NAICS codes: how the six-digit industry system works, and what 2027 changes

Register for a federal contract in SAM.gov, apply for an SBA loan, open a business bank account or fill in a state tax registration, and the form asks for your NAICS code. NAICS - the North American Industry Classification System - is the standard the United States, Canada and Mexico share for classifying establishments by what they produce. Nearly every official US industry statistic is keyed by it: employment and wages from the BLS, revenue from the Economic Census, small-business size standards at the SBA. It is the North American sibling of the UN’s ISIC and the EU’s NACE on the industry axis, the way SOC classifies the occupation axis.

There is a timing catch worth knowing before you memorise any code list. NAICS is revised every five years, and the 2027 edition is being settled right now: OMB published the proposed changes in the Federal Register on July 13, 2026, and the final version takes effect for data covering periods from January 1, 2027. This page covers how a code is built, the full 20-sector list, what the 2027 proposal actually changes - including which requested industries were turned down - and how to turn an industry code into live job-posting data.

How a NAICS code is built

A full NAICS code is six digits, read left to right as five levels. The first two digits are the sector. The third digit narrows to the subsector, the fourth to the industry group, and the fifth to the NAICS industry - the deepest level defined jointly with Canada and Mexico, so five-digit statistics are comparable across all three countries. The sixth digit is national detail: each country splits its own five-digit industries as finely as its economy needs.

Walk one code down: 541511, Custom Computer Programming Services. Sector 54 is Professional, Scientific, and Technical Services; 541 is its only subsector; 5415 is Computer Systems Design and Related Services; 54151 is the trilateral industry; and 541511 is the US split for custom programming. One quirk: three sectors span digit ranges rather than a single pair - Manufacturing is 31-33, Retail Trade is 44-45, and Transportation and Warehousing is 48-49.

Counting the official 2022 structure file from the Census Bureau gives the current totals: 20 sectors, 99 subsectors, 309 industry groups, 689 five-digit industries, and 1,012 six-digit US national industries.

The 20 NAICS sectors

What the 2027 revision changes

NAICS has been revised on a five-year cycle since it replaced SIC in 1997. The 2027 round is unusually visible right now: the Economic Classification Policy Committee’s recommendations were published for comment in the Federal Register on July 13, 2026 (docket USBC-2026-0133), OMB publishes the final changes in a follow-up notice, and Census posts NAICS 2027 in January 2027. It takes effect for establishment data covering periods from January 1, 2027.

The direction of travel is consolidation. Electronic computer, storage device and peripheral manufacturing - three six-digit industries - collapse into one 334110. Telephone, broadcast and other communications equipment merge into 334230. Four urban transit industries become one 485110. Tire manufacturing absorbs retreading, wood and non-wood office furniture merge, one-hour photofinishing loses its own code, and video tape and disc rental disappears into All Other Consumer Goods Rental.

The additions read like a 2020s changelog. Industry 516210 splits in two, so media streaming and broadcasting networks (516213) and social networks and collaborative media sites (516214) finally get codes of their own. Electric-vehicle motors move from motor and generator manufacturing into the engine industry, and “Gasoline” is dropped from that industry’s title. Airport Operations becomes Airport and Spaceport Operations.

Just as telling is what was declined. The comment round drew 60 submissions, with requests for new industries covering artificial intelligence, fintech, cannabis, e-bikes, ecological restoration and the bioeconomy. The committee adopted none of those as industries, in most cases because the resulting industry would be too small in the US or because the proposal grouped activities by what they sell rather than how they produce - the production-oriented test every NAICS industry must pass. Some landed in the product classification (NAPCS) instead, including lab-created meat, seafood and dairy.

NAICS vs SIC, ISIC and NACE

SIC, the four-digit system NAICS replaced in 1997, is not quite dead: the SEC still labels EDGAR filers with SIC codes, so finance datasets often carry both. Internationally, NAICS is one of three siblings. The UN’s ISIC is the global reference, and NAICS is designed to stay comparable with it at the top of the hierarchy - OMB’s 2026 notice calls NAICS 2022 statistics extensively comparable with the latest ISIC revision. Europe’s NACE is derived from ISIC and adds EU detail; it went through its own reshuffle in 2025, which we covered in the NACE guide. For cross-country analysis, the two-digit ISIC division is the grain that travels: fine enough to separate software firms from banks, coarse enough to survive every crosswalk.

How to look up a NAICS code

The official lookup is the search box at census.gov/naics - free, no key, searching the current manual by keyword. Two things trip people up. First, nobody assigns your code: you self-classify by primary activity, and different agencies can end up holding different answers for the same business, so check what SAM.gov, your tax filings and your insurer each have on record. Second, naics.com, the top result for most lookup searches, is the NAICS Association - a private company that sells business lists - not the Census Bureau. Its reference pages are useful, but the manual lives at census.gov.

From industry codes to live job postings

Official NAICS-keyed statistics are authoritative and slow: the BLS employment series lag by months, the Economic Census by years. Job postings are the live end of the same telescope - what each industry is hiring for right now. JobsPipe classifies the employer behind every posting with an ISIC Rev. 4 division, the global scheme NAICS crosswalks to, so one filter works across US, European and APAC postings alike; just under 80 percent of active postings carry a division today.

The crosswalk is direct for the sectors developers ask about most. NAICS 5415 (computer systems design) maps to ISIC division 62 - 317,560 live postings as we write this. NAICS 5613 (employment services) maps to division 78 - 226,142 live postings, the staffing industry’s footprint. The health-care sector 62 maps across divisions 86-88; human health activities alone carries 373,408 live postings, the largest industry slice in the index. One call gets you the live slice for any of them:

curl https://api.jobspipe.dev/v1/jobs/search \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer jp_live_your_key_here" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "isic_division_or": ["62"], "skills_or": ["python"], "posted_at_max_age_days": 30, "limit": 25 }'

Each record comes back with the industry label alongside ISCO-08 occupation codes, extracted skills, seniority and parsed salary where published - the same classified schema on every plan, across millions of live postings from LinkedIn, Indeed, Workday, Greenhouse and the rest of the ATS layer.