NAICS (North American Industry Classification System)

The North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) codes business activity across Canada, the United States, and Mexico into a common hierarchy: six-digit codes that define what a firm does for statistical, tax, and procurement purposes.

In procurement, NAICS matters in two places. Governments use it to classify industries and business size — in the United States, small-business status is defined per NAICS code by employee count, which gates set-aside eligibility. And buyers and prime contractors use the codes to filter and find suppliers, so the codes a firm registers under decide which opportunity feeds and supplier databases it appears in. Firms straddling two codes should register both: misclassification is usually invisible until the opportunities that matter never arrive.

@misc{pi-2026-definitions-naics,
  author = {{The Procurement Institution}},
  title  = {NAICS (North American Industry Classification System) — definition},
  year   = {2026},
  url    = {https://procurementinstitution.org/definitions/naics},
  note   = {Release 2026.10}
}