New South Wales childcare market history

Each bar is the number of services reporting care in that quarter. Scroll sideways to see all quarters. A missing bar means no published figure, not zero services. These counts do not measure available childcare places.

Providers delivering a preschool program to children aged 3 to 6, including programs within centre-based day care. Government share is government-operated preschool and day-care program providers divided by all providers in this collection. These are service providers, not counts of corporate owners.

Some preschools are reclassified to day care as collection methods change. A change in setting is not proof of an opening or closure. Management categories do not establish ultimate ownership, a transfer or merger. Source: based on Australian Bureau of Statistics data, CC BY 4.0.

Department of Education records extend regional service and fee history to 2012–13. This source covers 86 SA3 regions in Greater Sydney and Greater Melbourne. It does not represent all of NSW or Victoria.

These 2011 regions are kept separate from the later CCS regional series. Service counts repeat across age groups, so this view uses only the source’s Total age group. Regional mean fees are not combined into a national average. Suppression and rounding are retained.

Reference years: 2012–13 to 2015–16. First retained collection: 2026-09-06. The source publishes 4,042 rows across three care types and age groups. Changes in reported service counts do not establish individual openings or closures.

Original data ↗ · © Commonwealth of Australia, Department of Education, CC BY 3.0 Australia ↗

Dated observations of childcare-classified applications in the statewide OnlineDA and OnlineCDC feeds, lodged from 1 January 2026. Each application is counted once within its source. Modifications and certifications can relate to the same site, so these counts do not represent distinct new centres.

One verified baseline is retained. Progression will be available after another comparable observation; earlier lodgement and decision dates have not been turned into historical stages.

The feeds do not publish proposed childcare places. Capacity and net new centres are unavailable. Applications outside the fixed lodgement cohort, missing or incorrect source classifications and pre-portal approvals are not covered. Other states have no comparable retained application-stage series in this view.

Source: © State of New South Wales (Department of Planning, Housing and Infrastructure), OnlineDA licence and OnlineCDC licence. Original pages, source totals and hashes are retained for replay.

The retained August observation can now be compared with a fresh official source collection. These figures cover NSW government preschools, separately from the CCS centre-based day care series above.

The operating list includes the open expansion sites. Do not add those two counts together. “Announced for 2027” records a published intention, not a forecast of verified delivery.

Earliest retained observation: 2026-08-14. The first point is the product’s previously verified snapshot; its original upstream files were not retained. The latest collection archives the original official pages and school dataset with hashes.

© State of New South Wales (Department of Education), 2023. Source data used under CC BY 4.0. Check nearby public preschools for a site’s local context →