Published only once every five years, the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) is an indispensable volume of official industry codes used by businesses, libraries, and other establishments and individuals to complete tax returns, grant requests, and fill out other forms and to improve analyses and comparisons of different industries.

NAICS officially replaced the U.S. Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system in 1997. It provides a consistent system of economic analysis across the three NAFTA nations-Canada, Mexico, and the United States.

NAICS is used by U.S. statistical agencies to facilitate the collection, tabulation, presentation, and dissemination of data relating to establishments and to provide uniformity and comparability in the presentation of statistical data describing the U.S. economy. These statistics are used by all kinds of businesses, government agencies, policy analysts, academics and researchers, and the general public.

NAICS is a comprehensive system covering all economic activities. The 2017 edition of NAICS supersedes the 2012 edition published in July 2012. The 2017 edition includes new and emerging industries, title changes, and clarification of industry definitions. Revisions for 2017 were made to account for our rapidly changing economies.

This edition contains four parts:

Part I: Titles and Descriptions of Industries provides a detailed description of all sectors from Sector 11 Agriculture, Forestry, Fishing, and Hunting to Sector 92 Public Administration

Part II: List of Short Titles has been created for the use of those who find that space limitations preclude the use of the full title for the dissemination of data classified to NAICS

Part III : Appendixes A and B maps the changes for 2017 NAICS to the 2012 NAICS in 2017 NAICS sequence (Appendix A) and 2012 NAICS sequence (Appendix B)

Part IV: Alphabetic Index of the 1,057 industries in 2017 NAICS United States.