What the Canadian Staffing Index Is Saying About the Economy

Published monthly by the Association of Canadian Search, Employment & Staffing Services, the index tracks the billed hours reported by a panel of leading Canadian staffing firms — a sample large enough to represent roughly one-third of total industry sales, collected on ACSESS's behalf by Staffing Industry Analysts to preserve firms' confidentiality. The index is benchmarked to 100 at July 2008, the month it began; every reading since measures the size of the temporary and contract labour market against that starting point.

What the May number actually says

The index came in at 88 for May 2026, up from 86 in April. On its own, a two-point monthly gain is unremarkable. The more telling comparison is against a year earlier: May's reading was up 7.3 percent from the 82 recorded in May 2025 — and that gain came in a month with one fewer working day than the prior year, meaning the underlying volume growth was, if anything, understated by the raw number.

"The May data continues the trend of growth in overall volume on a year-over-year basis," said Timothy Landhuis, senior vice president of research at Staffing Industry Analysts, in comments accompanying the release.

Why staffing firms watch this before they watch anything else

The index's premise rests on a pattern staffing economists have observed for decades, first in the U.S. and now in Canada: temporary employment tends to move before the broader labour market does. Employers turn to contingent labour when they're not yet ready to commit to permanent headcount — which means rising temp hours can signal hiring intent building beneath the surface, well before it shows up in Statistics Canada's Labour Force Survey. The reverse holds too: temp hours are typically among the first things employers cut when uncertainty rises, making the index an early-warning system in both directions.

That framing matters for how to read May's 7.3 percent year-over-year gain. It arrived in a month when the broader Labour Force Survey was showing a Canadian economy essentially treading water — modest headline job growth, an unemployment rate hovering in the mid-6 percent range. A staffing-specific indicator accelerating against that backdrop suggests employers were leaning more heavily on flexible labour arrangements even as permanent hiring stayed cautious — precisely the dynamic a strong staffing market thrives on.