MapleCub Data Lab · Province data · 2026
How many licensed daycares are in British Columbia?
British Columbia licenses family child care one home at a time, and the whole shape of its registry follows from that.
- Computed 2026-08-10
- N = 5,702 British Columbia programs
- 20,516 across eight registries
- CC BY 4.0
5,702
licensed programs
26.3
per 1,000 children aged 0–4
215
communities with licensed care
28.4%
of them have exactly one option
The short answer, with everything behind it
As of 2026-08-10, MapleCub counts 5,702 licensed child-care programs in British Columbia — 3,849 centres and 1,853 licensed family homes. That is 26.3 licensed programs for every 1,000 of the province’s 216,910 children aged 0–4, the second-highest rate of the eight provinces that publish a licensing registry. They sit in 215 communities; 61 of those (28.4%) have exactly one licensed program and no second choice, while 35.9% of the province’s licensed programs are in its five largest cities.
British Columbia does not publish licensed capacity as open data, so how many children those programs can actually take cannot be worked out from public files. British Columbia’s 2026 price position: $10/day floor, no ceiling. CCFRI reduces fees by up to $900/month (under 36 months, group care), and out-of-pocket fees are never reduced below $200/month — $10/day — for full-time care. True $10-a-Day pricing applies only at designated $10-a-Day ChildCareBC sites; everywhere else a family pays whatever is left of the provider's own fee, and British Columbia publishes no ceiling. The registry does say which programs take part, which is unusual: 5,500 of 5,702 (96.5%) are authorized for the CCFRI fee reduction — a reduction, not a $10 rate.3†,1,2
On inspections, British Columbia publishes summary reports of inspections and substantiated complaints, held by the five regional health authorities rather than by the province, so there is no single provincial file to read. It answers a question about one centre and no question about the province. Online, MapleCub has matched 1,031 of British Columbia's 5,702 programs to a Google place record (18.1%), and 1,016 of those (98.5%) carry a rating, averaging 4.61 across 22,219 parent reviews. 1,566 programs (27.5%) have a website recorded in the frozen quarterly snapshot. Read the rating figure as coverage, not as visibility: with only 18.1% of British Columbia matched, the share of the province that actually carries a rating could be anything from 18.1% to 100%, so this page draws no conclusion about British Columbia's sector from it.3†
Source: MapleCub Canadian Childcare Dataset — Aug 2026 · computed 2026-08-10 · N = 5,702 · CSV · British Columbia; visible listings only
The numbers
| Measure | Value | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Licensed programs | 5,702 | 27.8% of the 20,516 licensed programs across the eight provinces that publish registries. |
| Centres | 3,849 | 67.5% of the province’s licensed programs. |
| Licensed family homes | 1,853 | 32.5% of the province’s licensed programs. Whether homes appear at all is a licensing rule, not a measure of how much home care exists. |
| Children aged 0–4 | 216,910 | Statistics Canada, Table 17-10-0005-01 (July 1, 2025 estimates)5 |
| Programs per 1,000 children | 26.3 | Licensed points of access a parent can look up, not licensed spaces. Registries differ in what they record, so read it alongside the provider mix above. |
| Communities with licensed care | 215 | A community is a normalized city name — lower-cased and trimmed — so registry case variants do not count twice. |
| Communities with exactly one option | 61 (28.4%) | One licence serves the whole community: no comparing, no waitlist hedging, no second choice. |
| Share in the five largest cities | 35.9% | How concentrated the province’s licensed supply is in its biggest municipal markets. |
| Published licensed capacity | Not published as open data | The province publishes a program list without saying how many children each program may serve, so no space count can be derived from public files. |
| Inspection records | Per facility only | Published on each facility’s own page, never as a bulk dataset, so no province-wide question can be answered from them.3† |
| Programs with a website | 1,566 (27.5%) | Harvested conservatively, requiring name agreement, so this undercounts rather than overcounts. |
| Matched by MapleCub to a Google place | 1,031 (18.1%) | Below the 60% floor this Lab requires before it will say anything about a province's own visibility, so the rating figure below is read as our coverage rather than as British Columbia's. |
| Rated among the matched | 1,016 of 1,031 (98.5%) | Average 4.61 out of five across 22,219 parent reviews. Across ALL of British Columbia's listings the rated share is 18.1% — a floor set by our matching, and a ceiling of 100% if every listing we never matched turned out to be rated. |
Source: MapleCub Canadian Childcare Dataset — Aug 2026 · computed 2026-08-10 · N = 5,702 · CSV · child population: Statistics Canada, Table 17-10-0005-01 (July 1, 2025 estimates)
How British Columbia compares on supply
British Columbia comes in at 26.3, between New Brunswick’s national high of 27.7 and Ontario’s national low of 6.1. Licensed programs per 1,000 children aged 0–4 is the cleanest cross-province supply signal this dataset supports, and it has to be read with the registry differences in mind: some provinces license each family home individually, others license home care through agencies that never appear as separate records.
Source: MapleCub Canadian Childcare Dataset — Aug 2026 · computed 2026-08-10 · N = 20,516 · CSV · child population: Statistics Canada, Table 17-10-0005-01 (July 1, 2025 estimates)5
What makes British Columbia’s registry different
It is the largest licensing registry in the country by program count — more records than Ontario, in a province with under a third as many children aged 0–4. Structure explains most of it: 1,853 of the 5,702 records are individually licensed family child cares, each carrying its own licence and its own row, where Ontario’s equivalent sector hides behind 165 agency records.
British Columbia is also one of three provinces whose registry carries a per-facility affordability flag, and its flag is close to universal: 5,500 of 5,702 programs are authorized for the Child Care Fee Reduction Initiative. Authorization means a provider may lower the fee it charges. It is not a $10 rate, and the separately designated $10-a-Day ChildCareBC sites are not identified in the open dataset at all — so the registry tells a parent that a price can move, and nothing about where it lands.
The gaps run the other way from the count. British Columbia publishes no licensed capacity, and its inspection findings are held by the five regional health authorities that licence child care rather than by the province, so there is no single provincial file to read. The widest registry in Canada is also one of the quietest about how many children are behind it.
Source: MapleCub Canadian Childcare Dataset — Aug 2026 · computed 2026-08-10 · N = 5,702 · CSV · registry structure and published fields as documented by each province
Where to go from here
British Columbia beyond the arithmetic: the programs themselves, and the rules behind them.
- Licensed daycares in British Columbia — browse the 5,702 programs themselves, with age, hours and subsidy filters.
- What child care costs in British Columbia — the fee rules and subsidy thresholds behind the price line above, with official sources.
- British Columbia’s one-option communities — the 61 places with a single licensed program, named.
- $10-a-day: claimed vs. measured — what the registries can and cannot confirm about the price each province advertises.
- The State of Licensed Child Care in Canada, 2026 — the national report these figures were computed for.
- Vancouver child care in numbers — the city snapshot, 504 licensed programs.
Cite as: MapleCub, “British Columbia child care by the numbers, 2026,” 2026-08-10, https://www.maplecub.ca/research/british-columbia-child-care-data. Released under CC BY 4.0. More open data: MapleCub Data Lab.
Sources
Every external claim in this report — every dollar figure, every inspection count, every rule — is cited to the government page it came from. Each entry records the publisher, the document, and the date we last fetched it. Sources were audited 2026-08-11. A dagger (†) marks the 1 sources that need a caveat: either the source has been updated since our figure was computed, or we could not open the page ourselves and have said so. The reason is printed with the entry.
- 1. Province of British Columbia — Ministry of Education and Child Care · Child Care Fee Reduction Initiative — Information for families · fetched 2026-08-11 · https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/family-social-supports/caring-for-young-children/childcarebc-programs/child-care-fee-reduction-initiative-provider-opt-in-status/information-for-families
- 2. Province of British Columbia — Ministry of Education and Child Care · Child Care Fee Reduction Initiative — Information for families · fetched 2026-08-11 · https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/family-social-supports/caring-for-young-children/childcarebc-programs/child-care-fee-reduction-initiative-provider-opt-in-status/information-for-families
- 3†. Province of British Columbia — BC Data Catalogue · Child Care Map Data · fetched 2026-08-11 · https://catalogue.data.gov.bc.ca/dataset/child-care-map-data† Not verified: this page could not be opened on 2026-08-11 from our environment, so the claim it supports is stated in its narrowest form and flagged in the text.
- 5. Statistics Canada · Table 17-10-0005-01 Population estimates on July 1, by age and gender · fetched 2026-08-11 · https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1710000501