Is Rent Still Rising in Canada? The Myth of Skyrocketing Prices City by City

Scroll through a South African Facebook group about moving to Canada and you’ll still find comments warning that rent there “never stops climbing.” Is rent still rising in canada the way those posts describe? Nationally, no — and it hasn’t been for close to two years, though the panic narrative has been slower to catch up than the actual data.

The myth

The myth is straightforward: Canadian rent only ever goes up, every city, every year, no exceptions, so a newcomer should expect to be permanently priced out a little further with each passing month.

The reality

Canadian rent prices falling 2026 is the more accurate headline. National average asking rent across all property types was $2,033 a month in June 2026, down 4.3% year-over-year — the 21st consecutive month of annual decline, according to Rentals.ca’s national rent report. Break it down by property type and the pattern holds: purpose-built rental apartments averaged $2,034, down 3.1% year-over-year; condo rentals averaged $2,058, down a sharper 6.8%; and other secondary-market units averaged $2,017, down 7.4%. Even three-bedroom units, typically in shortest supply for families, averaged $2,511 nationally, down 2.9% year-over-year. National average rent decline explained this bluntly: nearly two years of falling asking rents is not a blip, it’s a sustained trend.

One caveat worth understanding before you lean too hard on these figures: they describe asking rents on new listings, not what an existing tenant is actually paying. A sitting tenant who signed a year or two ago is typically paying less than someone applying for the same unit today, incentive or no incentive, simply because rent increases on a renewal usually lag well behind whatever the open market is doing in either direction.

Which cities have rising vs falling rent

Which cities have rising vs falling rent is where the myth actually has a kernel of truth, because the national average hides real local variation. Montreal bucked the national trend entirely, with average rent rising 7.2% even as the country as a whole cooled. Halifax also posted rent growth, up 6.7%. Meanwhile Greater Toronto’s purpose-built rents held roughly flat with turnover rents actually falling 2.5%, and Vancouver — still the country’s most expensive rental market by far, at $2,400 for a one-bedroom and $3,370 for a two-bedroom in June 2026 — has seen its vacancy rate climb to its highest level since 1988, a sign that even the priciest city has loosened somewhat at the margins.

What this means for a newcomer’s expectations

The honest version for anyone planning a move is that Canadian rent is not uniformly skyrocketing, but it also isn’t uniformly cheap or falling everywhere either. A newcomer weighing cities should look at the specific market they’re heading to rather than a single national headline in either direction — Montreal’s rising rent tells a different story than Regina’s, where a one-bedroom still averages a fraction of Vancouver’s price. The old “it only goes up” warning made sense a few years ago. In 2026, it’s simply out of date. Anyone still asking is rent still rising in canada as a blanket question deserves a city-by-city answer, not a single yes or no.