Methodology

The sample

The index covers 100 main streets across Canada, defined by the study-area boundaries maintained in the index geography. They span 6 regions and 5 size bands, and 40 of them are the primary or secondary downtown of their city.

How values are indexed

A downtown business improvement area and a four-block strip in a town of five thousand can't be compared on raw totals, so every measure is turned into an index with 100 as its no-change point, and every street counts equally in it however busy it is.

The pipeline computes two versions of that index for every series:

• Against past years. The month is compared to the average of the same month in the two preceding years. 104 means four per cent above that average.
• Against the past 11 months. The month is compared to the average of the 11 months before it. This picks up turns earlier, at the cost of carrying some seasonality with it.

Every visit and spending figure on this site blends the two, weighted equally. Business health is built differently; see below.

The MSE 100

The Main Street Economy Index — MSE 100 for short — combines three indices each month: visits, spending and business health. It is the headline number: above 100, main streets are expanding; below 100, they're contracting. The pipeline weights visits and spending equally; from Jul 2026, business health joins them, with visits and spending at 40 per cent each and business health at 20. A month without spending data falls back to visits alone. A quarter's figure is the average of its months.

Spending arrives later than visits, so a new quarter first appears as preliminary: built from the months published so far, and from visits alone until spending arrives. Changes since earlier quarters are held back until it's complete. The first release covers Q3 2026.

The index reports quarterly because that's the cadence at which spending data arrives. Monthly charts show the detail underneath.

The three measures

Visits

Environics Analytics mobile-device visit counts, processed by CUI.

Monthly visits are estimated from device-level observations inside each study area, then split into weekday, weekend and evening totals. Evenings run roughly 6 p.m. to midnight. The index works on visits per day, so a 31-day month doesn't look busier than a 30-day one. The visit totals quoted on the site are the sum of these estimates across the streets in a group; because they come from a sample of devices, they describe visits, not a count of distinct people, and they're dominated by the largest streets — the index, which weights every street equally, is the better guide to how a typical main street is doing.

Weekends are measured per weekend day. A month's weekend total rises and falls with how many Saturdays and Sundays it contains — eight in one year, ten in the next — which made the weekend index swing by 20 points or more from month to month. Dividing each street's weekend visits by the month's weekend days before indexing removes that artefact.

Spending

Mastercard aggregated and anonymised transaction data, processed by CUI.

Card transactions are aggregated and anonymised before they reach the index, and are broken out by merchant category — retail, restaurants, and services — and by whether the cardholder is domestic or international. Cash spending is not captured, so streets with a higher cash share will show less of their true activity.

Business health

Dun & Bradstreet failure and delinquency risk classes, processed by CUI.

D&B scores two kinds of risk for each business: failure risk, the likelihood it closes or becomes insolvent over the next 12 months, and delinquency risk, how reliably it pays — including whether payments run seriously overdue. Each is graded in five classes, from 1 (lowest risk) to 5 (highest).

The pipeline scores each class from 140 (class 1) down to 60 (class 5), averages each business's two scores, then averages the businesses in each grouping and business group (retail, restaurants, and services). So, like visits and spending, above 100 is better — but here 100 is the middle risk class, not "no change": it's a level, not a comparison with an earlier period. The site also shows how many businesses sit in each class; "serious risk" means classes 4 and 5.

Business counts are the businesses D&B scored on each main street in the latest month — active main street businesses with 5 to 500 employees — and are shown only for groups of streets, never for a single street. Visit and spending providers cover businesses differently, so these counts describe the population behind the business-health score, not behind the other two measures.

Coverage

Indexed values run from Jan 2025 to Sep 2026. The visit and spending pipelines need two prior years of history to compute the year-over-year basis, and raw history for both begins in January 2023, so both are published from January 2025. D&B business health begins in July 2026. Each quarterly issue covers the latest quarter the pipeline has published an MSE 100 for, marked preliminary until its spending is in; the monthly charts run to each pillar's latest month.

Where the data comes from

The processed outputs are published to blob storage and read by this site at page load:

• indexhttps://msmdata.blob.core.windows.net/mscanadaindex/processed_data/index/Main_Street_Index_50_50_v2.csv
• componentshttps://msmdata.blob.core.windows.net/mscanadaindex/processed_data/index/Index_subcomp_50_50_v2.csv
• businessScoreshttps://msmdata.blob.core.windows.net/mscanadaindex/processed_data/dnb/DNB_scores_output_10_20.csv
• spendDirectionshttps://msmdata.blob.core.windows.net/mscanadaindex/processed_data/mastercard/MC_change_buckets_10_20.csv
• businessRiskhttps://msmdata.blob.core.windows.net/mscanadaindex/processed_data/dnb/DNB_counts_output_10_20.csv

The pipeline that produces them lives in the main-street-index repository.

What this cannot tell you

• It is not a ranking. Results are published for groups of streets — the nation, regions, size bands — and the list of streets is alphabetical. Nothing here says one BIA is doing best or worst. Each of the MSE 100's three indicators is also shown on its own, because a street can be busy and struggling, or quiet and stable.
• It does not explain causes. A drop in visits could be construction, a closed transit line, a fire, or a slow decline. The index tells you where to look, not what you will find.
• Averages hide range. The national line is an average of 100 places that are not much like each other. The break-outs by region and size exist so that average is never the only thing on the page.