Question 1

How many licensed daycares are in Ontario?

Accepted Answer

As of 2026-08-10, MapleCub counts 4,374 licensed child-care programs in Ontario — 4,209 centres and 165 licensed family homes. That is 6.1 licensed programs for every 1,000 of the province’s 720,586 children aged 0–4, the lowest rate of the eight provinces that publish a licensing registry. They sit in 555 communities; 271 of those (48.8%) have exactly one licensed program and no second choice, while 34% of the province’s licensed programs are in its five largest cities. Ontario does not publish licensed capacity as open data, so how many children those programs can actually take cannot be worked out from public files. Ontario’s 2026 price position: $22/day cap. CWELCC fee cap of $22/day, in force since January 1, 2025. Separately, the one-year federal extension holds the provincial average at $19/day until December 31, 2026 and runs the agreement to March 31, 2027. The cap and the average come from two different commitments, and neither is $10/day. Which individual programs offer that price is not distinguishable from public registry data — no CWELCC enrolment field in the open data — so every row in the file carries the same value. On inspections, Ontario publishes confirmed violations and offences only — compliance orders, protection orders, administrative penalties, restraining orders and prosecutions. A routine Ontario inspection that ends in compliance is never published, and the provincial file of assessment results is withheld. A routine Ontario inspection that ends in compliance is never published, so a clean registry entry and an uninspected centre look identical from outside. Online, MapleCub has matched 1,996 of Ontario's 4,374 programs to a Google place record (45.6%), and 1,995 of those (99.9%) carry a rating, averaging 4.46 across 49,747 parent reviews. 2,999 programs (68.6%) have a website recorded in the frozen quarterly snapshot. Read the rating figure as coverage, not as visibility: with only 45.6% of Ontario matched, the share of the province that actually carries a rating could be anything from 47.4% to 101.8%, so this page draws no conclusion about Ontario's sector from it.

Question 2

What do parents pay for licensed child care in Ontario in 2026?

Accepted Answer

Ontario’s 2026 price position: $22/day cap. CWELCC fee cap of $22/day, in force since January 1, 2025. Separately, the one-year federal extension holds the provincial average at $19/day until December 31, 2026 and runs the agreement to March 31, 2027. The cap and the average come from two different commitments, and neither is $10/day. Which individual programs offer that price is not distinguishable from public registry data — no CWELCC enrolment field in the open data — so every row in the file carries the same value.

Question 3

Does Ontario publish child-care inspection records?

Accepted Answer

On inspections, Ontario publishes confirmed violations and offences only — compliance orders, protection orders, administrative penalties, restraining orders and prosecutions. A routine Ontario inspection that ends in compliance is never published, and the provincial file of assessment results is withheld. A routine Ontario inspection that ends in compliance is never published, so a clean registry entry and an uninspected centre look identical from outside.

Measure	Value	What it means
Licensed programs	4,374	21.3% of the 20,516 licensed programs across the eight provinces that publish registries.
Centres	4,209	96.2% of the province’s licensed programs.
Licensed family homes	165	3.8% 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	720,586	Statistics Canada, Table 17-10-0005-01 (July 1, 2025 estimates)⁸
Programs per 1,000 children	6.1	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	555	A community is a normalized city name — lower-cased and trimmed — so registry case variants do not count twice.
Communities with exactly one option	271 (48.8%)	One licence serves the whole community: no comparing, no waitlist hedging, no second choice.
Share in the five largest cities	34%	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.^3,4
Programs with a website	2,999 (68.6%)	Harvested conservatively, requiring name agreement, so this undercounts rather than overcounts.
Matched by MapleCub to a Google place	1,996 (45.6%)	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 Ontario's.
Rated among the matched	1,995 of 1,996 (99.9%)	Average 4.46 out of five across 49,747 parent reviews. Across ALL of Ontario's listings the rated share is 47.4% — a floor set by our matching, and a ceiling of 101.8% if every listing we never matched turned out to be rated.

How many licensed daycares are in Ontario?

The short answer, with everything behind it

The numbers

How Ontario compares on supply

What makes Ontario’s registry different

Where to go from here

Sources