Rental Yield by City in Canada

Roughly 4% to 6% gross is the ordinary band on Canadian purpose-built rental, and the gateway markets sit at the bottom of it. Using CMHC's October 2025 surveyed rents, a two-bedroom at the Canada-wide average of C$1,550 a month produces a 5% gross yield only if you buy at about C$372,000 — and in Vancouver the same arithmetic on a C$2,364 rent gives C$567,360, which is well under what two-bedroom stock actually trades for there. That gap is the Canadian market in one line: prices have outrun rents for years, so income investors are pushed toward the smaller centres and gateway buyers are effectively buying appreciation. Gross yield also ignores every running cost, so a 5% gross figure is not 5% in your pocket — subtract property tax, insurance, condo or strata fees, maintenance and management to get a net yield.

CMHC Rental Market Survey, October 2025, retrieved 2026-09-03 directly from CMHC's own published data tables and Housing Market Information Portal. Nothing on this page comes from a listings aggregator, a brokerage index or a rent-tracking website, and no figure has been estimated to fill a gap. The universe is purpose-built primary rental market, row and apartment structures of three units or more — CMHC's primary rental market. Where CMHC suppressed a cell, either to protect confidentiality or because the estimate was not statistically reliable, this page prints "not published" and excludes the row from the ranking rather than substituting a neighbouring city or another bedroom count.

Because they measure different things. CMHC surveys rent actually being paid across the whole purpose-built stock, which includes long-tenured tenants whose rent has risen only by the provincial guideline for years. An advertised rent is a turnover rent — the price of the units that happen to be empty, which skews to recently renovated and recently built stock. In the rent-controlled provinces the two can differ by hundreds of dollars a month in the same building. Neither number is wrong; they answer different questions. If you are buying a tenanted building you inherit something close to the CMHC average. If you are buying vacant possession, you are underwriting the turnover rent, and provincial rent-control rules then govern how fast it can move afterwards.

Not directly, and that matters. CMHC surveys the condominium secondary rental market separately from the purpose-built primary market, and the figures here are the purpose-built ones. Condo rentals generally command more than purpose-built units in the same city, so benchmarking a downtown condo against this table will usually understate its rent — and therefore understate its yield. Use the table as a floor and a sanity check rather than as a condo comparable.

Because a flat 5% allowance is wrong in both directions across Canada. In CMHC's October 2025 survey the two-bedroom vacancy rate ranged from 0.6% in Saguenay to 5.6% in Calgary, against a national two-bedroom figure of 2.9%. Applying one assumption everywhere would flatter the tightest markets and punish the loosest by roughly a full percentage point of rent either way. The tool discounts your annual rent by the rate CMHC measured for your city and your unit type, and where CMHC suppressed that rate it applies nothing and tells you so.

No, and using them interchangeably is a common way to overstate a deal. Gross rental yield is annual rent divided by price and stops there. Cap rate is net operating income divided by price — rent minus operating expenses, still before the mortgage. On the same property the cap rate is always the lower number, usually by a wide margin, because operating costs on Canadian rental commonly consume 35% to 50% of gross rent once property tax, insurance, condo fees, maintenance, management and vacancy are counted. This page is the gross-yield view against CMHC rent data; the NOI view against CBRE's institutional benchmarks is on the cap rates by city page.

Only with care, because the underlying products and rules differ. Canadian investment purchases require a minimum 20% down and CMHC mortgage loan insurance is not available on a non-owner-occupied buy, so there is no insured low-down route the way FHA works in the US, and there is no PMI here at all. Canadian fixed mortgages compound semi-annually rather than monthly, quote a term separately from the amortization, and are subject to the federal stress test. Rent control is provincial and, in Ontario, British Columbia and Quebec, materially constrains how fast an existing rent can move. A yield number that looks identical on both sides of the border is not describing the same investment.

The Rental Market Survey is fielded every October and published in the following weeks, so the figures here describe October 2025 conditions and were retrieved 2026-09-03. They will not move again until CMHC publishes the next October cycle. Nationally, two-bedroom rents rose 5.1% on a fixed-sample basis in this survey, so the gap between these figures and current market conditions widens roughly at that pace. Treat them as a dated benchmark rather than a live feed — which is exactly what makes them auditable.