Licensed child care in British Columbia, explained

A licence is the single most useful thing you can check about a daycare, and it is the thing parents are least often told how to read.

It is not a badge the centre buys, and it is not a rating of quality. A Community Care Facility Licence is a legal permission, issued by a regional health authority, that comes attached to a long list of rules. Those rules cover how many children may be in a group, who may supervise them, how much floor space and outdoor space the building must have, what happens when a child gets sick, and what the centre has to write down. A licensing officer visits and checks.

None of this is secret. All of it is published. The problem is where it is published: the rules sit in a regulation schedule written for lawyers, the inspection reports sit in a health authority database, and the list of licensed centres sits in a PDF that gets reprinted a few times a year. This guide puts the parts a parent actually needs in one place, in plain words, with a link to the original beside every number.

What the licence actually commits a centre to

Two pieces of law do the work. The Community Care and Assisted Living Act is the statute that says certain kinds of care require a licence and gives health authorities the power to issue, inspect and cancel them. The Child Care Licensing Regulation, B.C. Reg. 332/2007, is where the detail lives.

The regulation is more specific than most parents expect. It does not say a centre should be safe and clean. It says a licensee must provide at least 3.7 square metres of usable indoor floor area per child, at least 6 square metres of outdoor play area per child, one toilet and wash basin for every ten children or fewer, and water heated to no more than 49 degrees Celsius anywhere a child can reach it. It says food and drink must never be used as a reward or a punishment. It says a child must never be fed from a propped bottle.

Rules at that level of detail are useful to a parent for one reason: they turn a vague worry into a question with a checkable answer.

The threshold: three children

The line that decides whether a licence is required at all is the number three. A person who cares for three or more children who are not related to them needs a Community Care Facility Licence. Below that line sits licence-not-required care, where an unregistered caregiver may look after a maximum of two unrelated children, or one sibling group, with no health authority inspection at all.

This catches people out. A neighbour minding four children in her living room is not running a small unlicensed daycare that the system tolerates. She is operating outside the law. The distinction, and the middle category of registered licence-not-required care, is covered in licensed, registered and unlicensed care.

Ten care programs, not one

There is no single thing called a daycare licence. The regulation prescribes ten separate care programs, each with its own age range, maximum group size and staffing ratio, plus an eleventh category, Child-minding, that applies only to services attached to government-funded settlement and language programs for immigrants.

The ones a parent of a young child will meet are Group Child Care (Under 36 Months), Group Child Care (30 Months to School Age), Preschool, Family Child Care, Multi-Age Child Care and In-Home Multi-Age Child Care. A single centre often holds more than one. This centre holds two: a Group Child Care programme for children from 30 months to school age, and Multi-Age Child Care.

That matters when you read a centre's licensed capacity, because capacity is a building-wide number and group size is a per-room number, and the two are frequently confused. A centre licensed for 24 children is not running one group of 24. It cannot: no care program in the regulation permits a group that size except Group Child Care for 30 months to school age, which caps at 25 with strict staffing. The types of licensed child care sets out all ten. For how to check a centre's own licensed capacity against the public record before you tour, including this centre's own figures, see the journal.

The four rules worth checking yourself

Most of the regulation is aimed at the operator. Four parts of it are worth a parent's time, because they are checkable on a tour and they are where the differences between centres show up.

Ratios and group sizes. Schedule E is a table. It sets, for each care program, the largest group permitted and the number of staff required at each group size. It is the most concrete quality signal in the whole regulation, and the numbers surprise people. See ratios and group sizes.

Who is allowed to be with the children. Educator, assistant and responsible adult are three different legal categories with three different training requirements, and a ratio that reads "one educator and one assistant" is not the same as "two educators". See staff qualifications.

The building. Indoor space per child, outdoor space per child, the sleeping area, the diaper change surface, the fencing around the yard. All specified, all measurable. See space, safety and the outdoor play area.

What happens when something goes wrong. Illness, medication, injury, and the list of incidents a centre must report to a medical health officer within 24 hours. See health, illness and medication.

Checking a specific centre

Two public records exist for every licensed facility in the province, and both are free.

The first is the list of licensed facilities published by the health authority, which tells you that a centre exists, what care programs it may run, and how many children it may have on site at one time. Fraser Health publishes separate lists for Fraser North, Fraser South and Fraser East, each carrying the date it was printed. Port Coquitlam is in Fraser North. The licensed childcare finder on this site does the same job from the Province's own open dataset, searchable by name, street or postal code.

The second is the inspection record. Fraser Health publishes routine inspection reports and summaries of substantiated complaint investigations in a searchable online database. Reading these well takes a little practice, because a report listing several minor items is not automatically worse than a clean one from a centre that was inspected less recently. Inspections and how to read a report covers what a licensing officer checks and what the risk rating means.

If something is wrong at a centre your child already attends, the route is complaints and concerns.

What the numbers look like locally

The Province publishes an open dataset of licensed child care locations. Downloaded on 25 August 2026, it lists 396 licensed facilities across the Tri-Cities: 241 in Coquitlam, 106 in Port Coquitlam, 46 in Port Moody and 3 in Anmore. Of those, 246 hold a Licensed Group licence and 150 hold a Licensed Family licence.

Two things are worth knowing about that dataset before you lean on it. Most of its fields are filled in by each operator about itself, so a blank field usually means nobody completed it rather than that the centre lacks that feature. And it is a snapshot: capacities, age groups and vacancies change whenever a licence changes. Use it to build a shortlist, then phone.

Four mistakes parents make reading this

Reading capacity as availability. A centre licensed for 24 children has 24 seats when it is full, not 24 openings. The licence number never moves; the number of free spaces changes weekly.

Assuming a bigger licence means a bigger room. Capacity is the whole building. A licence for 24 usually means several small groups in several rooms, because the group size limits in Schedule E make one group of 24 impossible for most care types.

Treating a clean inspection report as a full picture. Reports show what an officer saw on the days they visited. A centre inspected twice in two years with nothing found has a thinner record than a centre inspected six times with two minor items corrected, though the first looks better at a glance.

Confusing "unlicensed" with "illegal". Care for one or two unrelated children without a licence is lawful and common. Care for three or more is not. The number is what matters, not the label a caregiver uses.

What a licence does not tell you

A licence is a floor, not a ceiling. It tells you a centre meets the minimum the province requires, that someone independent has been inside the building, and that a record exists if things go wrong. It tells you nothing about whether the educators are warm with children, whether the day has a rhythm that suits your child, or whether the person who runs the place is there every day.

Those answers only come from standing in the room. Read the record first so that the visit can be about the things a record cannot hold.

One part of the floor is worth reading on its own: Schedule G sets out the five kinds of development every licensed programme must support, and early learning and play works through it alongside the provincial Early Learning Framework.

Start with the types of licensed child care, or jump to whichever part answers the question you came with.