The share of Canadian mortgages backed by a parent’s signature has nearly tripled since 2004, and the extra borrowing power it hands adult children is showing up months later as strain on family finances, particularly in Ontario, according to new analysis from the Bank of Canada and Equifax Canada.
Parental co-signing on mortgages rose from 4 per cent of loans in 2004 to about 11 per cent in 2025, Bank of Canada senior economist Shaoteng Li found in an analysis published in April on the central bank’s Bank of Canada Sparks blog. Li’s research found that 74 per cent of those buyers would not have qualified for the mortgage they ultimately took out without a parent’s help, and that co-signing lifted a household’s maximum affordable home price by about 72 per cent, from roughly $458,000 to $787,000. Buyers used just over three-quarters of that extra room, Li wrote, and those who used the most of it went on to show higher delinquency rates on their other credit products. Buyers who bought with a co-signed mortgage in the fourth quarter of 2022 paid an average of $709,000, about 55 per cent more than they could have afforded on their own, the analysis found.
The trend has kept building since. Equifax Canada’s second-quarter Market Pulse report, released Aug. 24, found 70.9 per cent of first-time buyer mortgages involved a joint borrower this year, up from 57.6 per cent in 2016. The pattern is not spread evenly across the country: Ontario and British Columbia post roughly double the share of co-borrowers with a 20-plus-year age gap, a common signature of a parent co-signing for a child, compared with the rest of Canada, Canadian Mortgage Trends reported Sept. 21, citing the same Equifax data. Sole-borrower mortgages, meanwhile, are less common in Ontario and B.C. (27.3 per cent) than in the rest of the country (30.4 per cent), the outlet reported.
Ontario’s own mortgage holders are the outlier on the bill side of that ledger. The 90-plus-day delinquency rate on non-mortgage debt among Ontario mortgage holders reached 0.86 per cent in the second quarter, Equifax said in its Aug. 24 release, up 27 per cent from a year earlier and the fourth consecutive year that measure has climbed in the province. Nationally, the same delinquency rate among mortgage holders sits at 0.77 per cent, up 12.5 per cent year over year, but strip Ontario out and the increase across the rest of Canada drops to about 2 per cent, Equifax said.
“Ontario continues to stand out, with some mortgage holders struggling to keep up with other credit obligations,” Rebecca Oakes, Equifax Canada’s vice-president of advanced analytics, said in the release.
Canadians carried a combined $2.68 trillion in consumer debt in the second quarter, Equifax said, up 4.18 per cent from a year earlier, with non-mortgage debt alone reaching $712.2 billion. New mortgage originations in the quarter totalled 310,200 accounts at an average of $362,300, and more than half went to borrowers with credit scores above 750, suggesting the stress is not confined to weaker-credit buyers. Quebec accounted for 35 per cent of those new originations, Ontario 33 per cent, B.C. 12 per cent and Alberta 10 per cent, according to Equifax’s data.
Kathy Catsiliras, Equifax Canada’s vice-president of analytical consulting, said the divide within the mortgage-holder population means lenders and policymakers need a more targeted view than a single national number provides. “A one-size-fits-all model does not work,” she said.
Taken together, the two data sets point to a generational trade-off playing out mostly in Ontario and B.C.: parents are increasingly signing onto their children’s mortgages to bridge an affordability gap that neither the Bank of Canada nor Equifax’s economists expect to close on its own, and the added leverage that unlocks appears to be arriving alongside, not instead of, financial strain for the families taking it on.
Sourcing: Bank of Canada, “When parents co-sign a mortgage to help their adult children buy their first home” (Bank of Canada Sparks, April 2026, Shaoteng Li); Equifax Canada, “Non-Mortgage Delinquency Growth Slows in Second Quarter, but Ontario Homeowners Remain Under Pressure” (Aug. 24, 2026 release); Canadian Mortgage Trends, “Ontario, B.C. mortgage stress rises as joint borrowing grows: Equifax” (Sept. 21, 2026).
