School Bus Contracting
The industry — School and employee bus transportation
Base industry report for 4854 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 879
- Under 10 employeesA
- 40%
- Establishments · USA
- 4,000
- Employment · USA
- 210,606
- Payroll · USA
- $6.2B
Of 879 Canadian establishments with employees, 40% have fewer than ten — an industry where large establishments carry real weight.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
One thing must be trueEntry turns on a single condition that can be named and tested before much is spent. Clear it and this becomes an execution question; fail it and no amount of operating skill helps.
Get to the buyer. The product is reachable and the need is real; the channel is owned by someone else, and a route to it — a partner, a reseller, a trade relationship, a book of clients bought outright — is what has to be built.
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.
This is not a probability of success, and it is not a verdict on you. No survival probability is published per market, and inventing one would be worse than saying so. What the bar reads is how much of the outcome sits inside an operator's control: green means the hurdles are ones a better operator clears, red means the binding constraint is capital, an asset or a permission rather than execution. Someone arriving with an advantage this screen did not assume can win a market shown in red.
Companies named in this market · 4
The binding constraint — distribution
Routes are awarded by school boards on multi-year tenders, and the incumbent has the yard, the drivers and the buses already depreciated. Driver shortage is the binding constraint on every operator, which means winning a tender you cannot staff is worse than losing it. The routing software at 611110 is screened separately.
A board tenders a package of routes covering its own territory, and that package is the market. Sized by routes in one board's tender.
£792.6M of FY2024 School Bus revenue divided by approximately 14,135 vehicles, and the US$608M enterprise value divided by the same fleet. Both are derived from two figures in the same announcement. They are in different currencies and no exchange rate was sourced, so the two must not be read against each other — the point of the pair is that a bus turns over roughly its own purchase price in a year and sells for a fraction of it.
Who you would be competing with
The operators already at scale here, and whoever is buying these businesses. In most of these industries the competition an entrant meets is local, so this is who sets the terms rather than a list of everyone in the trade.
Financials & market size — sourced
Figures that came from a filing, a results release or reputable reporting, each carrying its evidence tier.
The field
Every operator named on this record, and what each one discloses. A private single-site operator discloses nothing, which is the normal case — the listed consolidators are the only window in.
Competitor set · 5 named · 0 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| First StudentA | not disclosed | — | Private since July 2021, owned by EQT Infrastructure; about 40,000 buses at the sale. No revenue published. |
| Student Transportation of America (Pacific Western Group in Canada)A | not disclosed | — | Taken private off the TSX in 2018 at US$7.50 a share by CDPQ and Ullico; 13,500+ vehicles then, 5,200+ Canadian employees now. No revenue published since. |
| Summit School ServicesA | not disclosed | — | The former National Express school bus group — Durham, Stock Transportation, Petermann — bought by I Squared Capital in 2025 at a US$608M enterprise value on £792.6M of FY2024 revenue. |
| Transdev CanadaB | not disclosed | — | Runs student transportation among transit, intercity, rail, paratransit and medical transportation contracts in Canada; Canadian revenue not disclosed. |
| The single-yard family operatorA | not disclosed | — | 201 of 879 Canadian establishments have one to four employees and 531 of the 879 are in Quebec, where the provincial rate is negotiated collectively through the Fédération des transporteurs par autobus. This is the competitive structure on most tenders. |
Nobody here publishes revenue. The market is not sized for that reason — an estimate built on nothing would only look like knowledge.
Evidence
Evidence. Three transactions anchor this record and all three were read in primary releases [A]. The Mobico figures — US$608M enterprise value, the £792.6M / £95.3M FY2024 School Bus result, the 14,135 vehicles and the '10% share, second largest' description — are from the company's own RNS announcement of the proposed sale, read on Investegate because mobicogroup.com refuses automated requests; completion on 14 July 2025 is reported consistently in trade and legal press but the completion release itself could not be opened, so that date is [B] and the slightly different net proceeds figure quoted for completion is not used here. Student Transportation Inc.'s per-share price, premium and fleet are from the 28 February 2018 announcement [A]; the aggregate US$877M sometimes quoted for that deal is not in the release and is not stated. First Student's fleet and daily journeys are from its own July 2021 completion release [A]; the US$4.6B FirstGroup received for First Student and First Transit together is reported consistently but was not read in a filing here, so it is left off the record. Pacific Western Group describes itself on its own site as a division of Student Transportation of America with more than 5,200 employees across Canada [B]. Business counts are Statistics Canada and US County Business Patterns, with per-head figures derived [A]. Not sourced: any Canadian board's contract value, any per-route or per-bus price paid in Canada, driver wage or vacancy series, and the Quebec rate mechanism beyond the fact that the province negotiates with the Fédération des transporteurs par autobus rather than with individual carriers. The driver-supply constraint and the incumbency argument in the reason remain analyst judgment, as does the cut factor.
Where the industry talks
The associations, forums and events where people in this trade actually talk shop — where to listen before entering, and where the first customers are found. Each link was opened on the date shown.
School bus contractors' association founded 1964; site says members across the US and Canada; no member count published. Runs The Bus Stop podcast.
Pupil-transportation professionals, public and contractor; ACTS conference Oct 3-7, 2026 Louisville. No member count published.
School bus fleets, boards/consortia and suppliers in Ontario for 60+ years; news dated Aug 2026. Old osba.on.ca domain no longer resolves.
'600 membres' per site description: private carriers (school and coach), manufacturers and suppliers in Quebec.
BC school transportation association; 2026 conference and BC school bus driver training program on site.
K-12 pupil transportation trade magazine; news and events dated Sept 2026.
School bus industry news since 1991; STN Podcast at episode 323 in Sept 2026.
STN EXPO East April 2027 Charlotte, West July 2027 Reno, TSD Conference Nov 2026 Dallas; contractors and directors together.
Alberta School Bus Contractors' Association (asbca.ca) timed out on automated access and is not listed. Reddit feeds returned 429.
Software serving this industry
Vertical software markets filed along the same branch of NAICS — who sells to these businesses, and who an entrant would have to displace.