Canada’s rental market has gone quiet. Annual rent growth across the country’s purpose-built rental sector slowed to 1.7% in the third quarter of 2026, the weakest reading since Yardi began tracking the market in 2020, according to Yardi’s Fall 2026 Canadian National Multifamily Report.
Two different markets for stayers and movers
The national average reached $1,790 a month, up just $7 from the previous quarter, Rental Housing Business reports, citing the Yardi report, which tracks more than 548,000 rental units across 6,200 properties. The headline hides a split: rents on apartments leased to new tenants fell 0.2% compared with the previous leases on those same units, the third consecutive quarter of declines, while landlords secured average increases of 2.1% on lease renewals — although that growth rate has slowed for ten straight quarters from a peak of 4.4% in early 2024. The national apartment vacancy rate held steady at 4.7%.
Where rents are still rising — and falling
Halifax led the country with annual rent growth of 5%, followed by Winnipeg at 4.1%, according to the report. Calgary sits at the other end: average apartment rents have declined for six consecutive quarters, slipping another $2 to $1,821, and are now 1.3% below year-earlier levels. The pattern is a useful reminder that national averages hide local stories, and that a tenant renewing in Halifax faces a very different negotiation from one renewing in Calgary.
What tenants can do with the numbers
For renters, the data argues for checking the new-tenant rate in your own building before accepting a renewal increase: if new leases in the same building are flat or falling, that is leverage. For landlords, the ten-quarter slowdown in renewal growth suggests pushing for a large increase risks a vacancy in a market where filling a unit now takes longer. Either way, the era of rapid rent growth that defined the early 2020s appears, for now, to be over.
