Average asking rents in Canada fell in July for the 22nd consecutive month, according to the national rent report published Aug. 6 by Rentals.ca and Urbanation. Federal housing data covering the same market shows that almost none of that relief is reaching renters who have not moved.
The Rentals.ca report put the average asking rent across all property types at $2,037 in July, down 4.0 per cent from a year earlier. That number counts only vacant units being advertised. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, which separately tracks what tenants actually pay on units that are already occupied, reported in its 2026 Mid-Year Rental Market Update, published June 9, that average rents paid by all tenants “continued to increase,” driven mainly by higher rents charged when a unit changes hands.
Two measures of the same market are moving in opposite directions, and the mechanism connecting them is turnover. A renter captures the discount only by signing a new lease. A renter who stays put keeps paying an average rent that is still climbing.
CMHC’s own figures show who is doing the moving. Its Rental Market Survey breaks 2025 turnover rates down by rent quartile for seven census metropolitan areas. In every market where all four quartiles were published, the most expensive quartile of units turned over more often than the cheapest. In Toronto, 12.1 per cent of top-quartile units changed tenants against 7.9 per cent of bottom-quartile units. Vancouver recorded 16.3 per cent against 11.1 per cent, Ottawa 21.8 against 14.0, Edmonton 33.6 against 22.5, and Halifax 10.0 against 6.7. Montreal showed the widest spread, at 16.9 per cent against 8.7. Calgary’s top-quartile estimate was suppressed in the published table.
Run the arithmetic and the pattern is consistent rather than scattered. In each of those six markets, the most expensive units turned over roughly 1.5 to 1.9 times as often as the cheapest ones. CMHC’s own reading is blunt. Vacancy and turnover rose across most quartiles in Toronto and Vancouver, the agency said, but “pressure remained in the lowest segments, particularly in the persistently tight first-quartile,” which it said “suggests limited downward filtering of new supply.”
The Rentals.ca numbers point the same way from a different direction. Purpose-built rental apartments, the older and generally cheaper stock, fell just 2.6 per cent year over year to an average of $2,041. Condominium apartments, largely investor-owned and concentrated in newer buildings, fell 6.3 per cent to $2,063, with studio condo rents down 9.6 per cent. Houses and townhomes fell 7.5 per cent to $2,007. The steepest discounts are sitting in the segments a lower-income renter was least likely to be living in to begin with.
CMHC’s affordability figures close the loop. The agency found asking rent-to-income ratios generally declined across most major census metropolitan areas, with Vancouver and Toronto now back to pre-pandemic levels. Over the same stretch, it found that affordability for existing tenants “has worsened across most key markets as compared to a year ago” in the first quarter of 2026. Edmonton and Toronto were the exceptions. Calgary and Halifax showed the sharpest deterioration.
The two datasets are not interchangeable, and Rentals.ca says so directly in its methodology note. Its figures cover asking rents on vacant units across both the primary and secondary rental markets, while CMHC’s average rents cover the full stock of occupied purpose-built units regardless of tenure. That difference is the point rather than a caveat to work around. Neither series is wrong. They answer different questions, and only one of them describes a household that has not moved.
There are signs the softening is itself running out. Rents rose 0.2 per cent nationally from June to July, a fourth consecutive monthly increase since asking rents hit a 35-month low in March. Toronto apartment and condo rents climbed 1.6 per cent in a single month to $2,577 and were down just 0.6 per cent annually, the best annual performance among the country’s six largest markets. Rentals.ca attributed the shift to fewer new condo units reaching the market and listings down roughly 6 per cent year over year. If asking rents have bottomed, the window in which moving buys a meaningful discount is closing before it ever opened for the bottom quartile.
CMHC has not yet published turnover-by-quartile figures for 2026, so whether that gap widened or narrowed this year is not on the public record.
Sources: Rentals.ca and Urbanation August 2026 National Rent Report (July data, published Aug. 6, 2026) and CMHC’s 2026 Mid-Year Rental Market Update (published June 9, 2026). Turnover-by-quartile figures are from CMHC’s Rental Market Survey as published in that update. All photographs in this article are illustrative stock photography and do not depict any specific property discussed.
