How big is the Canadian staffing market in 2026?
Staffing Industry Analysts forecasts the Canadian staffing market will grow 2% in 2026 to approximately C$9.3 billion, recovering from a contraction of just under 1% in 2025. Temporary staffing - the bulk of the market at roughly C$9.0 billion - is expected to rise about 1%, while place-and-search revenue is forecast to rebound 14% after declining 20% in 2025 and 10% in 2024. SIA economist Michael Schultz notes a fair share of the revenue growth is wage-inflation passing into bill rates, with clients resisting full passthrough.
How is Canada different from the US market?
The segment mix is inverted. SIA’s 2026 Canadian Staffing Market Survey - covering firms representing about 45% of the market by revenue - found IT is Canada’s largest temporary staffing segment, followed by industrial at 25% (about C$2.22 billion) and engineering at 15% (C$1.33 billion). Healthcare is the smallest individual segment at just 3%, around C$266 million - a striking contrast with the US, where healthcare staffing is the largest segment at a projected US$38.7 billion.
What Canadian firms are worried about
Survey respondents’ 2026 concerns cluster into four themes: soft market conditions, uncertainty, geopolitics, and AI-driven technology change - with slow economic conditions, candidate supply for in-demand skills, and margin pressure ranking most common.
The StaffingPulse view: Canada rewards a different playbook than the US - IT and engineering depth over healthcare scale, and pricing discipline over volume, because bill-rate growth is doing much of the market’s growing. Cross-border agencies should stop copy-pasting their US strategy north.