MapleCub Report · 2026

The State of Licensed Child Care in Canada, 2026

Published 2026-07-07. Dataset queried 2026-07-07; fee rules verified 2026-07-05. Methodology · Download CSV · JSON

Canada does not have one child-care system. It has at least seven. Each province licenses providers under its own rules, publishes its own data, and runs its own version of “$10-a-day.” This report puts those systems side by side, using a single deduplicated dataset of 19,569 licensed child-care programs across 2,033 communities in British Columbia, Ontario, Quebec, Alberta, Saskatchewan, Manitoba and Nova Scotia — 99.8% of them geocoded, 13,590 verified against official registry identifiers, and 290 duplicate records merged before any number below was computed.

• 1,021 communities have exactly one licensed option. Half of all communities with any licensed care at all have no second choice.
• Only three of seven provinces publish licensed capacity as open data. The other four publish program lists without saying how many children each can serve.
• Only Quebec, Manitoba and Saskatchewan are at or below $10/day in 2026. Ontario is capped at $22/day through December 2026; Alberta sits near $15/day; Nova Scotia has not reached the target.
• Inspection records are open data in just three provinces. Alberta leads with 15,566 records; Ontario and BC require facility-by-facility lookups; Saskatchewan and Manitoba publish neither.

Where the programs are

Licensed programs per 1,000 children aged 0–4 is the cleanest cross-province supply signal our data supports — but it must be read with the registry differences in mind. British Columbia licenses small family child cares individually, so each home appears in the registry; Ontario licenses home child care through agencies, so thousands of individual homes sit behind 165 agency records. The rate below measures licensed points of access a parent can look up, not spaces.

Licensed programs per 1,000 children aged 0–4. Child population: Statistics Canada, Table 17-10-0005-01 (July 1, 2025 estimates).

The provider mix itself tells a policy story. Saskatchewan’s licensed system is 66% family child-care homes — the highest share in the country — while Ontario’s registry is 96% centres. Quebec’s 3,774 installations include no individually licensed homes at all: home-based care there runs through recognized coordinating offices, another reminder that provincial registries measure different things.

The one-option communities

Across the seven provinces, 1,021 of 2,033 communities with licensed care have exactly one licensed program — 50.2%. In these places there is no comparing, no waitlist hedging, no choosing between a centre and a home: one licence serves the community, or the family drives. Saskatchewan has the starkest geography — 129 of its 177 communities (73%) are one-option, and 75.9% of all its licensed programs sit in just five cities. Ontario and Quebec, despite having the most communities covered, each have roughly 300 one-option communities.

What parents actually pay in 2026

“$10-a-day child care” is a federal promise implemented seven different ways. As of mid-2026, here is where each province actually stands — drawn from the same verified rules that power our province-by-province cost guides and subsidy calculators.

The transparency gap

Whether a parent can see a facility’s inspection history depends almost entirely on their postal code. Three provinces publish inspection or enforcement records as open, machine-readable data. Alberta publishes the most: 15,566 inspection records covering 2,874 facilities between July 2024 and December 2025 — 11,770 routine inspections, 2,274 follow-ups, and 1,522 complaint-triggered visits. Nova Scotia publishes 645 inspection records (328 annual, 317 unannounced). Quebec takes a different route: it publishes enforcement outcomes — 730 administrative penalties totalling $699,500 issued to 321 facilities between January 2023 and September 2025.

Ontario and British Columbia publish inspection findings only on individual facility pages — visible if you know where to look, invisible to any systematic analysis. Saskatchewan and Manitoba publish neither. No province publishes data that would let anyone honestly compute a comparative “safety score,” which is why MapleCub doesn’t: we show dated inspection facts where they exist and say plainly where they don’t. “No violations on record” in a province that publishes no records is not the same thing as a clean history.

The same gap applies to capacity. Only Quebec (237,634 spaces), Alberta (222,932, including school-age care) and Nova Scotia (19,216) state licensed capacity in their open data — 479,782 spaces in total. British Columbia, Ontario, Saskatchewan and Manitoba publish program lists without machine-readable capacity, which means nobody outside those governments can compute how many licensed spaces exist per child. For a national program spending billions to create “new spaces,” the count of existing ones is surprisingly hard to audit.

The visibility problem

Licensed care is also strikingly hard to find online. Of 19,569 licensed programs, only 7,652 (39%) have a website, and just 6,215 (32%) have a single Google rating — 132,162 parent reviews concentrated on less than a third of the sector. In Nova Scotia, 17 of 348 licensed programs (5%) have any Google presence with a rating; in Saskatchewan, 7%. The market signal parents rely on for restaurants effectively does not exist for child care outside the big cities — which is precisely why registry data, not review data, has to carry the weight.

Province snapshots

Quebec deserves one more number: 2,788 of its 3,774 listed installations (74%) are subsidized (subventionné) — the reduced-contribution network where parents pay $9.65/day — while the remaining quarter operate at market rates offset by the refundable tax credit. Explore any province in depth: British Columbia · Ontario · Quebec · Alberta · Saskatchewan · Manitoba · Nova Scotia

Methodology & data

Program counts, provider types, locations, capacity and inspection figures were computed on 2026-07-07 from MapleCub’s dataset, which is built from the seven provincial licensing registries, geocoded (99.8% of listings), matched to official registry identifiers where provinces publish them (13,590 programs in AB, BC, NS and ON), and deduplicated (290 duplicate records merged and excluded from every figure in this report). Inspection and enforcement counts come from the provinces’ own open datasets and cover the windows stated inline; they are presented as published facts, not ratings. Google presence signals (ratings, review counts, websites) were matched conservatively — name agreement required — and undercount rather than overcount. Child population denominators are Statistics Canada, Table 17-10-0005-01 (July 1, 2025 estimates). Fee and subsidy rules are from our audited 2026 rules module, verified 2026-07-05 against official provincial sources — every source is linked from the cost guides.

Known limitations: registries differ in scope (individually licensed homes vs. agency-based home care), so cross-province program counts are not space counts; Alberta’s published capacity includes school-age care while Quebec’s is early-childhood only, so we do not compute cross-province coverage ratios; Manitoba is the only province with listings not yet fully geocoded (1,104 of 1,139).

The full province-level dataset behind this report is free to download and reuse with attribution (CC BY 4.0):

Download CSVDownload JSON

Cite as: MapleCub, “The State of Licensed Child Care in Canada, 2026,” 2026-07-07, https://www.maplecub.ca/reports/state-of-child-care-2026. Media enquiries: hello@maplecub.ca.