NAICS is the North American Industry Classification System — the six-digit code set that the United States, Canada and Mexico use to say what a business does. Adopted by OMB in 1997 and revised every five years, it is the classification underneath federal economic statistics, small-business size standards, procurement, and most commercial firmographic data. It is a code list, not an interface: the structure is published as spreadsheets, and there is no authoritative endpoint that resolves a code to its industry.
NAICS
NAICS is the closest thing North America has to a shared primary key for what a company does. OMB adopted it in 1997 to replace the Standard Industrial Classification, and it is maintained trilaterally: the Economic Classification Policy Committee — the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the Bureau of Labor Statistics and the US Census Bureau, among others — recommends revisions to OMB after discussions with Statistics Canada and Mexico’s Instituto Nacional de Estadística y Geografía. Canada publishes it as NAICS Canada 2022 Version 1.0, Mexico as SCIAN.
- Five hierarchical levels - A 2-digit sector, a 3-digit subsector, a 4-digit industry group, a 5-digit NAICS industry, and a 6-digit national industry. NAICS United States 2022 holds 308 industry groups, 689 five-digit industries and 1,012 national industries.
- Three-country comparability stops at five digits - The 5-digit level is where the US, Canada and Mexico agree. The sixth digit is national, which is why a US 6-digit code has no guaranteed Canadian counterpart.
- A five-year revision cycle - The classification is reviewed every five years. OMB solicited comment on the ECPC’s proposed 2027 updates on 13 July 2026; it will be the sixth revision since 1997.
- Concordances are part of the standard - Census publishes 2017-to-2022 crosswalks alongside the structure, because a revision silently changes what a longitudinal series means.
- Load-bearing well outside statistics - SBA size standards, federal procurement, lending disclosure and effectively every commercial firmographic product key off NAICS codes.
The interesting thing for API operations is the delivery. NAICS is a US Government work, free of
charge and free of licence, and yet it reaches you as 2-6 digit_2022_Codes.xlsx. There is no
official API that resolves 513210 to Software Publishers, no JSON or CSV distribution at the
canonical path, and no versioned identifier scheme for a code that means one thing in the 2017
vintage and another in the 2022 one. The artifacts themselves are genuinely open — they return 200
to an anonymous client — but the landing page that indexes them refuses automated retrieval
outright, which is a fair summary of the whole posture: the data is public, and the access path
assumes a human with a spreadsheet.
That gap is why every vendor with a firmographic product ships its own NAICS lookup, why those copies drift across revisions, and why an agent asked to classify a company has no neutral authority to consult. The standard is not the problem. The distribution is.
