Ron Butler says that when he started in the mortgage business 30 years ago, it was quite easy for a grocery store produce manager or part-time nurse to find the five per cent down payment needed to buy a home.
“Those days are gone,” Butler said recently at a parliamentary finance committee hearing looking into household debt in Canada.
Asked how long it would take someone with a solid, full-time job to save up the minimum down payment on a home today, Butler said that when it comes to the Greater Toronto Area, “the reality is they never could.”
“If you’re running about $110,000, $115,000 income, you have to pay rent, you have to eat, you have to live. You pay taxes,” Butler said. “You could not possibly accumulate a satisfactory down payment for a house price that’s still sort of just under a million dollars.”
In Ontario before 2015, a family making $115,000 a year “had a shot” at home ownership, Butler said. They would have to go to places like Ajax, Burlington, Hamilton or the Niagara region to find a single-family home, but they would be able to find something to buy.
“Today, a $115,000 income earner, they really can’t buy anything.”
According to March 2026 figures from the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA), the national average sale price for a home in Canada was $673,084. That means the minimum down payment required would be just over $42,000.
But in the Greater Toronto Area, the average price was $1,017,796, while in Greater Vancouver, it was $1,201,123. In those cases, the minimum down payment would be about about $76,000 and $95,000, respectively.
It’s not just in parts of Toronto and Vancouver where a single income in the $100,000 range is insufficient to be able to buy a home.
“Over the last few years, it’s spread to other locations,” said Mike Moffatt, founding director of the University of Ottawa’s Missing Middle Initiative (MMI) and a researcher into Canada’s housing supply and affordability crisis.
For example, CBC calculated that by using CREA’s March 2026 median house prices and assuming a mortgage rate of 4.39 per cent amortized over 25 years, a person would need to make $122,300 to afford a 10 per cent down payment, a $4,000 annual tax bill and to pay $150 monthly in heating for a home in Calgary.
In Montreal, one would need to make $127,800, and in Ottawa $132,100 to do the same.
A report published in February this year by MMI found that across 23 Canadian metropolitan areas, newly built family-sized starter homes are now more than twice as expensive relative to median income as they were in 2004. According to the report, in the last two decades, new home prices at the lower end of the market have risen by 265 per cent on average, while young dual-earner incomes grew just 76 per cent.
Another MMI report published in November found that across 23 countries with available OECD data, Canada experienced the sharpest rise in the home price-to-income ratio, up more than 80 per cent since 2004.
A home that cost three years’ income in 2004 now costs nearly 5½ years’ income today, the report found.
“A combination of skyrocketing home prices and stagnant wage growth has left Canadian households far worse off than their peers abroad,” the report said.
Help from Mom and Dad
The people buying houses, at least in Ontario and British Columbia, are almost consistently in the top 10 or 15 per cent of earners in the country, Butler said.
Either that or people are getting massive assistance from their parents, who are using some of the accumulated equity in their own homes to assist their kids in buying a place, Butler said.
He gave the example of a semi-detached home in most of the GTA and most of Greater Vancouver, which would cost just under $800,000.
“That’s not a nice one. That’s not a great neighbourhood,” he said. Still, if you’re making $115,000, “that’s seven times your income. You can’t get a mortgage even with 20 per cent down.”
Butler said it’s “thin on the ground” in terms of Canadian locales where the lower part of middle-income earners can afford a home.
Moffatt said some parts of Quebec, northern Alberta, Saskatchewan, and some areas of Manitoba, Atlantic Canada and northern Ontario have homes that are priced relatively low compared to incomes.
When asked for advice on where someone would have to go to find an affordable house, “it’s largely to look for places where people don’t live as much,” he said.
“But that list of places is shrinking.”
The wage dilemma
He said this housing dysfunction, which 20 years ago was basically just a Toronto and Vancouver problem, has spread across the country, for the main reason that people moved.
In fact, Moffatt said the place where home prices have increased the most in Canada over a 10-year period was Tillsonburg, Ont., which is outside of London.
With wedding season around the corner for many in B.C., the costs can add up with the average cost of a Vancouver wedding running into the tens of thousands of dollars. Mark Ting, a partner with Foundation Wealth and On The Coast’s personal finance columnist, said a couple’s decision on whether to be practical and save that money for something else comes down to emotional trade-offs.
“And the reason for that is just that it was one of the cheapest places in the country to live, and families started moving there.”
The challenge with housing affordability is that the costs of homebuilding have not gone down. Moffatt said one of the risks is an extended period where new homes aren’t being built.
“Because right now, if you want a home, it’s hard to build something new that can compete with the prices on the resale market,” he said.
And if wages increased without more homes being built, that would just lead to more money chasing the same number of homes.
But wage growth is part of the solution, he said.
“That’s how we’re going to get affordability. It’s not just the prices of homes falling, but you need wages to rise, rise faster than housing prices.”
