Surrey BCruns on a handful of strong industries. If you’re job-hunting or weighing a move, here’s where the opportunities (and the big-name employers) are.
Top industries & employers
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.
Some of this may be out of date. Spotted something inaccurate? Help us keep it right for the next newcomer.