A business requirement is a statement of a business goal, objective, or desired outcome that describes why a change has been initiated. 

An example of a business requirement is as follows: the payroll department must upgrade existing payroll procedures to cater for the growth in employee numbers.

It is important to realize that the business requirements describe and justify the high-level business functionality that is needed in the resulting solution. In order to define a solution, the business requirements will be progressively elaborated and decomposed to the next level of detail, which brings us to the stakeholder requirements.”