MapleCub Data Lab · Province data · 2026
How many licensed daycares are in Saskatchewan?
Two of every three licensed child-care programs in Saskatchewan are somebody’s house.
- Computed 2026-08-10
- N = 1,320 Saskatchewan programs
- 20,516 across eight registries
- CC BY 4.0
1,320
licensed programs
19.2
per 1,000 children aged 0–4
176
communities with licensed care
72.2%
of them have exactly one option
The short answer, with everything behind it
As of 2026-08-10, MapleCub counts 1,320 licensed child-care programs in Saskatchewan — 450 centres and 870 licensed family homes. That is 19.2 licensed programs for every 1,000 of the province’s 68,675 children aged 0–4, the third-highest rate of the eight provinces that publish a licensing registry. They sit in 176 communities; 127 of those (72.2%) have exactly one licensed program and no second choice, while 75.9% of the province’s licensed programs are in its five largest cities.
Saskatchewan does not publish licensed capacity as open data, so how many children those programs can actually take cannot be worked out from public files. Saskatchewan’s 2026 price position: $10/day. Flat $217.50/month for children under 6 in licensed care since April 2023; extended on April 1, 2026 to children who turn six during kindergarten. Since July 1, 2026 the $10 buys a standard 10-hour day, and operators may charge fees for hours beyond it. Which individual programs offer that price is not distinguishable from public registry data — no fee-program field in the published provider list — so every row in the file carries the same value.1,2,3
On inspections, Saskatchewan publishes neither inspection records nor enforcement outcomes, so “nothing on record” here means only that there is no record. Online, MapleCub has matched 86 of Saskatchewan's 1,320 programs to a Google place record (6.5%), and 85 of those (98.8%) carry a rating, averaging 4.39 across 917 parent reviews. 140 programs (10.6%) have a website recorded in the frozen quarterly snapshot. Read the rating figure as coverage, not as visibility: with only 6.5% of Saskatchewan matched, the share of the province that actually carries a rating could be anything from 6.9% to 100.4%, so this page draws no conclusion about Saskatchewan's sector from it.
Source: MapleCub Canadian Childcare Dataset — Aug 2026 · computed 2026-08-10 · N = 1,320 · CSV · Saskatchewan; visible listings only
The numbers
| Measure | Value | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Licensed programs | 1,320 | 6.4% of the 20,516 licensed programs across the eight provinces that publish registries. |
| Centres | 450 | 34.1% of the province’s licensed programs. |
| Licensed family homes | 870 | 65.9% 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 | 68,675 | Statistics Canada, Table 17-10-0005-01 (July 1, 2025 estimates)4 |
| Programs per 1,000 children | 19.2 | 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 | 176 | A community is a normalized city name — lower-cased and trimmed — so registry case variants do not count twice. |
| Communities with exactly one option | 127 (72.2%) | One licence serves the whole community: no comparing, no waitlist hedging, no second choice. |
| Share in the five largest cities | 75.9% | 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 | Not published | Neither inspection records nor enforcement outcomes are published, so an empty history here means an empty file. |
| Programs with a website | 140 (10.6%) | Harvested conservatively, requiring name agreement, so this undercounts rather than overcounts. |
| Matched by MapleCub to a Google place | 86 (6.5%) | 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 Saskatchewan's. |
| Rated among the matched | 85 of 86 (98.8%) | Average 4.39 out of five across 917 parent reviews. Across ALL of Saskatchewan's listings the rated share is 6.9% — a floor set by our matching, and a ceiling of 100.4% if every listing we never matched turned out to be rated. |
Source: MapleCub Canadian Childcare Dataset — Aug 2026 · computed 2026-08-10 · N = 1,320 · CSV · child population: Statistics Canada, Table 17-10-0005-01 (July 1, 2025 estimates)
How Saskatchewan compares on supply
Saskatchewan comes in at 19.2, 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 Saskatchewan’s registry different
870 of 1,320 records — 65.9% — are licensed family child cares, the highest share in the country, against 450 centres. Licensing each of them individually is what lifts a province of 68,675 young children to 19.2 programs per 1,000, the third-highest rate here, off a base of only 1,320 licences.
It also produces the starkest geography in the dataset. 127 of 176 communities (72.2%) have exactly one licensed program, and 75.9% of every licensed program in the province is in five cities — the tightest concentration of the eight. Across much of rural Saskatchewan, the licensed sector is one home, and when it closes there is no second one.
Against that, the published record is the thinnest of any province: no inspection data, no enforcement data, no licensed capacity, and a provider file with no fee-program field. The flat monthly rate for children under six is province-wide policy, but nothing published confirms it facility by facility. Saskatchewan asks parents to take more on trust than anywhere else in this dataset.
Source: MapleCub Canadian Childcare Dataset — Aug 2026 · computed 2026-08-10 · N = 1,320 · CSV · registry structure and published fields as documented by each province
Where to go from here
Saskatchewan beyond the arithmetic: the programs themselves, and the rules behind them.
- Licensed daycares in Saskatchewan — browse the 1,320 programs themselves, with age, hours and subsidy filters.
- What child care costs in Saskatchewan — the fee rules and subsidy thresholds behind the price line above, with official sources.
- Saskatchewan’s one-option communities — the 127 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.
- Saskatoon child care in numbers — the city snapshot, 469 licensed programs.
Cite as: MapleCub, “Saskatchewan child care by the numbers, 2026,” 2026-08-10, https://www.maplecub.ca/research/saskatchewan-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. Government of Saskatchewan — Education · Child Care Updates · fetched 2026-08-11 · https://www.saskatchewan.ca/residents/family-and-social-support/child-care/child-care-updates
- 2. Government of Saskatchewan — Education · Child Care Updates — Changes Under the Extension Agreement · fetched 2026-08-11 · https://www.saskatchewan.ca/residents/family-and-social-support/child-care/child-care-updates
- 3. Government of Saskatchewan — Education · Child Care Updates — Standard hours of care · fetched 2026-08-11 · https://www.saskatchewan.ca/residents/family-and-social-support/child-care/child-care-updates
- 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