ABSTRACT The peculiar velocity field offers a unique way to probe dark matter density field on large scales at low redshifts. In this work, we have compiled a new sample of 465 peculiar velocities from low redshift ($z$ < 0.067) Type Ia supernovae. We compare the reconstructed velocity field derived from the 2M++ galaxy redshift compilation to the supernovae, the SFI++ and the 2MTF Tully–Fisher distance catalogues. We used a forward method to jointly infer the distances and the velocities of distance indicators by comparing the observations to the reconstruction. Comparison of the reconstructed peculiar velocity fields to observations allows us to infer the cosmological parameter combination fσ8, and the bulk flow velocity arising from outside the survey volume. The residual bulk flow arising from outside the 2M++ volume is inferred to be $171^{+11}_{-11}$ km s−1 in the direction l = 301° ± 4° and b = 0° ± 3°. We obtain fσ8 = 0.400 ± 0.017, equivalent to S8 ≈ σ8(Ωm/0.3)0.55 = 0.776 ± 0.033, which corresponds to an approximately $4{{\ \rm per\ cent}}\,$ statistical uncertainty on the value of fσ8. Our inferred value is consistent with other low redshift results in the literature.