A recent study by the City of Toronto has looked at why tech firms cluster (agglomeration economies) and where they cluster in the city. Here are maps of what they found:

Downtown captured almost half (49.2%) of all tech employment in the city with some 29,701 jobs. The South Employment Monitoring Area, which is the area outlined above in blue, captured 63.4% of the city's tech base.

I usually shy away from headlines touting some total number of tech jobs because I feel that it can become a bit of a vanity metric. What about the quality of those jobs? How much venture capital have the companies raised?

But this report is different and it is interesting to see the extent in which tech has concentrated itself in the core of the city. As of 2019, jobs in tech establishments represented about 4% of all jobs in Toronto.

To download a copy of the report, click here.

Tech Toronto recently published a new study called, How Technology Is Changing Toronto Employment. 

They estimate that there are over 400,000 tech jobs in Toronto, out of a total of 2.7 million people employed. That number includes tech people working for non-tech companies, and tech and non-tech people working for tech companies. So tech jobs are thought to represent about 15% of the city’s employment.

Within this 400,000 or so jobs, an estimated 93,000 people are self-employed (23% of tech jobs). And the belief is that there are around 2,500 to 4,100 active “startups.”

Zooming out, it is also one of the fastest growing industries in the city:

To try and put this into perspective, a similar report for New York – published in 2014 – reported 291,000 tech jobs out of 4.27 million people employed. I was a bit surprised by these numbers, but the Toronto report seems to have been modeled after the New York one. So presumably they use similar methodologies.

Of course, there’s the big question of quality over quantity. There’s a certainly a difference, in terms of impact to the economy, between a back office tech job and fast growing startup that will eventually reach the coveted $1 billion valuation number and create thousands of new jobs.

Obviously every city is hoping for the latter.