Professional and technical services
Professional, scientific and technical activities: law, accountancy, architecture, engineering, consulting, advertising, research. A hundred thousand firms for fewer than four hundred thousand workers — under four people per firm, and more than half of that employment in four communes.
Maps exactly onto CIIU Rev. 4 section M.
Territorial distribution
331/346 communesShaded by how much of each commune's own formal payroll this sector is — not by headcount, which would draw the same map of where people live for every sector.
Counted at the firm's registered address, not the workplace. SII assigns a company's whole payroll to the commune of its tax domicile, so a head office in Santiago carries the shifts worked everywhere else. Read this as where the sector files, and the count below as where its workers live.
Communes with at least 200 workers in the sector, so a village with one firm does not top the list.
What the branch is made of
14 divisions · 31 activitiesA section of twenty-one parts says what this page is called. The register files firms two levels below it, and those parts are not one economy: actividades de arquitectura e ingeniería y actividades conexas de consultoría técnica and actividades de fotografía share a letter and little else. Each division has a page of its own.
- Actividades de arquitectura e ingeniería y actividades conexas de consultoría técnica 167,434
- Actividades de consultoría de gestión 84,401
- Publicidad 42,918
- Actividades jurídicas 24,052
The list stops where 4 divisions have accounted for 84% of the branch's employment. The other 10 are together 16.0% of it and are drawn above, each as its own tile: every division of the register.
Two ways to count the jobs
SII 2024 · Casen 2024Series 2005–2024
2005–2024Who the sector runs on
SII 2024Artificial intelligence
estimate · 2026-05By region
| Region | Workers | Of the sector | Of its own payroll | Living here | Firms | Since 2005 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Metropolitana | 270,304 | 71.2% | 4.7% | 134,508 | 62,678 | +70% |
| Valparaíso | 21,674 | 5.7% | 3.2% | 19,156 | 8,945 | +76% |
| Biobío | 21,306 | 5.6% | 3.8% | 12,956 | 6,125 | +119% |
| Antofagasta | 17,095 | 4.5% | 7.4% | 8,368 | 2,688 | +423% |
| O'Higgins | 9,815 | 2.6% | 2.3% | 5,014 | 2,991 | +193% |
| Maule | 7,907 | 2.1% | 1.6% | 4,936 | 3,457 | +134% |
| Coquimbo | 6,141 | 1.6% | 2.7% | 7,758 | 2,879 | +82% |
| Los Lagos | 5,643 | 1.5% | 1.5% | 5,726 | 3,819 | +9% |
| Atacama | 4,727 | 1.2% | 5.1% | 1,638 | 859 | +97% |
| Araucanía | 4,287 | 1.1% | 1.4% | 4,592 | 3,392 | +74% |
| Tarapacá | 3,773 | 1.0% | 3.4% | 2,552 | 1,134 | +136% |
| Ñuble | 2,140 | 0.6% | 1.4% | 2,420 | 1,331 | +80% |
| Los Ríos | 1,995 | 0.5% | 1.9% | 2,014 | 1,511 | +60% |
| Magallanes | 1,165 | 0.3% | 1.5% | 1,485 | 673 | +142% |
| Arica y Parinacota | 993 | 0.3% | 1.8% | 1,294 | 578 | +56% |
| Aysén | 580 | 0.2% | 1.6% | 983 | 493 | +66% |
"Workers" is SII's count at the firm's registered address; "living here" is Casen's count of employees of this branch who live in the region. They are different measurements of different things and the columns are read side by side, not subtracted. A dash is a cell with fewer than 30 sampled workers.