Childcare costs in Canada: fees, caps and who pays what

What Canadian families actually pay

Statistics Canada's 2025 Survey on Early Learning and Child Care Arrangements, released on 21 October 2025, is the closest thing this country has to a national price list. It found that families paid a mean of $435 a month for full-time centre-based care for a child aged 0 to 5 in 2025. That is down from $508 in 2023 and $663 in 2022. Full-time home-based care was flat at $534 a month, and home-based care is now more expensive than centre-based care on average, which surprises most parents.

The reason for the gap is structural rather than mysterious. Around 45% of home-based providers were unlicensed in 2024, and unlicensed providers cannot join the Canada-wide Early Learning and Child Care system that is driving centre fees down.

That distinction is the single most useful thing to hold on to. The survey deliberately collects expenses for all arrangements, licensed and unlicensed, not only for care inside the national system. So the falling average does not mean every family is paying less; it means a growing share of families have a place in an enrolled programme, while the families who could not get one are paying much the same as before.

The provincial split

National averages are close to useless when the range runs from $206 to $571. Mean monthly expenses for full-time centre-based care in 2025 were:

• British Columbia $571, Ontario $542, Alberta $452
• New Brunswick $386, Nova Scotia $383, Northwest Territories $352
• Quebec $348, Nunavut $293, Yukon $280
• Manitoba $264, Saskatchewan $260, Newfoundland and Labrador $242, Prince Edward Island $206

Five jurisdictions — Prince Edward Island, Ontario, Manitoba, Alberta and the Northwest Territories — each shed more than $100 a month between 2023 and 2025. In Newfoundland and Labrador, Saskatchewan and Nunavut, expenses in 2025 were similar to 2023, but those jurisdictions had already been below the Canadian average, so there was less room to fall.

The fee caps that produced those numbers

Ontario

Since January 2025, base fees for eligible children in child care programmes enrolled in the Canada-wide system must be $22 a day or less. The reduction came in two statutory steps: 25% between April and December 2022, then a further 37% on 31 December 2022, a compound cut of 52.75%.

What the cap replaced is worth knowing. As at December 2024, before the cap took effect, mean full-day fees at licensed Ontario centres ran from $36.57 a day for infants down to $26.03 a day for kindergarten-age children. Licensed home child care agencies charged $23.52 a day for children under two and $19.90 for four- and five-year-olds. A $12 per day floor limits how far the cheapest programmes have to cut.

The word that carries the weight is base. Base fees include registration fees, deposits, administration fees, supervision, play materials and bedding, and food where regulation requires it. Those must all sit inside the $22. Non-base fees — late pick-up charges, bank processing fees, optional field trips, optional transport — sit outside it and are not capped. A provider quoting you $22 a day plus a mandatory annual registration charge is not complying, and an administrative penalty of up to $100,000 applies.

Enrolment is close to universal but not total: 5,556 licensed sites, or 92%, covering 328,610 spaces, were enrolled as at 31 March 2025.

Quebec runs a different scheme entirely

Quebec never joined the federal fee-reduction machinery, because it already had its own. If your child has a place in a subsidised childcare centre you pay a reduced contribution of $9.65 a day for 2026. That amount is indexed on 1 January each year, so the figure you were quoted last year is not this year's figure.

Eligibility is narrower than the fee. To get the reduced contribution the parent must reside in Quebec and hold one of a defined set of statuses, principally Canadian citizenship or permanent residence. Places outside the subsidised network are billed at whatever the provider charges, which is why Quebec's mean monthly expense of $348 sits mid-table rather than at the bottom.

What this means when you are choosing a place

Ask three questions before you accept a space, in this order.

First, is this programme enrolled in the Canada-wide system — or, in Quebec, is this a subsidised place? A licensed centre that is not enrolled charges market rates and is under no obligation to cut them. Second, which of these charges are base fees? Get the answer in writing. Third, what is the waiting list position, in months, for the age group my child will be in when I need the place, not the age group they are now?

The last question matters more than the first two. Fee caps have made care dramatically cheaper without making it dramatically easier to find, and a $22-a-day place you cannot get is worth nothing. Statistics Canada found a higher proportion of parents reporting difficulty finding child care in 2025 than in 2023.

Where to get help

Fee rules, enrolment status and subsidy eligibility are all set provincially, so your first call is to your provincial or territorial ministry responsible for early learning, or in Quebec to the ministry responsible for families. Municipal service system managers administer the scheme locally in Ontario and hold the waiting lists. Statistics Canada publishes the underlying expense tables if you want to check a figure yourself rather than take a provider's word for what is normal.