BuildData › Business Licences

Canadian Business
Licences API

690,000 business licence records from 28 Canadian cities. Active and historical licences with normalized business name, category, address, and status. Geocoded, automatically refreshed via REST API.

Search an address See coverage
712K+ licence records
27 cities covered
Daily refresh rate
Geocoded lat / lng on every record
Coverage

Business licence records are sourced from municipal open data portals. Coverage spans 28 cities across 5 provinces. New cities are added as municipalities publish their data. Every record is joined on a canonical address, so you can line it up with property assessments, zoning, and other datasets. See the property data hub.

Toronto ON
Calgary AB
Vancouver BC
Edmonton AB
Winnipeg MB
Hamilton ON
Brampton ON
Mississauga ON
Kitchener ON
Waterloo ON
Sudbury ON
Victoria BC
Burnaby BC
Prince George BC
Maple Ridge BC
Langley Township BC
New Westminster BC
Lethbridge AB
Red Deer AB
Grande Prairie AB
+ 7 more

Normalized categories

Raw licence types vary by city. BuildData normalizes them into a consistent category_canonical field across all sources.

Food & beverage
Retail
Professional services
Construction trades
Health & wellness
Transportation
Entertainment
Real estate
Manufacturing
Accommodation
Personal care
Childcare

What the data includes

business_name / normalized_business_name
Raw and normalized business name for matching across cities and datasets
category_canonical
Normalized category (food, retail, construction trades, etc.) consistent across all 28 cities
status
Active, expired, pending, or cancelled
address / normalized_address
Street address, normalized for joining with permit and inspection records
lat / lng
Geocoordinates for proximity and map-based queries
event_date
Issue date or most recent activity date
municipality / province
Normalized city and province fields

Who uses business licence data

B2B lead generation

Build targeted lists of businesses by industry, city, and activity date. Identify newly licensed businesses as early-stage leads. Filter by address to find businesses in a trade area.

Market intelligence

Track openings and closures by category across cities. Measure commercial density in a neighbourhood. Detect emerging clusters of a specific industry type.

Location strategy

Evaluate competitor density before opening a new location. Understand the commercial mix around a property. Map franchise saturation across a city.

Proptech & commercial real estate

Enrich property listings and valuations with live commercial activity data. Identify retail-to-office conversion opportunities. Track ground-floor commercial health in mixed-use developments.

API example

GET /licence?municipality=calgary&category=food_beverage&status=active&limit=100

# All active food & beverage licences in Calgary
# Returns: business_name, category_canonical, address, lat/lng, status, date
GET /licence?lat=43.6532&lng=-79.3832&radius_km=1&category=construction_trades

# Construction trade businesses within 1km of downtown Toronto
# Useful for B2B sales territory mapping

Same endpoint pattern as building inspections, development permits, and building permits. One API key, one schema.

Three ways to get this

The same records, delivered to suit how you work.

Property search

Look up a single address and see every record a city has published against it.

Search an address

Weekly feeds

New records for the cities and datasets you choose, as a spreadsheet, every week.

See what a feed covers

API and bulk data

Query any dataset directly, or pull the whole of it into your own warehouse.

Read the docs

Part of the BuildData Canadian construction data platform. Also available: building inspections, development permits, see all coverage.