---
title: 'BC''s 10,562 Liquor Licences: Market Map'
description: 'The September 2026 LCRB licence stock, compared with March and July:
  licence types, recorded address cities and 77 licensee-name groups with five or
  more licences.'
source: Duty Room
source_url: https://dutyroom.com
published_on: '2026-08-27'
updated_on: '2026-10-03'
market: ca
submarket: bc
sectors:
- all
canonical_url: https://dutyroom.com/ca/bc/reports/liquor-market-map
data_vintage: LCRB Mar/Jul/Sep 2026
---

# BC's 10,562 Liquor Licences: Market Map

The September 2026 LCRB licence stock, compared with March and July: licence types, recorded address cities and 77 licensee-name groups with five or more licences.

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

![BC active liquor licences by type, 23 September 2026: 10,562 licences. Food Primary and Liquor Primary together account for 75.4%.](https://dutyroom.com/figures/ca/bc/licence-type-mix.png)

BC active liquor licences by type, 23 September 2026: 10,562 licences. Food Primary and Liquor Primary together account for 75.4%. Source: [Duty Room analysis of LCRB workbook, 23 September 2026](https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/employment-business-and-economic-development/business-management/liquor-regulation-licensing/reports/all_liquor_licensed_establishments_in_bc.xlsx).

| 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

![BC active liquor licences by recorded address-city label, 23 September 2026. Labels are case/whitespace normalized; municipal aliases are not pooled.](https://dutyroom.com/figures/ca/bc/licence-address-city-snapshot.png)

BC active liquor licences by recorded address-city label, 23 September 2026. Labels are case/whitespace normalized; municipal aliases are not pooled. Source: [Duty Room analysis of LCRB workbook, 23 September 2026](https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/employment-business-and-economic-development/business-management/liquor-regulation-licensing/reports/all_liquor_licensed_establishments_in_bc.xlsx).

| 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](https://dutyroom.com/ca/bc/reports/licensed-capacity-map) 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

![Largest BC liquor licensee-name groups by active licences, 23 September 2026. These are normalized register names, not consolidated franchise or ownership groups.](https://dutyroom.com/figures/ca/bc/multi-site-operators.png)

Largest BC liquor licensee-name groups by active licences, 23 September 2026. These are normalized register names, not consolidated franchise or ownership groups. Source: [Duty Room analysis of LCRB workbook, 23 September 2026](https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/employment-business-and-economic-development/business-management/liquor-regulation-licensing/reports/all_liquor_licensed_establishments_in_bc.xlsx).

| 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](https://dutyroom.com/ca/bc/reports/enforcement-heat-map) keeps its original 10,572-licence denominator. The [minors report](https://dutyroom.com/ca/bc/reports/lcrb-minors-enforcement) distinguishes rolling waiver windows from annual government-store ID checks. Neither source supports a current private-sector test-failure rate.

The [cross-domain study](https://dutyroom.com/ca/bc/reports/multi-domain-offenders) 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](https://www2.gov.bc.ca/assets/gov/employment-business-and-economic-development/business-management/liquor-regulation-licensing/reports/all_liquor_licensed_establishments_in_bc.xlsx) 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.

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Published by [Duty Room](https://dutyroom.com/ca/bc/), software for organizing, tracking, and evidencing operational compliance.