BC's 10,562 Liquor Licences: Market Map

BC's 23 September 2026 active liquor-licence workbook contains 10,562 unique licence numbers. This includes restaurants and bars alongside manufacturers, stores, agents, clubs and other licence types. A licence is not necessarily a separate business or an operating premises.

The stock changed little; its composition changed

Workbook date	Active licences	Service-area rows	Licence IDs with service areas	Summed capacity
2026-03-11	10,572	19,563	8,548	2,130,170
2026-07-02	10,476	19,574	8,508	2,174,025
2026-09-23	10,562	19,864	8,582	2,198,008

March has 10,572 active licences, the July workbook has 10,476, and September has 10,562. September is ten below March and 86 above July. These are point-in-time counts, not annual licence issuances or counts of closures. Licence IDs can be added, removed or revised between snapshots.

The current licence mix

Food Primary 6,116 · 58% Liquor Primary 1,847 · 18% Manufacturer 823 · 8% Licensee Retail Store 679 · 6% Agent 430 · 4% Liquor Primary Club 259 · 2% Rural Licensee Retail Store 232 · 2% UBrew and UVin 84 · 1% Wine Store 50 · 1% Catering 42 · <1%

Licence type	Count	Share
Food Primary	6,116	57.9%
Liquor Primary	1,847	17.5%
Manufacturer	823	7.8%
Licensee Retail Store	679	6.4%
Agent	430	4.1%
Liquor Primary Club	259	2.5%
Rural Licensee Retail Store	232	2.2%
UBrew and UVin	84	0.8%
Wine Store	50	0.5%
Catering	42	0.4%

Food Primary and Liquor Primary together account for 7,963 licences, or 75.4%. Adding Liquor Primary Club and Catering gives 8,264. This explicitly defined group excludes manufacturers and retail stores; it is not a census of all hospitality businesses.

Where licence addresses concentrate

Address-city label	Licences
Vancouver	1,704
Victoria	545
Richmond	420
Surrey	407
Kelowna	405
Burnaby	287
North Vancouver	228
Langley	225
Kamloops	212
Nanaimo	208

This table groups the register's address-city text after case and whitespace normalization. Blank addresses remain in the provincial total and are excluded from this named-city ranking. City/district aliases are not automatically combined. The earlier March study's 409 normalized communities used a broader alias treatment, so its city counts should not be treated as a directly comparable local time series.

The capacity report groups a different field: the service-area sheet's local-government/Indigenous-nation label. Matching similar-looking names across these fields does not establish that their geographic boundaries are identical.

Licensee names reveal some multi-site operations

Licensee-name group	Licences
Northland Properties Corporation	38
Otter Farm & Home Co-Operative	30
Gateway Casinos & Entertainment Limited.	26
Wine Growers British Columbia Society	21
British Columbia Ferry Services Inc.	18
Chipotle Mexican Grill Canada Corp.	18
Huber Developments Ltd.	18
Mid-Island Consumer Services Co-Operative	18
White Spot Limited	17
Resorts Of The Canadian Rockies Inc.	16

There are 77 normalized licensee-name groups with at least five licences, holding 675 licences (6.4% of the register). Applying the same grouping to March gives 73 groups; July gives 75. Names are normalized for case and whitespace only. The complete derived CSV retains every licence number in each group.

A group is not necessarily a consolidated economic owner. Franchise locations can use different corporations, and related companies may appear under distinct names. These counts must not be converted into a chain-enforcement rate without reviewing the identities and aligning enforcement snapshots.

What this stock can and cannot support

The register identifies active licences, their recorded holders and addresses. It does not establish whether a premises is trading, the number of customer visits, inspection exposure or ultimate ownership. Recorded licence capacity is a sum of service-area limits, not a count of available seats at one instant.

The March waivers-by-city report keeps its original 10,572-licence denominator. The minors report distinguishes rolling waiver windows from annual government-store ID checks. Neither source supports a current private-sector test-failure rate.

The cross-domain study reviews named examples against aligned liquor, food and employment archives. It does not turn this licence stock into a current rate of cross-domain enforcement.

Source and reproduction

The official LCRB download changes in place. Duty Room preserved March 11, July 2 (retrieved July 10) and September 23 workbooks. Header-based extraction handles changed column order and retains leading-zero licence numbers. Dated source hashes, full worksheet extracts, licence-ID additions/removals/revisions, capacity totals and licensee-name groups are archived in the research vault.