FIRST READING: Just as predicted, immigration cuts keep yielding lower rents
The Liberals started cutting immigration 24 months ago, and rents have been dropping ever since
Author of the article: By Tristin Hopper, Published Oct 09, 2026
Canadian rental prices have almost entirely snapped back from the meteoric highs they hit in the immediate wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, and one of the main reasons is that Ottawa is no longer importing record numbers of migrants each year.
Newly released figures from Rentals.ca show that the average Canadian asking rent dropped to $2,034 in September, representing a 4.2 per cent decline over the last year. This makes September the “24th consecutive month of annual decline,” according to the report.
This puts rental prices right around where they were in the fall of 2022, just before they entered a sustained surge that ultimately peaked in the spring of 2024 at $2,202 per month.
Prior analysis by Rentals.ca has claimed that some of this is due to an increase in supply, with completions of purpose-built rentals recently hitting record highs. But the fact that population growth has slowed to a crawl should “should not be discounted,” it added.
Across Canada, rents have been in decline almost from the moment that the federal government announced in October 2024 that it would be “turning off the taps” on what had previously been the largest migration surge in Canadian history.
In just three years between 2022 and 2025, the Canadian population grew by 2.8 million, an increase driven almost exclusively by increases to both permanent and non-permanent immigration streams.
According to an October 2024 federal backgrounder, “reducing the volume of immigrants will help to alleviate some pressure in the housing markets.”
of non-permanent residents will shrink rental demand in the near term — especially in areas close to post-secondary education institutions where ballooning international student enrolment crushed vacancy rates,” read a November 2024 report by RBC analyst Robert Hogue.
This time last year, a TD Bank report similarly determined that the cities where migrants were leaving in the highest numbers were also those seeing rents plummet the fastest.
“Reduced immigration has moderated demand for purpose-built rentals and, consequently, rent growth,” it read.
Last month, Statistics Canada announced that it had overestimated the rate of foreign residents leaving the country in its preliminary population estimates for 2025. Although StatCan had initially declared that 2025 had seen the population go down by about 100,000, it had actually gone up by 280,000.
In other words, statisticians had missed a population of temporary residents equivalent to the population of London, Ont.
This still means that population growth for 2025 was at a record low of 0.5 per cent, but in a Sept. 28 reaction to the new numbers, Rentals.ca analysts concluded that migration cuts weren’t affecting rental prices as much as it had previously suspected.
“The elimination of population decline in the revisions indicates that new supply has been a more important factor than previously believed,” it read.
And while the most dramatic rental price surges of the COVID-19 era may have been reversed, overall Canadian rents still remain far higher than they were just five years ago.
In April 2021, Rentals.ca data show that average rents hit a low of $1,662 per month, nearly $400 lower than the current rate, even after 24 months of falling rental prices.
The post-2021 surge in rental prices was noted in a Bank of Canada essay published last month, with author Benjamin Straus citing “strong population growth” as the main factor.
“If the number of renter households increases faster than the supply of rental units, asking rents tend to rise,” he wrote.
www.nationalpost.com/opinion/first-reading-just-as-predicted-immigration-cuts-keep-yielding-lower-rents
