Temporary Staffing Agency
The industry — Temporary help services
Base industry report for 561320 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 1,497
- Under 10 employeesA
- 30%
- Establishments · USA
- 39,366
- Employment · USA
- 3,928,974
- Payroll · USA
- $177.0B
Of 1,497 Canadian establishments with employees, 30% have fewer than ten — an industry where large establishments carry real weight.
Entry signal — what decides who wins here
Structure decidesThe binding constraint is not executional. Being better than the incumbent does not, by itself, get you in — this one is cleared with capital, an asset, or a permission.
Raise or borrow the entry ticket, or buy an operator who has already paid it. The barrier is money rather than permission, so it yields to a balance sheet — and an acquisition is usually cheaper than a start.
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 · 2
The binding constraint — entry cost
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.
Workers must physically get to the shift, so supply is a commuting radius. The client list is local too. Sized by the labour pool inside one commute.
48.2% of the $24,263.7M of 2024 employment-services operating revenue is about $11.7B of temporary staffing sales, divided across the 1,497 establishments Statistics Canada counts in 561320. The two series have different frames — the sales split covers all of NAICS 5613, including permanent placement — so treat this as the order of magnitude of a branch's billings, not its revenue. What the branch keeps is the gross margin: 16.7% at ManpowerGroup, and a 4.3% operating margin industry-wide.
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.
Market size, derived
Built from the competitor set upward rather than quoted from a forecast. Published TAMs in these categories are frequently reverse-engineered from each other, so any published figure is checked against the vendor arithmetic rather than trusted on its own.
Disclosed revenue from 2 of 5 named vendors. The market is at least this large.
No vendor has both a disclosed revenue and a published share.
Only a revenue floor is known — the true market is larger by whatever the undisclosed vendors earn.
Competitor set · 5 named · 2 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| ManpowerGroupNYSE: MANA | $18.0B | — | FY2025, from its 10-K filed 23 February 2026 |
| Kelly ServicesNASDAQ: KELYAA | $4.3B | — | fiscal year ended 28 December 2025 |
| Randstad, Adecco, Robert HalfC | not disclosed | — | The rest of the global field, all present in Canada. Their filings were not opened for this record, so no revenue is stated. |
| Agilus Work Solutions and the regional Canadian agenciesC | not disclosed | — | Privately held; no revenue published and not researched for this record. These are what an entrant actually meets on a local order. |
| The 1,497 Canadian branchesA | not disclosed | — | Statistics Canada, December 2023 — 710 of them in Ontario, where a licence and a $25,000 security have been compulsory since 1 July 2024. Only 270 employ one to four people; 389 employ 100 or more. |
Evidence
Evidence. ManpowerGroup's and Kelly Services' revenue and gross profit are read from the XBRL data of their most recent 10-K filings — ManpowerGroup for FY2025, filed 23 February 2026, and Kelly for the year ended 28 December 2025, filed 12 February 2026 [A]; the gross margins are arithmetic on those two figures, and they are the anchor on this record because gross margin is the staffing spread itself. The Canadian revenue, expense and operating-margin series is Statistics Canada table 21-10-0063 and the temporary-staffing share of sales is table 21-10-0177, both for NAICS 5613 [A]. The Ontario licence, the $25,000 security and the application fees are from the province's own licensing page for temporary help agencies and recruiters [A]. Counts are Statistics Canada (December 2023) and US County Business Patterns (2022) [A]. What this does not establish: no published series isolates temporary help services (561320) from the wider employment-services group in the revenue and margin tables, so the derived per-establishment figure spans a broader industry than this record. Nothing opened here measures the working-capital cycle the reason rests on — days to collect an invoice, the cost of factoring one — and no Canadian branch's accounts were seen. Licensing rules outside Ontario were not checked. The cut factor is analyst judgment.
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.
Corporate members (400 firms, 1,500+ branch offices) per its What Is ACSESS page. Code of ethics, provincial chapters and the Canadian member of the World Employment Confederation.
The US staffing-industry trade association: legal guidance, research and the ASA Staffing Index. No member count stated on its pages.
ASA's annual convention and expo (Staffing World 2026); the main trade show for staffing-firm owners and their software suppliers. No attendance figure on the page.
Blocked automated access (Cloudflare). Search results show 2026 research and press releases; runs Executive Forum North America (next March 2027, Miami Beach).
Association for IT and engineering staffing firms; Executive Summit Nov 9-11, 2026, monthly IT employment index. No member count on its site.
Staffing-industry news and benchmarking (2026 State of Staffing report, conference calendar).
Staffing Hub's interview podcast with staffing-firm executives; episodes dated September 2026.
Canadian HR Reporter (hrreporter.com) is live and has a recruitment-and-staffing section but is an HR publication rather than a staffing-operator venue. No active staffing-owner subreddit could be verified.
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.
No vertical software market has been recorded along this branch yet. The base industry report says what the subsector typically runs on.