Child care in the Tri-Cities, by the numbers

The Province of British Columbia publishes an open dataset of every licensed child care location it knows about. It is free, it is machine readable, and almost nobody looks at it.

We downloaded it on 25 August 2026 and analysed the records for Coquitlam, Port Coquitlam, Port Moody and Anmore. This page reports what it shows, what it does not, and where it should not be trusted.

The shape of the local market

396 licensed facilities appear across the four communities.

Community	Licensed facilities
Coquitlam	241
Port Coquitlam	106
Port Moody	46
Anmore	3

By licence type across all four:

Licence type	Facilities
Licensed Group	246
Licensed Family	150

In Port Coquitlam alone the split is 63 Licensed Group and 43 Licensed Family. That is a much larger share of home-based care than most parents expect, and it is worth knowing when you start looking, because a Licensed Family programme is a very different setting from a Licensed Group one. The ten types of licensed child care explains how they differ.

Fee reduction participation is nearly universal

391 of the 396 facilities are recorded as participating in the Child Care Fee Reduction Initiative. Five are not.

That is the most useful single number on this page, and its usefulness runs in an unexpected direction: it means participation will not help you choose. Almost every licensed centre here already takes part, so it is a baseline rather than a differentiator.

What still varies between centres is the underlying published fee, whether the site is approved for $10 a Day, and what your own household qualifies for under the Affordable Child Care Benefit. Those are the three variables worth spending time on. How the three programs stack covers them together.

Languages, hours and other reported features

These fields come with a large caveat that appears in full below, and they are still worth reporting.

Feature reported	Facilities
French offered	7
Mandarin offered	6
Spanish offered	4
Cantonese offered	3
Both French and Mandarin	1
Weekend care	7
Care after 7 p.m.	4
Care before 6 a.m.	2
Vacancy reported for a child under 36 months	120

Two of those rows are worth pausing on.

One facility in 396 lists both French and Mandarin. That is this centre, La Vie Est Belle Childcare Centre in Port Coquitlam. We are reporting it because it comes from the Province's data rather than from our own marketing, which is the only basis on which a claim like that belongs on a website.

Seven facilities report weekend care. In a region of nearly four hundred licensed facilities, weekend availability is genuinely scarce. If you work weekends, that number tells you to start calling early.

What this dataset is not

Being clear about the limits matters more than the figures.

It contains no fee information. There is no price field. Any Tri-Cities average fee published anywhere is either drawn from another source or estimated, and we are not going to estimate one. The Province states a provincial average of $1,120 a month for full-time centre-based care before the $10 a Day program, and that is a provincial figure covering very different local markets.

Most descriptive fields are self-reported. Languages, hours, meals, age groups and vacancies are completed by each operator about its own facility. A blank field usually means nobody filled it in rather than that the service is unavailable. So the seven French facilities are seven that said so, and the real number may be higher.

Vacancy data goes stale fastest. 120 facilities reporting an infant vacancy is a starting point for a call list, not a live count of open spaces.

It is a snapshot. Capacities, care types and participation change whenever a licence changes. This analysis is dated 25 August 2026 and will drift.

It carries at least one error we can see. The dataset records this centre as not ECE certified, which does not match how the centre operates. That field is self-reported and was evidently never completed. We are pointing at a mistake in our own record rather than a competitor's, because it is the clearest way to show how much weight these fields will carry.

What the numbers suggest about looking for care here

A few practical readings, offered as readings rather than as findings.

There is more home-based care than most people expect. 150 of 396 facilities hold a Licensed Family licence, and in Port Coquitlam it is 43 of 106. A family that only considers centre-based care is ruling out roughly a third of the licensed options in the area without looking at them. Licensed Family and In-Home Multi-Age programmes are genuinely different settings, with one consistent caregiver and a small group, and they suit some children better.

Coquitlam has more than twice the facilities of Port Coquitlam. That is partly population and partly geography, and it matters for how wide you draw your search radius. A family in north Port Coquitlam may find more realistic options across the boundary than within their own city.

Specialist provision is thin. Seven facilities report weekend care in a region of nearly four hundred. Four report care after 7 p.m. If your work does not fit a standard weekday, the search is a different exercise: you are looking for one of a handful of places rather than choosing among many, and you should start much earlier.

Language provision is thinner still. Seven French, six Mandarin, four Spanish, three Cantonese, and one facility offering two of them. These are the facilities that filled the field in, so the true figures may be higher, and the order of magnitude is unlikely to be wrong.

Comparing centres on cost, properly

Because the dataset holds no fee data, cost comparison has to be done by hand, and there is a right way to do it.

Get the fee for the exact care programme and age band. A centre often charges differently for an under-36-months place than for a three year old, because the staffing the law requires is different.

Ask whether the quoted figure is before or after the fee reduction. With 391 of 396 local facilities participating, it usually is after, and assuming otherwise throws a budget out by hundreds of dollars.

Get the list of what is extra, in writing. Meals, field trips, late pick-up. These sit outside the funding calculation entirely, and a centre with a slightly higher all-inclusive fee can be cheaper than one with a lower fee and a long list of extras.

Estimate your Affordable Child Care Benefit before comparing. The benefit depends on care type as well as income, so it can change which of two centres is actually cheaper for your family.

How the three programs stack works through that arithmetic in order.

What to do with all this

Use the dataset to build a list, not to make a decision. It is excellent at telling you what exists and roughly where. It is unreliable on the details.

Search it yourself. The licensed childcare finder on this site searches these same records by name, street or postal code. The Province's own child care map at maps.gov.bc.ca covers the whole province and shows fee reduction participation.

Then phone. Confirm the age groups, the hours, the languages, the current fee and what is included. Every one of those can differ from the record.

Then check the licence and the inspection history, which is a separate exercise from the funding one. Licensed child care in British Columbia covers what a licence commits a centre to and how to read an inspection report.

How this analysis was done

For anyone who wants to check it or repeat it.

The source is the Province's Child Care Map Data, published by the Ministry of Education and Child Care under the Open Government Licence for British Columbia. We downloaded the CSV on 25 August 2026 and filtered it to the four communities named above, which produced 396 records.

The counts on this page are straightforward tallies of fields in those records: city, licence type, the fee reduction flag, the language list, the hours flags and the vacancy flags. No estimation, no weighting, no inference from one field to another.

The same file powers the licensed childcare finder on this site, so anything reported here can be searched there.

If you repeat this after the dataset refreshes, expect the totals to move. That is the dataset working correctly rather than a contradiction.

Why we do not publish our own fees here

Our fee schedule is not on this site, and inventing a figure or a range to fill the gap would make this page less trustworthy rather than more.

Phone or email and we will tell you the current fee for the programme your child would join, what is included, what is charged separately, and what we understand your family would pay after funding. That is a real answer for your situation rather than an average that fits nobody.

You have reached the end of this guide. Licensed child care in British Columbia covers the rules every centre follows, and raising a bilingual child covers how young children pick up a second language.