The average asking rent for an apartment or condominium in Nova Scotia was $2,356 in August, the highest of any province in Canada for a fourth consecutive month, according to the September 2026 National Rent Report published Sept. 9 by Rentals.ca and Urbanation.
It is an unusual place for the country’s rent ceiling to sit, and it runs against almost everything else in the same report. Nationally, the average asking rent across all property types was $2,035 in August, down 4.8 per cent from a year earlier. That was the 23rd consecutive month of annual decline and the steepest since March 2026. Over two years, national asking rents have fallen 7.0 per cent, to their lowest August level since 2022.
Nova Scotia is one of only two provinces where apartment and condo asking rents rose year over year at all. The province was up 3.1 per cent, and Manitoba was up 0.2 per cent. Every other province fell, led by British Columbia at 4.6 per cent, Alberta at 4.3 per cent and Ontario at 3.5 per cent.
The ranking comes with a qualification worth stating plainly, because Rentals.ca states it itself. Nova Scotia’s first-place finish is a composition effect, not a like-for-like one. The report attributes the provincial average “largely to Nova Scotia’s larger proportion of newly-completed projects and larger unit types,” and notes that for each individual unit type, B.C. remains the most expensive province in the country. B.C.’s provincial average of $2,353 trails by $3. The province’s headline 11.0 per cent annual jump in three-bedroom rents is likewise attributed to the absorption of a large number of units priced under $3,000, rather than to landlords raising asking prices on new listings.
One dataset alone, in other words, would not carry this story. A second one does.
What CMHC’s own benchmark says
In its 2026 Mid-Year Rental Market Update, published June 9, Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation set out preliminary estimates of what a balanced vacancy rate actually looks like in each major market, arguing that the industry’s long-standing 3 per cent rule of thumb does not hold everywhere. CMHC defines the balanced range as the vacancy rate at which rent growth, after inflation, is close to zero.
By that measure, Halifax is the tightest major rental market in the country. Its 2025 apartment vacancy rate of 2.7 per cent sits below its estimated balanced range of 3.0 to 4.5 per cent. Vancouver was the one market sitting clearly above its range, at 3.7 per cent against an estimated 2.0 to 3.0 per cent. Toronto (3.0 per cent), Ottawa (3.0 per cent), Montreal (2.9 per cent), Calgary (5.0 per cent) and Edmonton (3.8 per cent) all landed inside their estimated ranges.
Two different measurements, from two organizations using different methods, point in the same direction. Rentals.ca tracks asking rents on units available to a prospective tenant today. CMHC’s Rental Market Survey measures vacancy and average rents across the standing purpose-built stock. The two routinely disagree on levels. On Halifax they agree on direction.
CMHC’s affordability work reinforces the point. The agency found that affordability for existing tenants worsened across most key markets in the first quarter of 2026, and singled out Calgary and Halifax as the two markets that have seen “the most significant deterioration in recent years,” with ratios “now approaching levels currently seen in Toronto.”
Halifax renters are also the least mobile of the major markets CMHC surveyed. Turnover in 2025 ran at 6.7 per cent in the cheapest quartile of units and 10.0 per cent in the most expensive, the lowest readings among the seven census metropolitan areas reported. Vacancies rose in Halifax but turnover fell, which CMHC read as tenants being less willing to move. In a market where landlords can reset rents when a unit changes hands, low turnover slows how quickly new supply reaches the people who need cheaper units.
What would change it
Supply, eventually, and the same new completions that inflated the headline number are the clearest force pushing back. Dartmouth posted a 10.8 per cent annual rent increase, the third largest of any market outside Canada’s six biggest, which Rentals.ca attributes to a significant increase in the proportion of larger units available over the past year rather than to price growth as such.
The August monthly reading was also negative. Nova Scotia asking rents fell 0.9 per cent from July, the second-largest monthly decline of any province after Manitoba’s 1.5 per cent. One month is not a trend. It is, however, the first sign in this data that the province’s outlier run may be ending.
CMHC cautions that its balanced-range estimates are preliminary and reflect work in progress, and that further methodological detail will be released in later publications.
Sources: Rentals.ca and Urbanation, September 2026 National Rent Report (published Sept. 9, 2026, reflecting August data); CMHC, 2026 Mid-Year Rental Market Update (published June 9, 2026). Photographs in this article are illustrative stock images and do not depict any specific property discussed.
