Naics 424 Wholesale Trade Data: Dataset Structure and Field Coverage

The 2022 Basic file puts scale on the tier. At sector level, merchant wholesalers excluding manufacturers' sales branches and offices number 232,225 firms running 321,660 establishments, with $7.89 trillion in sales, $416.1 billion in annual payroll and 5,185,436 employees. Inside NAICS 424 the detail runs deeper. NAICS 4244 Grocery and Related Product Merchant Wholesalers shows 27,414 firms and 34,604 establishments selling $1.30 trillion, paying $54.4 billion in annual payroll to 621,911 employees, and holding inventories that rose from $57.2 billion at the start of 2022 to $63.8 billion at its end. NAICS 4248 Beer, Wine, and Distilled Alcoholic Beverage Merchant Wholesalers adds 4,893 establishments, $208.2 billion in sales and 213,961 employees.

These cells live in a large file: the sector 42 Basic table alone holds 442,035 rows - a 119 MB pipe-delimited .dat once unzipped - across a census that spans over 950 detailed industries. Type-of-operation codes let you separate pure merchant wholesalers from manufacturers' sales branches and offices, and the imputation-range columns show how much of each estimate was imputed rather than reported.

Home Improvement Retail is one of the industries Datadory catalogs without a single primary dataset: the viability roll-up assigns it 0 primary and 13 secondary records, six of which trace to the Census Bureau or its Data API. Within that pool, the Economic Census - Wholesale Trade (NAICS 424) record is the upstream half of the story - the merchant-wholesale tier big-box shelves replenish from - and a working stack reads it in sequence: