MapleCub Data Lab · City snapshot · 2026
Vancouver child care, in numbers — 2026 snapshot
Vancouver has 504 licensed child-care programs, 8.8% of everything British Columbia publishes — with what the registry does, and does not, record about them.
- Computed 2026-08-11
- N = 504 programs
- 20,516 across eight registries
- CC BY 4.0
504
licensed programs
364
centres
140
licensed family homes
22.8%
publish opening hours
27.8% of Vancouver’s licensed programs are family homes: 140 of them, against 364 centres. That is the 16th-highest family-home share among Canada’s 30 largest municipal child-care markets. That mix is set by provincial licensing law more than by local demand: some provinces license each home individually, others license home care through agencies that never appear as separate records. Altogether MapleCub lists 504 licensed child-care programs in Vancouver, 8.8% of all the licensed programs British Columbia publishes.
Vancouver publishes opening and closing times for 115 of its programs (22.8%) and age ranges for 60 (11.9%). Where hours are known, 17 programs open by 7 a.m. and 27 stay open past 6 p.m. The remaining 389 programs have not published a schedule anywhere we can read it. Both counts are floors.
The numbers
| Measure | Value | What it means |
|---|---|---|
| Licensed programs | 504 | 8.8% of British Columbia's 5,702 licensed programs. |
| Centres | 364 | 72.2% of the city's licensed programs. |
| Licensed family homes | 140 | 27.8% of the city's licensed programs. |
| Age ranges published | 60 (11.9%) | Programs whose served age groups are recorded, so an infant or school-age filter can find them. |
| Opening hours published | 115 (22.8%) | Both an opening and a closing time on file. 389 programs publish neither. |
| Open by 7 a.m. | 17 | 14.8% of the 115 programs with known hours. Partial data — a program with no published schedule is not counted either way. |
| Open past 6 p.m. | 27 | 23.5% of the 115 programs with known hours. Same partial-data caveat. |
| CCFRI-authorized (fee-reduction program — not $10-a-day designation) | 479 (95%) | 25 of the city's programs are not authorized for the CCFRI fee reduction. Authorization lowers the monthly fee a provider may charge; it does not make a program a $10-a-Day site. |
| French-language programs | Not recorded | British Columbia's registry does not record the language of instruction, so no count can be published without inventing one. |
| Programs with a public rating | 80 (15.9%) | Average 4.54 out of 5. Matching requires name agreement, so this undercounts rather than overcounts. |
Source: MapleCub Canadian Childcare Dataset — Aug 2026 · computed 2026-08-10 · N = 504 · CSV · Vancouver, British Columbia; visible listings only
Centres or homes: where Vancouver sits
Vancouver sits at 27.8%. The 30 largest municipal markets hold 9,998 licensed programs between them, 48.7% of the national dataset, and they do not run on the same kind of supply: Saskatoon and Regina are family-home cities, while 4 Quebec cities have no individually licensed homes at all.
Source: MapleCub Canadian Childcare Dataset — Aug 2026 · computed 2026-08-10 · N = 9,998 · CSV · community = normalized city name within a province
What this snapshot cannot tell you
Program counts are not space counts: no province in this dataset publishes licensed capacity for Vancouver in a form that survives comparison, so 504 counts licences a parent can look up rather than rooms with a free spot. Opening hours come from provider-published schedules rather than the registry, which is why 389 of 504 programs have none on file. And every figure here is a snapshot of 2026-08-11 — licences open and close weekly.
The CCFRI figure above reflects what the registry records rather than what a given family will pay; fee rules and eligibility are covered in the cost guides.
Looking for a place, not a statistic?
Browse all 504 licensed programs in Vancouver with filters for age group, hours and subsidy, or read the national picture these numbers came from.
Cite as: MapleCub, “Vancouver child care, in numbers — 2026 snapshot,” 2026-08-11, https://www.maplecub.ca/research/vancouver-childcare-snapshot. Released under CC BY 4.0. More open data: MapleCub Data Lab.