Daycare and Childcare Centre Cleaning Services in Toronto & the GTA

Licensed childcare centres in Toronto and across the GTA need daycare cleaning services built around a standard most commercial spaces never see: room-by-room disinfection frequencies published by Public Health Ontario, secure storage rules for cleaning chemicals under provincial regulation, and an inspection process that expects dated logs, not a verbal assurance. Pro City Maids' daycare cleaning services follow that same published Public Health Ontario schedule a Ministry of Education inspector references, scheduled entirely after hours so cleaning never overlaps with a program day, with the clear line between what our team covers and what stays with your educators set before the first visit.

Who Needs Daycare Cleaning Services Like This

This guide is for directors, owners, and administrators of licensed childcare centres, licensed home childcare agencies, and early years programs across Toronto, Mississauga, Vaughan, Markham, Richmond Hill, and the rest of the GTA who want daycare cleaning services that actually support, not just approximate, what a Ministry of Education licensing inspection expects. It is not a substitute for your own Program Statement or infection-control policy; it covers the cleaning layer specifically, and where a task belongs to your educators rather than an outside cleaning company.

Why Daycare Cleaning Is Different From a Standard Office

A general office rarely has anyone under five putting a shared surface in their mouth, sitting on the floor for circle time, or napping on a cot six feet from where lunch was served an hour earlier. Three things separate daycare cleaning from standard commercial cleaning:

• Every surface is a child-contact surface. Floors, low shelving, cubbies, and table tops all sit within a toddler's reach and mouth height, which is a different risk profile than an adult-height office.
• The frequency standard is published and specific, not general. Public Health Ontario sets an item-by-item schedule (after each use, daily, weekly, monthly) rather than a general "keep it clean" expectation.
• Licensing inspection expects documentation. A Ministry of Education program advisor can ask to see cleaning records as part of a licensing visit, the same way a public health unit does for a medical clinic.

What Ontario Actually Requires: CCEYA, O. Reg. 137/15, and Public Health Ontario

Two different sources govern childcare cleaning in Ontario, and conflating them is a common mistake in this niche. Ontario Regulation 137/15 (General), made under the Child Care and Early Years Act, 2014, is the actual statute text. Reading it directly: section 15(1) requires a licensee to provide storage "for medical supplies, cleaning materials and equipment and other items that could cause harm to a child, such as poisonous and hazardous substances," kept separate from areas children use. Sections 59 and 60 require a licensee to obtain a vulnerable sector check, a specific category of police record check, from every employee before they begin employment and from every volunteer or student before they begin interacting with children.

What O. Reg. 137/15 does not contain is a room-by-room cleaning frequency schedule. That comes from a separate document: Public Health Ontario's Child Care Centre Cleaning and Disinfection Schedule, published to be used alongside PHO's Infection Prevention and Control in Child Care Centres Checklist. It is the practical reference a public health unit or licensing inspector actually points to, and it is what we build our own daycare cleaning checklist against.

The Official Cleaning & Disinfection Schedule, Room by Room

Public Health Ontario's schedule sets a minimum frequency by item and area. Below is our own summary of the published standard, organized by zone, for the areas a professional after-hours cleaning visit typically covers (educator-performed after-each-use tasks are noted separately in the checklist below the table):

Every "other" row on Public Health Ontario's published schedule also carries a standing rule: clean and disinfect as needed whenever a surface is visibly soiled or the centre is in a period of increased illness, on top of the listed minimum. That escalation pattern is the same logic behind our own flu-season office cleaning guide, applied to a setting where the baseline standard is already higher year-round.

Sanitizing vs. Disinfecting: What Belongs Where

Public Health Ontario's schedule draws a deliberate line between two different standards, and mixing them up is a real compliance gap, not a technicality:

• Sanitizing reduces microorganisms to a level considered safe under Ontario Regulation 493/17's food-premises definition. It is the correct standard for anything that goes in a child's mouth: toys, teethers, water table equipment, and food-contact surfaces like highchairs and table tops.
• Disinfecting is a higher standard, required for diaper-change surfaces, washroom fixtures, and any surface contaminated with blood or bodily fluid.

Every product we use for daycare accounts carries a Health Canada Drug Identification Number and is applied at the exact dwell or contact time listed on the label, the same standard we hold ourselves to on medical and dental office cleaning.

Staff Screening: What a Vulnerable Sector Check Actually Covers

Several daycare-cleaning providers advertise that their staff carry a Vulnerable Sector Check simply because they clean licensed centres. Reading O. Reg. 137/15 directly is more precise than that: section 60(1) requires the licensee to obtain the check from "every employee, before the person begins their employment," and from "every volunteer or student who is on an educational placement with the licensee, before the person begins interacting with children." A contracted, after-hours cleaning vendor with no child contact isn't squarely either category on the regulation's own text. We don't overstate that as a blanket guarantee. What we do instead: confirm with your director at the walkthrough whether your specific licence, insurer, or board policy requires screening for any vendor with building access, and arrange it if so, rather than assuming one answer fits every centre.

What Pro City Maids Covers (and What Stays With Your Educators)

A clear division of labour is what keeps a licensing inspection clean on both sides. Our after-hours visit covers:

• Daily and weekly cleaning of classrooms, hallways, and common areas, including low shelving and cubby surfaces at child height
• Washroom and diaper-change area cleaning and disinfection on the daily/weekly cadence set by the published schedule
• High-touch surface disinfection (door knobs, light switches, handrails), escalated in frequency during flu and cold season or a known illness in the centre
• Floor care, including daily vacuuming and scheduled carpet steam cleaning
• Kitchen and eating-area surface cleaning outside of active mealtimes
• Dated, written completion logs your director can keep on file for a licensing inspection

What stays with your educators, by design: after-each-use toy sanitizing between activities, diaper-change table disinfection after each individual change, and anything that happens while children are present. We build our checklist around that boundary rather than claiming coverage of tasks that, by their nature, have to happen during the operating day.

GTA-Specific Considerations

Licensed centres across Toronto, Mississauga, Vaughan, Markham, and Richmond Hill share a scheduling constraint most commercial tenants don't: a licensed childcare space typically has one operating window (roughly 7 a.m. to 6 p.m.) with no evening programming to work around, which makes after-hours access straightforward to arrange compared to a multi-shift office or a retail unit with late closing. Multi-location operators running several GTA centres under one licence group also benefit from a single cleaning agreement and one consistent checklist across every site, rather than negotiating scope separately at each location. Where a centre shares a building with other tenants, common-area janitorial (shared lobbies, stairwells) typically falls under the property's own contract, separate from the licensed suite itself, coordinated the same way we handle it for our commercial and medical office accounts.

How to Start Daycare Cleaning Services Without Disrupting Your Program

• Start with a walkthrough. We map every room, note which surfaces are diaper-change or food-contact zones, and agree on the frequency table and documentation format before the first visit.
• Scheduling runs entirely outside program hours. Before opening, after closing, or on a weekend, whichever fits your centre's access and alarm arrangements.
• No long-term contract required. Frequency can adjust seasonally (see our flu-season guide) or as enrollment changes, without renegotiating a base agreement.
• Documentation is built in from day one. Dated completion logs are available on request for every visit, formatted for what a licensing inspection or parent inquiry actually asks to see.

Signs Your Centre's Current Cleaning Isn't Meeting the Standard

• No written cleaning log exists to hand a licensing inspector or a parent who asks how the centre is cleaned.
• Cleaning happens during operating hours, with strong-smelling products in use anywhere near children.
• Carpets haven't been steam-cleaned in longer than six months, below Public Health Ontario's twice-a-year minimum.
• Your current provider can't say whether they sanitize or disinfect a given surface, or why.
• Multiple children or staff have been out sick at once with no corresponding escalation in disinfection frequency.

We also serve licensed childcare centres in Mississauga, Vaughan, Markham, Richmond Hill, and Brampton.

Frequently Asked Questions