Canada · 14 jurisdictions
What can you actually afford?
Two ceilings, computed side by side: what a lender would approve, and what your income actually carries once the costs of owning are paid. The lower one decides — and it is named.
Almost every affordability calculator returns a single number, and it is the lender's. That number answers what a bank is willing to risk. It does not answer what your month looks like afterwards.
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Two ceilings, not one
Both come out of the same inputs and are shown together, because the distance between them is the part of the decision nobody is handed.
What a lender approves
Gross income against the GDS and TDS ratios, qualified at the stress-test rate — your contract rate plus two points, or the regulatory floor, whichever is higher. This is what a pre-approval measures: the risk the lender is willing to take.
What your income carries
Net income after tax, minus property tax, insurance, condo or strata fees, utilities and a maintenance reserve. Whatever survives that subtraction is what a mortgage payment comes out of, every month, for decades.
Which one binds
The lower ceiling sets the price and the other one is noise. Naming it — and showing what one more dollar of monthly debt costs you in purchase price — is more useful than the headline figure.
Provincial rules, not national averages
Fourteen jurisdictions are modelled one at a time — eight city markets, six provinces and territories — each with its own transfer tax structure, rebates, registration fees and professional-fee conventions. They are not variations on a template.
- Ontario
- Toronto stacks a municipal land transfer tax on top of the provincial one, with its own bracket table and its own first-time-buyer rebate cap.
- Alberta
- No land transfer tax at all. Land Titles charges a registration fee on the price, and a second one on the mortgage.
- Manitoba
- The land transfer tax applies in full: there is no first-time-buyer rebate to reduce it.
Which is why the answer moves when you change the city, and why a national average would be wrong in all fourteen places at once.
Where the figures come from, stated plainly: each jurisdiction figure carries a sourcing record naming the document it was checked against and that document's date. Most are read off the issuing authority's own schedule; some are defaults we chose and disclose, because legal fees and moving costs have no authoritative publisher; a few are left empty because nobody publishes them at all. Sources and provenance lists every one, figure by figure.
What each tool answers
Every tool runs on the same engine and the same inputs, so a number you enter once follows you across all of them. Nothing is gated behind anything else — start wherever your question is.
Afford
Buy
- Closing CostsWhat is owed on closing day, line by line: land transfer tax, legal fees, title insurance, adjustments, and which rebates actually arrive.
- Down PaymentWhere the money should come from — FHSA, cash, the RRSP Home Buyers' Plan, TFSA, a gift, then investments — and what each source costs you to use.
- RRSP & Home Buyers' PlanWhat an RRSP withdrawal is worth once the refund lands, and what fifteen years of repayments do to the years after.
Own
More
Questions this answers
- How much house can I afford in Canada?
- It depends which ceiling binds. Give the affordability tool your income, your city and your down payment and it computes both — the maximum a lender would qualify you for, and the price your net income carries after ownership costs — then names the lower one.
- Why is my pre-approval higher than what I can afford?
- A pre-approval tests gross income against the GDS and TDS ratios. It does not subtract the property tax, insurance, condo fees, utilities and maintenance that arrive with the house, and it takes no view on what you want the rest of your month to contain. The gap between the two figures runs to several hundred dollars a month.
- What is the mortgage stress test?
- You qualify at the higher of your contract rate plus two percentage points and the regulatory floor, so the payment a lender tests you against is larger than the one you would make. Both rates and both payments are shown rather than folded into one result.
- Does this work outside Ontario?
- Fourteen jurisdictions are modelled separately. Alberta and Saskatchewan charge land titles registration instead of a transfer tax; Toronto adds a municipal land transfer tax to Ontario's; Manitoba levies the tax with no first-time-buyer rebate against it.
- Are the numbers verified?
- Most of them, and every figure says which. Each one carries a sourcing record: the document it was checked against, that document's date, and how far it can be trusted. Most were read off the issuing authority's own schedule. Others are modelling defaults we chose and disclose, because legal fees, inspections and moving costs have no authoritative publisher in Canada. A few are left empty because nobody publishes them at all, and the app asks you for those rather than inventing one. The sources page lists every figure with its document and date. Confirm anything you are about to act on.