Daycare Cleaning Checklist for Ontario Centres

How to Use This Daycare Cleaning Checklist

Most child care centres already have a cleaning list. The ones that hold up under inspection differ in three small ways, and they are worth fixing before you print anything.

Split it by room, not by person. A single list for the whole centre gets signed once at the end of the day, which tells you nothing about whether the toddler room tables were wiped before lunch. A short list per room, initialled as the day goes, is both easier for staff and more useful as evidence.

Separate cleaning from sanitizing. These are two steps, and the order is not optional. Cleaning with detergent and water physically lifts food, milk, stool and dirt off the surface. Sanitizing then reduces what is left. Applying a disinfectant to a soiled surface largely wastes it, because organic matter neutralises the active ingredient. If a centre has one recurring problem, it is usually this, not the product.

Record the contact time, not just the task. Every disinfectant label states how long the surface has to stay visibly wet to do what the label claims. A quick wipe that dries in fifteen seconds has cleaned the surface, not disinfected it. Contact time is the single most skipped step in child care cleaning, and it is the one an inspector can ask about.

Daily Checklist — Infant and Toddler Rooms

This is the highest-risk room in the building, for the simple reason that everything in it goes in a mouth and the occupants crawl on the floor. It also has the shortest tolerance for a missed step, because infants and toddlers cannot report symptoms early.

• Mouthed toys removed on sight. A bin or bucket in the room for toys a child has mouthed, emptied and processed at least once during the day and again at close. The toy does not go back into play until it has been washed, sanitized and dried.
• High-touch surfaces — gates, door handles, light switches, cupboard pulls, taps, the sides of cots and playpens, the top rail of the change table — cleaned and sanitized at least twice a day and whenever visibly soiled.
• Floors vacuumed and damp-mopped at the end of the day, and spot-cleaned during it. In a room where children crawl, the floor is a contact surface, not a background.
• Highchairs and feeding seats cleaned and sanitized after every use, including the tray edge and the straps, which is where food actually collects.
• Soothers, bottles and feeding equipment handled per your centre's policy — labelled, stored individually, never shared, washed between uses.
• Bedding and cot surfaces wiped after each rest period; linen kept to one child and laundered on your set schedule or immediately if soiled.
• Sensory and water play items emptied, cleaned, sanitized and fully dried after each use rather than left standing.
• Bins, laundry hampers and diaper pails emptied and wiped daily, with the lid and foot pedal included — the pedal is touched by everyone and cleaned by nobody.

Daily Checklist — Preschool Rooms and Shared Play Areas

Older children mouth fewer objects but touch far more of them, and they move between rooms. The emphasis shifts from mouthed items to shared surfaces and transitions.

• Tables cleaned and sanitized before and after every meal or snack, and again before craft or sensory activities. This is the single most repeated task in the building.
• Chairs, including the backs and undersides of seats — wiped daily; the underside is where hands actually go when a child pulls a chair out.
• Shared equipment and manipulatives in circulation that day — cleaned at the end of the day, sanitized on your weekly rotation unless mouthed, in which case they are pulled immediately.
• Dress-up clothes, fabric props and soft items checked for soiling; anything soiled goes to laundry same day rather than back on the rack.
• Cubbies, hooks and shelf edges wiped daily — the transition zone where outdoor clothing meets indoor storage.
• Reading corner and soft seating vacuumed daily, with covers laundered on the weekly list.
• Craft sinks cleaned and sanitized, taps included, and drying racks checked for standing water.
• Floors vacuumed and damp-mopped, with attention to the perimeter and under furniture rather than the open centre of the room, which is the part that always gets done.

Daily Checklist — Diapering Station

The diapering area is where a checklist stops being paperwork. It is a small, high-frequency, high-consequence surface, and the sequence matters more than the product.

Daily Checklist — Washrooms

Child care washrooms are cleaned more often than commercial washrooms of the same size, because the users are shorter, less accurate and more likely to touch everything at hand height.

• Toilets, child-height seats and potties cleaned and disinfected at least twice daily and after any soiling. Potties are emptied, cleaned and sanitized after every use.
• Sinks, taps and soap dispensers cleaned and disinfected daily — the tap handle is touched with dirty hands by definition.
• Step stools cleaned and sanitized daily. They are stood on with outdoor shoes and grabbed with wet hands, and they are almost always missing from the printed list.
• Door handles, push plates, light switches and the flush handle disinfected at least twice daily.
• Walls and partitions to child height spot-cleaned daily — splash lands lower than adults expect.
• Floors damp-mopped daily with a mop and bucket used only for washrooms, never the one used for kitchen or play areas.
• Soap, paper towel and tissue restocked, and dispensers checked to be working. A hand hygiene routine fails quietly when the towel dispenser is empty.

Daily Checklist — Kitchen and Eating Areas

If your centre prepares or serves food, the kitchen sits under food-premises expectations as well as child care ones, and it is often inspected by a different person on a different visit.

• Food-contact surfaces washed, rinsed and sanitized before and after each use, with a food-safe sanitizer at the correct concentration.
• Sanitizer concentration checked with test strips and the result recorded. An eyeballed dilution is the most common quiet failure in a child care kitchen.
• Fridge and freezer temperatures recorded at least daily, plus a wipe of handles and seals.
• Dishes and utensils run through your set wash-rinse-sanitize process and air dried rather than towel dried.
• Sinks, taps and drain areas cleaned and sanitized daily; hand-wash sink kept separate from the food-prep sink and stocked.
• Bottle and cup preparation area cleaned and sanitized between uses, and labelling checked.
• Floors swept and mopped after the last meal service, including under and behind equipment on the weekly list.
• Garbage and organics removed daily, with bin lids and the surrounding floor wiped.

Daily Checklist — Nap and Sleep Areas

• Cots, mats and cribs wiped down after every rest period, including the frame and the underside edge where hands grip.
• Bedding assigned to one child, stored so pieces do not touch, and laundered on your schedule or immediately when soiled.
• Cots stored with sleeping surfaces not in contact with each other when stacked.
• Floor under and around the sleep area vacuumed and mopped daily.
• Comfort items — blankets, soft toys brought from home — kept with their own child and sent home for laundering on a set schedule.

Daily Checklist — Entry, Office and Corridors

• Entry door handles, buzzer, sign-in tablet or pen and clipboard disinfected at least twice daily. The sign-in surface is touched by every adult who enters the building.
• Entry mats vacuumed and the floor mopped — this is where the building's soil load enters.
• Handrails and stair edges at child height wiped daily.
• Staff room, office desks and shared phones wiped daily.
• Strollers, wagons and outdoor equipment wiped down after use.

Toy Cleaning and Sanitizing — The Part Most Centres Get Wrong

Toy cleaning is where a checklist most often quietly breaks, because it is the one task that cannot be done properly in passing. The method below is a four-step sequence, and skipping any step undoes the ones before it.

What goes in which pile

Weekly Cleaning Checklist

The weekly list catches what daily cleaning is not designed to reach. It is usually done after close on the same day each week so it does not drift.

• Full toy rotation — wash and sanitize the hard toys that were in circulation but not mouthed.
• Launder bedding, cot sheets, dress-up clothes, fabric props and cushion covers.
• Wash walls and doors to child height in every room — the handprint band about a metre up.
• Clean inside the fridge and freezer, discard expired items, wipe shelves and seals.
• Move furniture and clean underneath — under cribs, shelving units, the reading corner and the craft table.
• Deep clean washroom floors and grout, including corners and behind toilets.
• Wash windows and interior glass to child height, plus door glass and mirrors.
• Clean and disinfect diaper pails and garbage bins inside and out, not just re-line them.
• Wipe down cubbies inside, and check for forgotten food and wet clothing.
• Check and restock gloves, sanitizer, soap, paper towel and cleaning supplies, and check product expiry dates.

Monthly and Quarterly Checklist

These are the tasks nobody notices until an inspection or a complaint, which is exactly why they belong on a written schedule rather than in someone's memory.

Enhanced Cleaning — Illness and Outbreak

Routine cleaning and outbreak cleaning are different tasks, and the checklist should say so rather than leaving staff to improvise during the week it matters most.

The main technical difference is product selection. Norovirus and several other pathogens common in child care are non-enveloped, which means they survive treatments that handle enveloped viruses easily. Alcohols and many ordinary quaternary ammonium products are not reliable against them. During a gastrointestinal outbreak the centre needs a product whose label specifically covers the organism in question, applied to an already-cleaned surface and left wet for the full contact time.

• Increase high-touch frequency across the affected room and shared corridors.
• Switch to a product with the right label claim for the organism, and keep the label or data sheet on file.
• Handle vomit and stool incidents as a contained clean — gloves and mask, remove visible material outside-in with disposable cloths, bag the waste, clean, then disinfect for the full contact time.
• Dedicate equipment to the affected room — separate mop, bucket and cloths, not the ones used everywhere else.
• Remove soft and shared items from circulation until the outbreak is declared over.
• Record every enhanced clean — date, room, product, contact time, staff initials. This is what public health asks for during and after an outbreak.

Our separate guide on daycare outbreak response in Ontario covers the reporting and closure side in more detail.

What to Write Down

A checklist that is completed but not recorded is invisible the moment somebody asks. Keeping the record is a small amount of extra work and it is the entire difference between having a routine and being able to show one.

For each entry, the useful columns are the date, the room or area, the task, who did it, the product used, the contact time observed, and a notes field for anything unusual. The product and contact-time columns are the two that get dropped first and the two that carry the most weight, because they are the ones that turn "we cleaned it" into "we cleaned it with this, correctly."

Who Does the Work

Almost every centre splits the list. Educators handle the in-the-moment tasks that cannot wait for evening — tables before and after meals, the diapering surface after each change, mouthed toys pulled on sight. A cleaning contractor handles the end-of-day and periodic work: floors, washrooms, kitchen, high dusting, the weekly and quarterly items.

What matters is that the split is written down, so nothing sits in the gap between the two. The most common failure in a child care cleaning routine is not a task nobody could do — it is a task each side assumed the other had. Put the boundary in the contract and put it on the wall.

If a contractor is doing part of it, the same standard applies to them: cleaning before disinfecting, full contact times, separate equipment for washrooms and food areas, and a signed record left behind after each visit. Our daycare cleaning service works to this checklist, and the terms are covered on the daycare cleaning contracts page.

Frequently Asked Questions