Private Household Employment
The industry — Private households
Base industry report for 8141 →- Establishments · CanadaA
- 6,933
- Under 10 employeesA
- 97%
Of 6,933 Canadian establishments with employees, 97% have fewer than ten — an industry of very small operators.
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.
Widen the definition, or stack this niche with others. The prize as drawn will not carry a business on its own; it may still be worth owning as one line of several.
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 — market size
This code does not describe businesses. It counts households that employ someone directly — a nanny, a housekeeper, a caregiver, a gardener — and the 6,933 Canadian 'establishments' are those households, 97% of them with fewer than ten employees, as one would expect of a family [A]. There is nothing to enter, because being a household that hires help is not a business. The record exists so the row is answered rather than left blank. The businesses that serve the same need are filed where they belong: home care agencies at 6216, where the 621610 study found a fragmented software market and a consolidating visit-verification rail; cleaning and landscaping under 5617; child care at 6244; and the placement agencies that match households with domestic staff under employment services at 5613. Each of those has its own record. If there is an idea inside this code, it is payroll and compliance for households as employers — source deductions, records of employment, workers' compensation — and that is a software product sold to families, not an industry an operator joins.
The 'establishment' is a private home employing domestic staff. It has no market, no competitors and no customers — only an employment relationship.
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 · 3 named · 0 disclose revenue
| Name | Revenue | Share | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| HeartPayrollC | not disclosed | — | Household payroll and tax service for families employing nannies and caregivers. Publishes its price but no revenue and no customer count, so the only thing sourced about it is what it charges. |
| General small-business payroll servicesC | not disclosed | — | A household can run a nanny's pay through any ordinary small-business payroll product, and many do. None markets to this segment specifically; none was researched for this record. They are named because they are the reason a specialist cannot price above them. |
| Nanny and caregiver placement agenciesC | not disclosed | — | Filed at 5613 (employment services), where they have their own record. They reach the household at the moment of hiring, which is the moment the payroll question arises — so they own the distribution a payroll entrant would need. |
Nobody here publishes revenue. The market is not sized for that reason — an estimate built on nothing would only look like knowledge.
Evidence
Evidence. The count and the definition of what it measures are Statistics Canada's [A], and the codes the related businesses fall under were checked against NAICS 2022 (Canada) [A]. The competitive field is the one part of this record that could be researched, and only because the reason names an adjacency: HeartPayroll's published price of $50 a month plus $10 for WCB/WSIB was read off its own site [C] — a vendor's own price list, not a filing. The $4.2M ceiling is arithmetic on that price and the Statistics Canada count, shown with its method and tiered UNVERIFIED because it assumes complete conversion, which no market achieves. No revenue, customer count or market size was found for household payroll in Canada, and no company in this field publishes one; that is stated here rather than parked in the figures. Nothing else was researched, because there is no industry here to research — the record is a classification note.
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.
Membership body for nannies, newborn-care specialists and agencies; runs credential exams and an annual conference. No member count published.
Small Canadian body listing caregiver agencies, educators and consultants as members; paid membership tiers on its site.
Member-led organising group for migrant care workers, farm workers and students; the main voice of live-in caregivers in Canada.
US membership organisation of nannies, house cleaners and home-care workers; chapters and affiliates.
Annual nanny conference (Oct 2-4 2026) that also organises National Nanny Training Day events by city.
Nanny-industry podcast by Nannypalooza's Sue Downey and Lora Brawley of NannyCareHub.
Reddit blocks automated access from here; search results show an active subreddit covering wages, contracts, taxes and daily nanny life.
No Canadian nanny-employer association exists: acna.ca is a 'launching soon' placeholder, and cca-acaf.ca (Canadian Caregivers Association), caregiversactioncentre.org and domesticestatemanagement.org (DEMA) no longer resolve.