North American Industry Classification System (NAICS)

What is NAICS?

NAICS is a system for classifying establishments by type of economic activity. Its purposes are:

(1) to facilitate the collection, tabulation, presentation, and analysis of data relating to establishments.
(2) to promote uniformity and comparability in the presentation and analysis of statistical data describing the economy. NAICS is used by statistical agencies in Canada, the US and Mexico that collect or publish data by industry. It is also widely used by federal and provincial agencies, trade associations, private businesses, and other organizations.

INEGI of Mexico, Statistics Canada, and the United States Office of Management and Budget (OMB), through its Economic Classification Policy Committee (ECPC), collaborated on NAICS to make the industrial statistics produced in the three countries comparable. NAICS is the first industry classification system developed in accordance with a single principle of aggregation, the principle that producing units that use similar production processes should be grouped together in the classification. NAICS also reflects in a much more explicit way the enormous changes in technology and in the growth and diversification of services that have marked recent decades. Industry statistics presented using NAICS are also comparable with statistics compiled according to the latest revision of the United Nations' International Standard Industrial Classification (ISIC, Revision 3) for some sixty high-level groupings.