Moving to Surrey BC

Health care

Surrey Memorial Hospital, Peace Arch Hospital, Jim Pattison Outpatient Care and Surgery Centre, Fraser Health, the new Surrey hospital and BC Cancer Centre in Cloverdale

Fraser Health is the largest employer associated with this city at roughly 25,000 staff — but that is a REGIONAL figure covering a health authority stretching from Burnaby to Hope, not a Surrey headcount. Surrey Memorial runs one of the busiest emergency departments in Canada. A second hospital with a BC Cancer Centre is under construction in Cloverdale next to the KPU campus, scheduled to take patients from 2027, adding 168 acuity-adaptable beds and 54 chemotherapy spaces.

Education

Surrey School District 36, Simon Fraser University Surrey campus, Kwantlen Polytechnic University, the Surrey Catholic and independent schools

School District 36 is the largest in British Columbia — around 100 elementary and 21 secondary schools and some 10,000 staff — and is the second-largest employer in the city on any measure. SFU's Surrey campus sits inside Central City in the town centre and KPU has campuses in Surrey and Cloverdale, the latter beside the new hospital site.

Construction, trades & building supply

Starline Windows, ICBA member contractors, the Surrey Langley SkyTrain contractors, residential developers across the six town centres

Surrey builds more housing than any other municipality in the region most years, and the trades economy that comes with that is one of the largest sources of well-paid work without a degree in Metro Vancouver. It is also the sector BC's provincial nominee programme now explicitly targets through its construction stream.

Logistics, warehousing & manufacturing

Campbell Heights and Port Kells industrial parks, Fraser Surrey Docks, the Douglas and Pacific Highway border crossings, food processing and agri-food operations

Surrey has more industrial land than anywhere else in Metro Vancouver and sits on both the Fraser River and the American border, which is why the warehousing and cross-border trucking sector is concentrated here rather than in Vancouver. It is the part of the local economy most exposed to trade policy.

Financial services & credit unions

Coast Capital Savings, Prospera Credit Union, regional bank operations centres

Coast Capital Savings is headquartered in Surrey and is one of the largest credit unions in Canada — a genuinely local financial institution rather than a branch of something else, and a serious alternative to the national banks for anyone opening a first account.

Agriculture & agri-food

Berry, vegetable and greenhouse operations across the Serpentine and Nicomekl lowlands and Cloverdale, farm-gate retail, processing

A large share of Surrey's land sits inside the provincial Agricultural Land Reserve, which protects it from development, so a city of well over half a million people still has working berry farms in the middle of it. It is the largest agricultural producer among Metro Vancouver's municipalities and the reason the summer roadside stands are real.

Neighborhood · Whalley, around King George and Surrey Central SkyTrain

The town centre the city has spent two decades building — SFU's Surrey campus inside the Central City complex, the sculptural City Hall and library, towers going up on every block, and a large open park beside the SkyTrain.

Local tip: Come out of Surrey Central station and look in both directions: one way is fifteen years of new towers, the other is the older Whalley the towers are replacing, and both are the real city. Holland Park hosts the summer Fusion Festival, which is the single best afternoon to understand who lives here.

Nature · South Surrey, on Boundary Bay

A low-key seaside village at the mouth of the Nicomekl — a sandy beach, a spit of salt marsh that is one of the best birdwatching sites on the south coast, and a handful of cafés that have not been redeveloped.

Local tip: Go at low tide when the flats run out for what feels like a kilometre, and go on a weekday because the parking is genuinely impossible on a summer Sunday. Blackie Spit in autumn and winter is the serious birding: this is on the Pacific Flyway and the shorebird counts here are internationally significant.

Food · The 120 Street corridor and the Newton town centre

The densest concentration of South Asian food and grocery in Canada outside Brampton — sweet shops, tandoors, dosa counters, spice wholesalers and vegetarian thali houses along a corridor that runs for kilometres.

Local tip: This is not a tourist strip and it is better for it: the restaurants are serving the community, the portions and prices reflect that, and the regional distinctions are real — Punjabi in Newton, with south Indian, Sri Lankan, Fijian-Indian and Afghan kitchens interleaved. Go hungry, ask what is good today, and expect no English menu in the best places.

Culture · Eastern Surrey, on the old Yale Road

A preserved nineteenth-century main street with a false-front streetscape used constantly as a film location, the Museum of Surrey, and the fairgrounds that host one of the oldest rodeos in North America every May.

Local tip: You will recognise the street before you have been down it, because it doubles for small-town America in an enormous number of productions — Smallville above all. The museum is much better than a suburban civic museum has any right to be, particularly on the Indigenous and South Asian history of the area. The new hospital is going up a few minutes away.

Nature · Central Surrey, between City Centre and Fleetwood

Around 180 hectares of forest in the middle of the city, on the site of British Columbia's first reforestation project — the province planted it in 1930 after the original stand was logged out, and it is now mature second growth with a lake and trails.

Local tip: Almost nobody outside Surrey knows it exists, which is precisely the point: it is a proper walk-in-the-woods twenty minutes from downtown Vancouver's commuter belt. The Surrey Langley SkyTrain's Green Timbers station will put it a rail stop from City Centre when the line opens, so see it before that changes.

Landmark · South Surrey, at the end of Highway 99

The white marble arch straddling the Canada–United States boundary, set in a park that is legally open from both countries at once, at the busiest land crossing on the west coast.

Local tip: The park is the unusual part: you can walk into it from either side without formally entering the other country, which makes it a genuine curiosity and, for split families, something more than that. If you are crossing rather than visiting, check both Peace Arch and the Pacific Highway crossing at 176 Street before choosing — the wait times diverge sharply and a NEXUS card pays for itself fast if you go often.