In 2024, 23.2% of Canadian households lived in housing unaffordable to them—defined as spending 30% or more of their income on shelter costs—up from 22.0% in 2022. Renters (33.7%) were more likely than owners (17.4%) to live in unaffordable housing. This gap has been stable since 2018, the first cycle of this survey.
In 2024, over one-third (36.6%) of households in Canada were homeowners with a mortgage, 27.8% were homeowners without a mortgage, and 31.3% were renters in the private market. More than one-quarter (26.1%) of homeowners with mortgages lived in unaffordable housing, up from 23.6% in 2022. This drove the overall increase in the share of households in unaffordable housing, as renters living in market rental units saw no change in their unaffordability rate over the same period.