier margin — two things the vendor does not control. Sourced update: both ends now disclose, and the challenger has filed its first 10-K. Amex GBT turned $2.718B of FY2025 revenue into $532M of adjusted EBITDA and $111M of net income. Navan grew 31% to $702.3M in the year to 31 January 2026 and lost $398.0M — a loss that widened from $181.1M mostly on one-off items rather than on the operating line: $118.0M to extinguish the Vista facility at IPO and $182.1M of stock-based compensation, against an operating loss of $196.9M. On the company's own non-GAAP basis the year was near breakeven. Gross margin improved to 71%, but the revenue is still commission on $9.1B of gross booking volume, which is the exposure the screen is about.
This market is squeezed from both ends and the middle is empty. Above it sits a distribution oligopoly — Amadeus at €6.517B, Sabre at $2.8B, Travelport at ~$1.5B — that owns access to the inventory any booking product must reach, so an entrant's first problem is a supply contract rather than a product. Below it, the agency-facing tools have already priced themselves at the prosumer floor: published list prices run $19–$111 per month across Travefy, TravelJoy, TripCreator, Tourwriter, Wetu, WeTravel, Ezus, TrekkSoft, Rezdy and Bókun. Now multiply it out. ARC accredits about 9,873 travel agencies in the United States, and the entire Canadian travel agency industry turns over $2.8B of revenue — itself down 2.8% in 2025. At the midpoint of the published pricing (~$65/month, or $780 a year), the whole US ARC-accredited base buying itinerary software from a single vendor would be worth about $7.7M a year [UNVERIFIED arithmetic on sourced inputs]. Add tour operators, Canadian agencies and the non-accredited long tail and a generous ceiling is somewhere in the low tens of millions — for the entire category, split across at least ten vendors. There is no version of this where a new entrant's share of that pool funds a sales team. The vendors that do earn a living have solved it the same way the restaurant, salon and ticketing records describe: they take a cut of the booking. Bókun charges $49/month plus 1.5% per booking; Rezdy $49/month plus 3%. That is the actual business, and it requires becoming the merchant of record — payments underwriting, chargebacks and float — before the software matters. The tour-and-activity half of this category is already screened at 487, where the OTAs give the same software away to secure inventory. The article that prompted this record is itself the evidence: four separate software categories (booking, tour building, mid-office accounting, CRM) with a different vendor list in each, and the agencies stitching them together with spreadsheets. That looks like an integration opportunity until you price it — the buyer paying $39 a month for itinerary building is not the buyer who funds a systems-integration product.
Guard-company software has two incumbents, and a buyer usually needs both of them. The back office of the big guard firms runs on TEAM Software. WinTeam is an ERP that holds payroll, billing and job costing for contract security and janitorial companies. TEAM says 65% of the largest US security companies run on it [C, vendor, checked 2026-10-08]. It has sat inside WorkWave, an IFS company, since September 2021 [B, from the 561722 record]. The field layer has already been rolled up by Trackforce. Guard tours, post orders, incident reports, mobile patrols and client portals are its ground. Trackforce is backed by K1 Investment Management. It bought Silvertrac, the small-firm tool with 600+ North American customers, in January 2020 [B]. It then bought Montreal's TrackTik in June 2022, on undisclosed terms [B: BetaKit, K1 release]. TrackTik had raised $54.5M by then, the last $45M in January 2019 from Georgian and CDPQ [B]. Trackforce now sells TrackTik, GuardTek (its EMEA product) and Silvertrac under one roof, and claims 600k+ active users in 50+ countries [C, vendor]. The only Canadian champion in the category is therefore already inside a US private-equity platform. The funded challengers attack the gap between the two: one system for back office and field, sold to small and mid-size guard firms. Belfry (New York) raised a $12M Series A in January 2025 led by Base10 Partners, bringing it to $20M in total [B]. Guardhouse (Sydney) started on an A$850K seed in 2020 [B]. It took growth equity from Sundance Growth in March 2026 [B: BDO deal note, amount undisclosed]. In August 2026 it bought Florida's Mobohubb to add patrol verification and push into the US [C, vendor release]. Guard Owl reportedly raised a $3M seed led by Tower Research Capital in February 2026 [C, not confirmed from a primary source]. Below them is a long, cheap tail. QR-Patrol (Terracom, Greece) lists guard-tour plans from $3.20 a guard a month, and Guardix from $8.99 a user a month [C, vendor price pages]. OfficerReports (Baton Rouge) claims 700+ companies [C], and Celayix sells shift scheduling across security and healthcare. The buyers are consolidating faster than the software. Allied Universal closed its $5.28B purchase of G4S in March 2021, creating a $18B-revenue firm with 750,000+ staff [B]. Every large consolidation takes a WinTeam-or-Trackforce customer off the market for a newcomer. What is left is thousands of small, thin-margin guard firms. The best-funded entrant in years (Belfry, $20M) and an Australian roll-up (Guardhouse) are already chasing them. Incumbent vulnerability decides it. Neither incumbent is weak, the consolidators below them are pulling share toward the enterprise products, and the SMB seat is contested by Belfry, Guardhouse, Silvertrac and a sub-$10-a-guard tail. The only angle worth keeping is a narrow one for an operator: in BC, guard licensing and compliance tracking under the provincial security-worker licence regime could be sold as an add-on that plugs into TrackTik or WinTeam, rather than as a competing platform.
Pest-control software has already been bought. Three owners hold the named category leaders. WorkWave, an IFS company, sells PestPac to the enterprise end. ServiceTitan bought ServicePro/ServSuite in February 2021 [B] and FieldRoutes, formerly PestRoutes, in a deal announced 4 January 2022 [B]. ServiceTitan's own homepage now routes its "Pest Control" trade to FieldRoutes [C]. EverCommerce bought Briostack in January 2021 [B]. All acquisition terms in those releases are undisclosed. The biggest buyers run their own systems or the incumbent's. Rollins (NYSE: ROL; $3.76B 2025 revenue, 26 acquisitions in 2025, more than two million customers [A, 10-K]) runs branches on its proprietary BOSS system with virtual route management, plus InSite for commercial customers. Rentokil Terminix is moving its North American branches onto PestPac. Its 2024 results say the share of technicians on PestPac and the ServiceTrak app rose from about 40% to about 49% in the year, and 58 branches (987 technicians, $373M of revenue) moved onto the unified platform [A, Rentokil 6-K]. The two largest operators in the market are therefore not open to a new system of record. One runs its own software, and the other has picked PestPac. The small end is priced near the floor. GorillaDesk sells at $49, $99 and $149 a month, month to month, with free data migration and an account freeze for seasonal businesses [C, vendor pricing page]. Jobber (400,000+ home-service pros claimed [C]; $176M raised [B]) lists chemical tracking, routing and a client portal on its pest-control page. Pocomos (300+ businesses claimed [C]) is still independent. FieldRoutes prices on active customer count and publishes no prices [C]. Recent venture money has gone around the system of record, not into it. Pest Share (Nampa, Idaho) raised a $28M Series A led by Integrity Growth Partners in September 2025 [B]. It is a marketplace that routes apartment pest jobs to 400+ vetted providers, not operator software. Driven (Provo, formerly Pest IQ; $600K pre-seed from Startup Ignition Ventures [B]) sells a performance layer that sits on top of PestPac, FieldRoutes, Briostack and GorillaDesk. Both bets assume the operator software is settled. The regulatory record is real but already met. BC's Integrated Pest Management Regulation (s.35) requires a per-day, per-location record of use: recipient, certified applicator, pest, product and PCP registration number, rate and quantity, weather for outdoor use, and the IPM monitoring method and threshold. Section 83 says the record must be kept 3 years [A]. That is a report template, not a product, and Jobber already ships chemical tracking. Incumbent vulnerability decides it. The incumbents are owned by well-capitalised strategic or PE parents, the top buyers are taken, and the open SMB tier is $49–$149 a month. What remains is an operator angle: a BC firm that knows exactly which provincial annual-report fields the US tools miss could sell a compliance add-on that plugs into them.
Cleaning software is two markets that share a name, and both are taken. Residential and maid services go to the horizontal platforms. Jobber (Edmonton; $176M raised to February 2023, the last $100M led by General Atlantic [B]) and Housecall Pro (Denver; $125M in June 2022 from Permira and Vista Credit Partners [B]) sell to cleaners as one trade among 50+, with payments, quoting, CRM and marketing in one login. Jobber now claims 400,000+ service professionals and Housecall Pro 200,000+ [C, vendor]; the best-known cleaning-specific tool, ZenMaid, claims 3,000+ maid-service owners [C, vendor]. The cleaning-only booking tools (ZenMaid, Launch27, BookingKoala) have no disclosed venture funding and compete on price and ease of use against products funded two orders of magnitude more heavily. Commercial janitorial does not go horizontal — it goes to TEAM Software. Contract cleaning needs multi-site inspections, job costing against a fixed monthly contract, payroll for high-turnover crews, and client-facing quality reports, which Jobber and Housecall Pro do not centre. TEAM's WinTeam ERP says it runs 50% of the largest US cleaning companies [C, vendor] and has sat inside WorkWave (an IFS company, EQT-controlled) since September 2021 [B]. Below it the small-contractor tier is already crowded: Swept (Halifax; US$2M seed 2017, iNovia and Afore [B]), Otuvy (the former CleanTelligent, Provo; inspections and work orders, 105,000+ users claimed [C]) and Janitorial Manager (Toledo; owned by Double A Solutions). So the answer to whether horizontal beats specific is: yes at the residential end, no at the commercial end, and in neither is there an unoccupied seat. The vacation-rental turnover niche is a marketplace (Turno, formerly TurnoverBnB; $4.5M Series A 2021 led by RET Ventures [B]) more than software. The owner's own operating record (561722 Commercial Janitorial Services) found 6,009 of 10,768 Canadian janitorial firms have four employees or fewer — buyers who pay $50–$300 a month and churn when the business does. Incumbent vulnerability is what decides it: the incumbents are not weak at either end. The only angle worth keeping is an operator's one: a BC contractor who knows exactly what Swept and Otuvy miss can sell a narrow add-on to them, not against them.
ServiceTitan's acquisition of Aspire extended the field-service incumbent into green industry. The seasonal revenue cycle also compresses willingness to pay outside the growing season. Sourced update: Aspire now sits inside ServiceTitan, which closed FY2026 at $961M growing 24% — the landscaping buyer is being served by a general trades platform with a balance sheet, not by a specialist.
Pool service software has a clear owner at the small-route end and two different owners at the top, and the top is where the customers are going. Skimmer owns the owner-operator and small-crew market. It is Austin-based, founded 2017, and took $74M of growth capital from Mainsail Partners in October 2024, with Unbundled Capital (its 2020 backer) staying on the board [B: Mainsail release]. It now says more than 35,000 pool service professionals servicing 1,000,000+ pools in North America use it, and that it is "trusted by more pool service companies than any other company in North America" [C, vendor]. Its price is $1 a serviced location a month up to 49 pools and $2 from 50 to 1,000 pools, with paid add-ons for texts, an AI phone line, marketing and bookkeeping [C, vendor pricing page, checked 2026-10-08]. In August 2026 it bought Pool Builder Geek and Poologics to move into pool construction [C, Skimmer release] — it is widening, not defending. The buyer is consolidating, and the consolidators are not choosing Skimmer. Private-equity roll-ups are buying route companies city by city: SPS PoolCare (Storr Group; 30+ branches in five states, 1,000+ employees) standardised on ServiceTitan in March 2026 [B: ServiceTitan release]; Azureon (O2 Investment Partners; Subcomm was its 13th acquisition, August 2026) chose ServiceTitan in December 2025 [B: GlobeNewswire via Nasdaq; Barchart via Webull]. National Pool Partners, "the largest multi-regional pool service company in the United States," chose Pool Brain in September 2023 after testing "just about every software option for over 2 years" [B: Field Technologies]; America's Swimming Pool Company (257 locations, 22 states; owned by Apax-backed Authority Brands since 2018) chose Pool Brain in December 2024 [C, Pool Brain release; B for the 2018 deal]. So the enterprise seats are being decided by ServiceTitan (public, Nasdaq: TTAN) and Pool Brain (Phoenix, no disclosed funding), not by a newcomer. Equipment makers are buying the software layer. Fluidra bought 100% of Pooltrackr, the leading pool-service platform in Australia and New Zealand (2m+ pools under management claimed), in 2025 and said it intends to scale the model globally [B: SPLASH; C for the pool count]. RB Retail & Service Solutions, the pool-and-spa retail POS, has been inside Fullsteam since June 2020 [C, RB's own announcement]. Below that, the tier is crowded and cheap. Pool Office Manager, PoolTrac ("$1 per visited pool"), PoolCarePRO, Paythepoolman ($50 a month plus $15 a technician), PoolDial and ProValet all sell routing, chemistry logs, dosing calculators, photos and invoicing at roughly $1–2 a pool or $15–65 a technician a month [C, vendor pages]. Dosing math is a free feature — Orenda, a chemical maker, gives its calculator away in an app. Pool Office Manager already markets the obvious northern wedge, seasonal openings and closings for routes that do not repeat all year [C, vendor]. Incumbent vulnerability decides it: the small end is held by a $74M-funded leader pricing at a dollar or two a pool, the large end is being decided inside PE roll-ups by ServiceTitan and Pool Brain, and the features a newcomer would lead with are already in five products. Market size UNVERIFIED — no pool-software vendor publishes revenue. Classification note: pool cleaning and maintenance services sit in NAICS 561799 (all other services to buildings and dwellings) in the Canadian system — the US equivalent is 561790 — so that is the customer industry this record is filed under.
Catalogued categories — named, not analysed
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 · 109
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 |
|---|---|---|---|
| ConcentrixPrivate | Office administrative services5611 | $9.8B | 1/4 |
| ABM IndustriesNYSE:ABM | Facilities support services5612 | $8.7B | 1/5 |
| ADT Security ServicesNYSE:ADT | Security systems services (except locksmiths)561621 | $5.1B | 1/5 |
| GenpactNYSE:G | Office administrative services5611 | $5.1B | 2/4 |
| Kelly ServicesNASDAQ:KELYA | Temporary help services561320 | $4.3B | 1/1 |
| Amex GBTPrivate | Travel arrangement and reservation services5615 | $2.7B | 1/4 |
| BrightViewPrivate | Landscaping services561730 | $2.7B | 1/8 |
| TaskUsPrivate | Office administrative services5611 | $1.2B | 3/4 |
| Five9NASDAQ:FIVN | Business support services5614 | $1.1B | 1/4 |
| Lindblad ExpeditionsPrivate | Tour operators561520 | $771M | 1/4 |
| NavanPrivate | Travel arrangement and reservation services5615 | $702M | 2/4 |
| Emerald Expositions EventsNYSE:EEX | Other support services5619 | $463M | 1/4 |
| JobberPrivate | Janitorial services (except window cleaning)561722 | — | 1/17 |
| IFSPrivate | Security guard and patrol services561612 | — | 1/10 |
| BokunPrivate | Travel agencies561510 | — | 1/11 |
And 94 more on the companies page.
Who works here
The occupations employed in Administrative and support, waste management and remediation services, most concentrated in it first. The share is measured against the whole sector, not this industry — the published cross-tabulation stops there.
Tagged to this industry
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. But note the shape of this industry: 73% 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.
Inside this industry
8 rows sit directly beneath 561, and 61 in all once every level is counted. Each has a base report of its own.
Alongside it, under 56 Administrative and support, waste management and remediation services
| Code | Industry | Establishments · CA | What is known |
|---|---|---|---|
| 562 | Waste management and remediation services | 3,463 | Waste Hauler Route ManagementWaste Treatment & DisposalSeptic & Portable Sanitation Services |