Update: 2025 data for Data Axle Historical Business Data and Residence Data

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Last modified
Mar 26, 2026
Category
Data

We have just received the latest (2025) datasets from Data Axle:

These resources are available to all current U of T students, staff, and faculty.

These files are too large to open in Excel; you must use a statistical package (like SPSS) or a programming language (like Python or R).

To help navigate these large files, please see our tutorial for working with these datasets using Python. In additional to more details on the setup and layout of the files, instructions on how to download them and how to get started working with Python, the tutorial also includes sample Python code in the form of Jupyter Notebook files. These contain both example code and explanatory text to help you get started, and so that you can modify the examples as needed. The notebooks provide examples on how to:

  • Preview the rows and columns in your dataset
  • Generate a list of all columns in the dataset and preview values from a particular column only
  • Change the data type of a single column or select columns
  • Filter your data based on the values contained in one or more columns - for example, if you are interested in businesses in a particular city only and/or those with more than 1000 employees
  • Filter your data to include only selected columns - for example, you may want to keep only the business name, address, and employee size data for each row
  • Export your data to a csv

Sample notebooks are available for both the Canadian and US data.

* In February 2026, we uploaded corrected versions of our 2022-2024 Canadian Historical Business Data files.