Executive summary
Early Childhood Education and Care in Canada 2024/2025 is the 15th and latest report in the ECEC in Canada series, which the Childcare Resource and Research Unit has regularly developed for more than 30 years. This report features data on child care spaces, enrolment, auspice, and funding; kindergarten enrolment and provision; and detailed policy and program information. It covers the period from 2022 to 2025, a time of unique changes in Canadian child care.
This report closely documents these changes, focusing on key areas such as parent fees, the child care workforce, and funding, capturing developments and successive iterations of policy as much as possible. Generally, the descriptive information in this report covers 2022 to 2025, while the numerical information captures point-in-time snapshots of March 31, 2024, and March 31, 2025.
ECEC in Canada 2024/2025 also features several new additions, including a glossary of key terms, more enrolment data, and data specific to the implementation of CWELCC in each province and territory. The report contains 29 comparative tables: 18 Canada-wide and 11 longitudinal.
This report is an indispensable tool for researchers, advocates, and government policy makers for identifying, analyzing, and assessing recent changes in Canada’s child care landscape.
Published approximately every two years since 1992, the ECEC in Canada reports serve as Canada's sole source of consistently, recurrently, and reliably collected and presented data on early childhood education and care. These reports provide cross-jurisdictional longitudinal data and information about regulated child care, kindergarten, and parental leave.