MapleCub Data Lab · Province data · 2026
How many licensed daycares are in Manitoba?
Manitoba hit ten dollars a day by regulation, and its own published data cannot tell a parent where.
- Computed 2026-08-10
- N = 1,139 Manitoba programs
- 20,516 across eight registries
- CC BY 4.0
1,139
licensed programs
14.2
per 1,000 children aged 0–4
160
communities with licensed care
43.1%
of them have exactly one option
The short answer, with everything behind it
As of 2026-08-10, MapleCub counts 1,139 licensed child-care programs in Manitoba — 802 centres and 337 licensed family homes. That is 14.2 licensed programs for every 1,000 of the province’s 80,298 children aged 0–4, the fourth-highest rate of the eight provinces that publish a licensing registry. They sit in 160 communities; 69 of those (43.1%) have exactly one licensed program and no second choice, while 65.6% of the province’s licensed programs are in its five largest cities.
Manitoba does not publish licensed capacity as open data, so how many children those programs can actually take cannot be worked out from public files. Manitoba’s 2026 price position: $10/day. Regulated maximum total daily fee at funded facilities for 4–10 hours of care (M.R. 62/86, in force since December 8, 2024): $8 maximum subsidized fee plus a $2 maximum additional fee. Manitoba publishes whether a specific facility is funded, and the fees it may charge, in Manitoba Child Care Search — but the province's downloadable provider list carries no funding column, so the split cannot be counted province-wide. Which individual programs offer that price is not distinguishable from public registry data — no funding or fee field in the published provider list — so every row in the file carries the same value.3,1,2
On inspections, Manitoba publishes neither inspection records nor enforcement outcomes, so “nothing on record” here means only that there is no record. Online, MapleCub has matched 233 of Manitoba's 1,139 programs to a Google place record (20.5%), and 232 of those (99.6%) carry a rating, averaging 4.35 across 5,722 parent reviews. 405 programs (35.6%) have a website recorded in the frozen quarterly snapshot. Read the rating figure as coverage, not as visibility: with only 20.5% of Manitoba matched, the share of the province that actually carries a rating could be anything from 21.7% to 101.2%, so this page draws no conclusion about Manitoba's sector from it.3
Source: MapleCub Canadian Childcare Dataset — Aug 2026 · computed 2026-08-10 · N = 1,139 · CSV · Manitoba; visible listings only
The numbers
| Measure | Value | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Licensed programs | 1,139 | 5.6% of the 20,516 licensed programs across the eight provinces that publish registries. |
| Centres | 802 | 70.4% of the province’s licensed programs. |
| Licensed family homes | 337 | 29.6% 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 | 80,298 | Statistics Canada, Table 17-10-0005-01 (July 1, 2025 estimates)4 |
| Programs per 1,000 children | 14.2 | 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 | 160 | A community is a normalized city name — lower-cased and trimmed — so registry case variants do not count twice. |
| Communities with exactly one option | 69 (43.1%) | One licence serves the whole community: no comparing, no waitlist hedging, no second choice. |
| Share in the five largest cities | 65.6% | 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 | Not published | Neither inspection records nor enforcement outcomes are published, so an empty history here means an empty file.3 |
| Programs with a website | 405 (35.6%) | Harvested conservatively, requiring name agreement, so this undercounts rather than overcounts. |
| Matched by MapleCub to a Google place | 233 (20.5%) | 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 Manitoba's. |
| Rated among the matched | 232 of 233 (99.6%) | Average 4.35 out of five across 5,722 parent reviews. Across ALL of Manitoba's listings the rated share is 21.7% — a floor set by our matching, and a ceiling of 101.2% if every listing we never matched turned out to be rated. |
Source: MapleCub Canadian Childcare Dataset — Aug 2026 · computed 2026-08-10 · N = 1,139 · CSV · child population: Statistics Canada, Table 17-10-0005-01 (July 1, 2025 estimates)
How Manitoba compares on supply
Manitoba comes in at 14.2, 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)4
What makes Manitoba’s registry different
The regulated maximum of $10/day binds at funded facilities. The provincial provider list carries name, language, provider type, address, city, postal code and age groups — and no funding field at all, so all 1,139 rows look identical on the only question that decides the price. The policy is real; the map of it is not public.
Manitoba is the only province with records carrying no coordinate at all: 1,104 of 1,139 have one. The bigger caveat is what those coordinates are. 1,061 of them — 96.1% — are the centroid of a postal district rather than a street address, which is why the province’s listings occupy only 89 distinct points on a map. Earlier editions of this work named Manitoba as the one province with a geocoding problem; the truth is that Manitoba is one of four, and the missing-coordinate gap is the smallest part of it. A small number of rows also carry no city value and sit outside the community counts entirely, and a repair in August 2026 folded registry abbreviations such as “Wpg” back into Winnipeg wherever the intended community could be determined. Those are ingestion facts, not findings, but they are the reason Manitoba’s community counts rest on slightly fewer rows than its program count.
The system underneath is compact and centre-led — 802 centres to 337 family homes, 160 communities, 65.6% of programs in five cities — and its supply rate of 14.2 per 1,000 sits squarely mid-table. A middle-of-the-pack province with a leading price rule and no way to verify it is a particular kind of gap.
Source: MapleCub Canadian Childcare Dataset — Aug 2026 · computed 2026-08-10 · N = 1,139 · CSV · registry structure and published fields as documented by each province
Where to go from here
Manitoba beyond the arithmetic: the programs themselves, and the rules behind them.
- Licensed daycares in Manitoba — browse the 1,139 programs themselves, with age, hours and subsidy filters.
- What child care costs in Manitoba — the fee rules and subsidy thresholds behind the price line above, with official sources.
- Manitoba’s one-option communities — the 69 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.
- Winnipeg child care in numbers — the city snapshot, 671 licensed programs.
Cite as: MapleCub, “Manitoba child care by the numbers, 2026,” 2026-08-10, https://www.maplecub.ca/research/manitoba-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.
- 1. Province of Manitoba — Education and Early Childhood Learning · Child Care Fees · fetched 2026-08-11 · https://www.gov.mb.ca/education/childcare/families/childcare_fees.html
- 2. Province of Manitoba — Education and Early Childhood Learning · Child Care Fees — finding a funded facility · fetched 2026-08-11 · https://www.gov.mb.ca/education/childcare/families/childcare_fees.html
- 3. Province of Manitoba — Education and Early Childhood Learning · $10 a Day Child Care · fetched 2026-08-11 · https://www.gov.mb.ca/education/childcare/families/10_dollar_a_day.html
- 4. 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