What is $10-a-Day Daycare in BC?

8 min read · Updated May 8, 2026

$10-a-Day daycare in BC is a provincial program that caps full-time licensed daycare fees at $200 per month per child at participating sites — about $920/month less than a typical Vancouver group infant fee. The program is open to any BC family at a participating centre and is not income-tested. The catch isn't whether you qualify. It's whether you can get a spot.

This guide explains how the program actually works, what eligibility means on the parent side and the operator side, how many spaces exist (versus how many BC needs), and how to find a $10-a-Day site near you.

The basics: $200 a month, full-time

The program is officially called $10 a Day ChildCareBC. It's run by the province and works alongside the federal Canada-Wide Early Learning and Child Care (CWELCC) framework — the two stack rather than compete.

At a participating site, "families pay no more than $200 a month per child for full-time enrolment during regular business hours." The math is simple: 20 weekdays × $10 = $200. That's where the name comes from.

To put $200/month in context: a typical Vancouver group infant program runs around $1,900 to $2,109 per month at sticker price (Westcoast CCRR fee survey, Sept 2024). The province describes the savings as taking fees "from $1,120 a month to $200 a month" for a typical family — roughly $920 saved per child per month, or more than $11,000 a year.

For lower-income families, the Affordable Child Care Benefit can stack on top, reducing fees further — sometimes to zero. ACCB is income-tested (families earning up to $111,000 may qualify) and can pay up to $1,250/month per child for the youngest age groups in licensed care. $10-a-Day is not.

How it works on the operator side

Parents see one number — $200/month. The operator is paid the difference between that and what their full fee would otherwise be, directly by the province. A centre that normally charges $1,800/month for a toddler space still receives roughly that amount; about $200 of it comes from the parent and the rest comes from ChildCareBC funding.

This is why the program is called a funded-site model. It's not a subsidy attached to the child — it's a contract attached to a daycare. A family doesn't enrol "in $10-a-Day"; they enrol at a participating centre. If the centre stops participating, the rate stops. If the family moves to a different centre that isn't on the program, the rate doesn't follow them.

Sites apply to the province during time-limited intake windows. The most recent window ran "from noon, Oct. 1, 2024, until noon, Oct. 31, 2024 (Pacific time)." Operators must meet 12 eligibility criteria laid out in the 2025 Applicant Guide, and priority goes to "larger non-profit, publicly delivered and Indigenous-led providers, which primarily offer care to children five and younger, and in communities that have no spaces or a low number of $10-a-day spaces compared to their region's population density."

The practical implication for parents: which centres participate is partly a policy choice about where the province wants to grow capacity, not just a question of which operators want in.

Who qualifies

Parent eligibility

Any BC family can use a $10-a-Day spot. The program is "not income-tested and is open to any family, regardless of finances." There's no application form for the program itself, no household-income threshold, and no priority list at the provincial level for parents.

What you apply to is the individual centre. Each provider runs its own waitlist. The province is explicit: "Waitlists are kept and managed by individual child care providers, so it is best to contact them directly to learn how their waitlists work and how they fill openings."

A few things that follow from that:

A given waitlist position at a $10-a-Day centre is no different from a waitlist position at any other licensed daycare. The intake process, paperwork, and timeline look the same.
Most providers don't run waitlists as first-come-first-served. Vancouver Society of Children's Centres (VSOCC), for example, prioritizes currently enrolled families, employee children, returning families, siblings, and neighbourhood proximity before pulling from the general list.
A parent who lands a spot at a participating centre gets the $10-a-Day rate automatically. There's nothing extra to file.

Facility eligibility

Operators carry the eligibility burden. Beyond the 12 criteria and the application window, the program explicitly favours non-profit, public, and Indigenous-led providers — and within those, the operators serving zero-or-low coverage communities. For-profit operators can apply but face stiffer competition for slots.

This shapes which centres in your neighbourhood are likely to be participating. A non-profit run out of a community centre or church basement is more likely to be on the program than a for-profit chain location, all else equal.

The honest reality: spaces vs. demand

Here's where the brochure ends and the queue begins.

The current count

The program has grown quickly:

Date	$10-a-Day spaces	Source
2022	6,500	(BC Gov News, 2022)
Sept 2024	"more than 15,000"	(BC Gov News, 2024-09-09)
March 2025	"more than 16,000"	(BC Gov News, 2025-03-24)
Most recent	17,266	(Coalition of Child Care Advocates of BC, 10aday.ca)

The provincial target is 20,000 $10-a-day spaces by March 31, 2026 (BC Gov News, 2025-03-24).

The gap between announced and operating

Across BC's broader child care expansion, "41,500+ licensed child care spaces have been funded since 2018" but only "26,200 spaces are currently open and providing care for families" as of August 2025. That's roughly a 37% gap between funded-and-announced spaces and spaces a parent can actually enrol in. Construction, staffing, and licensing all take time.

The supply picture overall

$10-a-Day spaces sit inside a market that is short on spaces full stop, across all of BC's licensed daycare types. Metro Vancouver has 25.1 spaces per 100 children under 12 (2023); the BC provincial average is 21. The federal CWELCC accessibility benchmark is 5.9 spaces per 10 children — 59 per 100. BC is roughly a third of the way there.

The Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives' August 2025 analysis adds detail: "Two-thirds of BC children live in areas with between 3-5.89 spaces per 10 children" and "only 21% of BC children have access to the federal target." The Coalition of Child Care Advocates of BC, which originated the $10-a-Day campaign, characterizes progress as "nowhere near enough."

What that means for getting in

Roughly 17,000 $10-a-Day spaces serve a province where there are about 21 licensed spaces per 100 children — and where the federal accessibility target would require nearly three times the current supply. Demand for a $10-a-Day spot specifically is therefore higher than demand for daycare in general, and demand for daycare in general already produces 1-to-3-year waitlists at many Vancouver providers (VSOCC, UBC Child Care).

In plain terms: getting into a $10-a-Day spot is competitive. Treat it as the best-case outcome of a broader application strategy, not the plan.

How to find a $10-a-Day site

Two paths. Use both.

1. The provincial centres list

The province publishes its official $10-a-Day centres list, organized by six school regions: Fraser Valley, Kootenay-Boundary, Metro, Northern, Thompson-Okanagan, and Vancouver Island. The page notes that "space numbers are updated quarterly." It's the authoritative source for which centres are currently in the program.

The trade-off: the list is geographic and alphabetical. There's no map, no age-band filter, no language filter, no way to combine $10-a-Day with other criteria you care about (commute distance, curriculum, hours, vacancy status). For a single-criterion search it works. For everything else, it's a starting point.

2. Daycare Discovery

You can filter our directory of BC childcare facilities by $10-a-Day participation, alongside age, location, and other practical criteria. Try /search?funding=ten-a-day to start with the funding filter applied, then layer on Where, Age, and other filters.

We index the BC Child Care Map's facility records, the Westcoast CCRR Vancouver directory, and each Health Authority's licensing roster — currently more than 7,000 BC childcare facilities. That breadth matters because of the next section.

What this means for your search

If you're searching for $10-a-Day specifically, three things follow.

Apply broadly, not narrowly. With 17,000 $10-a-Day spaces in a province where waitlists routinely run 1 to 3 years, applying to one or two centres isn't a strategy. The Vancouver parenting community's working benchmark is to "get on every list you can find, that you would be willing to drive to." For Metro Vancouver, our internal recommendation is 15 to 20 centres minimum, prioritizing $10-a-Day participation but not limited to it.

Apply early. Every BC source we found agrees: start during pregnancy, ideally first trimester (see when to start looking for daycare in BC for the full timeline). UBC Child Care lets you apply with a due date rather than a birth date. VSOCC accepts applications at birth. Several of their programs run average waits of 1 to 3 years.

Applying is now financially free. As of April 1, 2024, BC banned waitlist fees at all CCFRI-participating providers — about 94% of licensed centres (find CCFRI sites). The pre-2024 problem of paying $25 to $200 per list to apply broadly is over. The bottleneck now is your time and form-fatigue, not your wallet.

For the full strategy — how many lists, in what order, how often to follow up, how to track them — see our pillar guide on how to find daycare in BC. When you're ready to search, filter our directory for $10-a-Day sites and start your list.