As buying a home becomes less and less attainable, renting is no longer a temporary arrangement for many people.
Housing affordability in Canada remains the worst it’s been in decades, despite improving over the past three years, according to the National Bank of Canada. Rents, on the other hand, have dipped by 1.2 per cent compared with two years ago, marking the first such decline since January, 2022.
For some, rental accommodation is a step before home ownership. For others, it’s about choosing a lasting home in a community.
Why Edmonton is Canada’s most renter-friendly city. Plus, your best bets in Toronto and Vancouver
That’s why we built this tool: to help you find the best cities to rent, whether you’re a young professional, a student or someone looking for a new start. We also help you find where to rent within those cities based on your income.
Using monthly listing data from Rentals.ca and Urbanation, we ranked 235 cities (each with a population exceeding 20,000) on four attributes: Affordability, Availability, Stability and Livability.
Affordability highlights housing costs relative to local median incomes. Availability signals how competitive the search for a unit will be, not only among people within the city, but also among people in the neighbouring communities. Stability helps identify markets where prices and availability have remained steady over the past five years. Livability looks at the daily experience of living in a place: how easy it is to get around, run errands and participate in the community.
Interested in understanding a city beyond its rental market? Explore our complete annual ranking of Canada’s Most Livable Cities, where we rank the best cities to live in based on 10 categories such as safety, health care, demographics and even the weather.
Since this project emphasizes a city’s affordability rather than its livability, regions where wages are higher relative to rent rise to the top of the list.
Rental affordability varies significantly across the country. According to census data, the territories have some of the lowest rates of housing unaffordability in the country. In Nunavut, just 11.2 per cent of recent renters spend more than 30 per cent of their income on shelter, followed by 23.5 per cent in the Northwest Territories. Both were below the national average of 43.2 per cent.
Click into any city to explore where you can afford to live within it. You can also enter your income, and we’ll tailor the ranking to cities with at least one area that matches your desired budget and housing type, ranging from studio and bachelor units to one-, two- and three-bedroom homes, and provide recommendations at the postal code level.