Is Toronto Affordable in 2026? Why Cheaper Homes Haven’t Fixed It
When Kori Marin was a kid in the 1980s, a six-figure salary sounded like it was a massive income, and it was. She remembers her father earning around that mark as a lawyer, while her mother stayed home. The family had a detached house, two cars, good schools and ballet lessons, and nobody worried about the grocery bill, and they went on vacations every summer. Years later, when Kori cross $100,000 in pharmaceutical sales, she figured life would get easier. It didn’t.
The gap between what a good income use to buy and what it buys now is at the centre of a deep issue many Torontonians face in 2026. On paper, housing has done its part. GTA prices are down roughly 25 percent from the 2022 peak. The Bank of Canada rate has fallen from 5 percent to 2.25 percent. The monthly payment on an average-priced home has dropped from about $7,100 to about $4,200.
So is Toronto affordable now? No. A household still needs roughly $236,000 a year to qualify for the average home, while the median household earns just under $100,000. Housing got cheaper. Almost everything around it got more expensive, and that part rarely makes the headlines.
Watch the Full Episode
If reading isn’t your thing, press play. In this episode, Ralph Fox, Broker of Record at Fox Marin, and Kori Marin, Co-founder of Fox Marin, share what they’ve learned from working with hundreds of Toronto buyers and sellers.
Housing Did Its Part
From an affordability standpoint, we can start with the good news, because there is some. In August 2026, the average GTA home sold for $993,000; the second time this year, the figure fell under a million. That’s about $341,000 below the 2022 market peak. We broke the month down in Toronto Real Estate August 2026: Average Price Falls Below $1 Million Again.
Since early 2022, borrowing has also gotten cheaper. In September, the best five-year fixed rate was 4.24 percent, and the variable rate was 3.25 percent. With 20 percent down, the average home’s monthly payment is about $4,280. At the 2023 peak, with rates around 6.49 percent, the same house cost just under $7,200 a month.
The problem is getting in the door. Ralph Fox, Broker of Record at Fox Marin, puts the math plainly: on a roughly $1 million home, a 20 percent down payment is $200,000. Where does a household earning under $100,000 find that? In 1985, saving a 20 percent down payment on an average home took about five and a half years. Today it takes over 20.
Ralph sees the result every week in the Fox Marin leasing team. Many tenants renting through the team earn around $300,000 a year. They could carry a mortgage, but they haven’t pulled together the deposit plus what Ralph calls the friction costs of buying, so they rent. If you want to see what a sub-million budget actually gets you right now, What $1 Million Buys in Toronto Right Now walks through it property type by property type.
The Wall Is Everything Else
Kori opens the episode by calling today’s conversation “affordability therapy,” then explains how basically everything around real estate has been going up.
Groceries are up 29 percent since 2021 and still rising about 2.8 percent a year. Gas in Toronto is $1.83 a litre, up from $1.44 a year ago. Food bank visits in the city have hit 4.1 million a year, about one in ten people, and Kori points out the lineups include every age and background. Kori admits she now feels guilty throwing out half a container of expired Greek yogurt. “We’ve kind of become like our grandparents who survived a depression,” and are fearful of wasting anything, Ralph says.
Then there’s the paycheque. Earn $100,000 and your take-home is about $74,000 after income tax, CPP and EI. If you are looking to buy a home within the City of Toronto, you generally pay both Ontario’s provincial Land Transfer Tax and Toronto Municipal Land Transfer Tax. On a roughly $1 million purchase, the combined amount can exceed $30,000 before any applicable first-time buyer rebates. You must pay that in cash at closing and cannot roll it into the mortgage. The FM Land Transfer Tax Calculator will show you your exact number.
Property taxes rose 2.2 percent this year. Ralph notes that’s an election year, and by his estimate the increases over the past three years add up to something like 18 to 20 percent.
The $4,000 Bare Minimum
To show what a Toronto income covers today, Kori built a bare-bones monthly budget for two sharing a one-bedroom condo with no car.
Rent is just over $2,200. Groceries for two are about $900, TTC for two adults is about $310, phones and internet are about $160, and hydro is about $100. Add one modest dinner out a month at about $190 and one movie night with snacks at about $55.
That’s roughly $4,000 a month before clothes, a gym membership, a vacation or a pet. Add a car payment, insurance, parking and gas, and the couple exceeds $4,700. As for the dinner line, Ralph’s advice is only half a joke: “You have to pre-drink in Toronto before you go out for dinner now.”
“When I was a kid, anyone making $100,000, the six-figure salary, to me was like mega rich. I’m thinking Daddy Warbucks level wealthy.” – Kori Marin, Co-founder, Fox Marin
To cover even that stripped-down list, one partner needs to earn about $62,000 (roughly $48,000 after tax) and the other about $36,000. Together, that matches Toronto’s median household income of about $98,000. In other words, the median household can cover the basics and save almost nothing. If you’re weighing whether to keep renting or push toward buying, the FM Rent vs Own Calculator puts your numbers side by side.
Same Age, Different Life
Politicians and baby boomers (the largest portion of the electorate) who set policy today mostly bought homes in a very different Toronto. Kori pulled census data comparing the typical family in 1985 with the typical family today, using 2021 data, the most recent available.
In 1985, most families with kids had one earner, and 53 percent had a stay-at-home parent (based on 1976 data). Among 25- to 39-year-olds, 47 percent were married with children, and the average age at first marriage was 27. Nearly half of that age group, 48 percent, owned a home, and only 11 percent lived with their parents.
Today, 69 percent of families with kids are dual-earner, and just 18 percent have a stay-at-home parent. That usually means paying for daycare unless grandparents live nearby. Only 27 percent of 25- to 39-year-olds are married with children, and the average age at first marriage has risen to 31. Home ownership in that age group has slipped to 41 percent, and Kori notes the typical first-time buyer is now around 40, up from the early 30s not long ago. A quarter of 25- to 39-year-olds, 26 percent now live with their parents. Ralph suspects the true figure is closer to 30 percent now, since the data is five years old, and we have seen a significant erosion in affordability during that time.
What $1,500 Bought in 1985
The clearest way to see the shift is to look at one month of spending.
In 1985, the average family earned about $3,250 a month gross. The mortgage on an average home, even at a 12 percent interest rate, was $906. Groceries for a family of four were $420, a transit pass $37, a movie for two $10, and a year of university tuition about $103 a month. A family day at Canada’s Wonderland cost $60. That’s about $1,500 in total, or 46 percent of gross income.
The same six items cost almost $7,000 a month in 2026. The mortgage is about $4,263; groceries for four are about $1,500, according to the Food Price Report; TTC is $155; a movie for two is about $35 with the only fee; tuition is about $774 a month; and Wonderland is at least $220. That’s roughly 84 percent of gross income. Mortgage alone tells the story:
Measured in years of income, the average home cost about three years of family pay in 1985 ($109,000). It cost about four years in 1995 ($203,000) and about five years in 2005 ($336,000). Today it takes about ten years of pay to buy the average $993,000 home.
A two-bedroom apartment rented for about $689 a month in 1990 and costs about $3,000 today. The cheapest Leafs tickets were $21 in 1995, roughly $41 in today’s dollars, and now cost about $215. A typical concert ticket was $15 in 1985 and now starts around $133.
Is buying realistic for you right now? The math is tougher than it was for our parents, but it isn’t the same for everyone. It depends on your income, savings and where you’re willing to look. Start with our Buyer Intake form, and we’ll give you a clear read on what you can afford and what it would take to get there.
Inflation Is the Silent Killer
Ralph borrows a line from Ronald Reagan here: Inflation is the silent killer. He argues that real estate takes the blame because it’s the most visible cost in anyone’s life, while the inflation of everything around it goes largely unnoticed.
“It’s the inflation of everything surrounding real estate that has helped make real estate prices so challenging and unaffordable.” – Ralph Fox, Broker of Record, Fox Marin
Ralph points to taxes most people never see or think about: taxes and levies embedded in the cost of producing and transporting goods, HST on many purchases, and other charges that can raise the prices consumers ultimately pay. It is important, however, not to confuse those individual costs with the CPI itself. Statistics Canada’s CPI does not include several tax-related housing costs, including property taxes and other special charges, as well as mortgage interest costs.
The broader point Ralph is making is about the difference between the inflation rate people see reported in the headlines and the cumulative increase in the cost of living they actually experience. A household does not experience CPI as one number. It experiences hundreds of individual prices, taxes and expenses moving at different speeds.
Kori thinks most people feel it but can’t name it. They blame everything around the problem except the problem itself.
“I feel like it’s kind of the silent elephant in the room.” – Kori Marin, Co-founder, Fox Marin
Forced to Rent
What bothers Ralph most is where policy seems to be heading. He sees governments leaning toward building subsidized, government-owned rental housing rather than helping people afford to buy. He’s careful to say there’s nothing wrong with renting.
“I think the shame is when people in society no longer have the option to decide whether they want to rent or purchase, and that they’re just forced to become renters.” – Ralph Fox, Broker of Record, Fox Marin
Kori adds a fair counterpoint: Ottawa did follow through on the HST rebate for new homes under $1 million. Both agree the stress shows up well beyond housing. Conversations with clients that start with real estate quickly move to hopes, finances and strained relationships. Social media makes it worse, Kori says, with everyone scrolling through other people’s trips, dinners and renovations while they worry about the vet bill. It’s not just you, she tells viewers. “It’s all of us together in this.”
What Would Actually Help
Ralph and Kori laid out the levers they’d pull at each level of government.
Ottawa: income tax relief, scrapping the industrial carbon tax, a stronger dollar to lower import costs, and more competition among grocery chains and telecom providers.
Queens Park: cut the provincial land transfer tax, and update the first-time buyer rebate, which Kori notes has sat at about $8,000 combined since 2017 even as prices climbed. Build the missing middle by allowing mid-rise housing in areas zoned for single-family homes, especially along subway lines. Kori also wants to know why struggling retails trips aren’t being turned into homes. “What are we doing with all of the crappy retail that is not being rented on these major arteries of the city?” she asks.
Ralph’s idea for fast, gentle density is to pay homeowners $20,000 to $50,000, or offer a property tax break, to turn basements and backyards into proper rental suites. The catch is that most owners won’t rent to a stranger under current tenancy rules without a real way to remove a problem tenant. Fix box, he argues, and you unlock rental space in some of the city’s best neighbourhoods for a fraction of what new construction costs.
He also wants development charges cut. By his estimate, they’ve risen something like 1,000 percent since 2010. Any savings, he says, need to reach and be passed on to buyers, not just developers.
City Hall: waive the municipal land transfer tax, speed up permits and approvals, and slow the climb of utility fees, parking fees and property taxes. Ralph notes that Toronto’s double land transfer tax adds an unusual cost to moving within the city and can influence how homeowners make their next housing decision. Instead of selling and moving, some owners may decide that renovating their existing home makes more financial sense. Instead of selling and moving up, they stay and renovate, which chokes off supply for everyone behind them.
How Kori Saved Her First Down Payment
So what does a 28-year-old earning around $98,000, with no bank of Mom and Dad, actually do? Ralph’s answer starts with clarity. Know where you are, decide where you want to go, and focus everything on that goal, whether that means a second job, starting a business or chasing opportunities others overlook.
Kori did exactly that in the 2000s. On top of a demanding corporate job, she taught group fitness classes and put every gym paycheque into a separate account that became her real estate fund. It eventually bought her a pre-construction condo. The whole process took about 12 years. For one year, she built her work wardrobe from two shirts, two pairs of pants, two skirts and two pairs of shoes from Club Monaco, rotating them so no one noticed.
“I did not go out for dinner for an entire year. And I did not shop for clothes for work for an entire year.” – Kori Marin, Co-founder, Fox Marin
She’s quick to say it was easier then. Ralph insists it’s still possible, as long as you tune out the noise, including the doomscrolling on YouTube.
“If you persist and you remain relentless towards your vision, you can still make it happen.” – Ralph Fox, Broker of Record, Fox Marin
What This Means For You
If you’re a first-time buyer, forget the headline price for a moment and focus on the down payment and closing costs, because that’s where most buyers stall. Open a separate account for your down payment and pay into it first. If you are considering buying but are early in the process, check out Are You Actually Ready to Buy A Home in Toronto?A First-Time Buyer Mindset as a good gut check, and Fox Marin’s First-Time Home Buyer Academy covers the steps in order. Run your real monthly carry through the FM Mortgage Calculator before you fall for a listing.
If you’re a homeowner thinking of moving up, count the double land transfer tax and selling costs before deciding between moving and renovating. Staying put can be the right call, but it should be a decision based on the numbers, not a default.
If you’re renting and watching from the sidelines, lower prices and rates have genuinely improved the math over the past three years, even if it doesn’t feel like it. Track your own savings rate against the down payment you’d need. That number matters more than where the market goes next month.
Frequently Asked Questions
Not for most households. Prices are down about 25 percent from the 2022 peak and rates have roughly halved, but a household needs about $236,000 a year to qualify for the average home, and the median household earns just under $100,000.
Above $236,000 a year to qualify for the average-priced home, assuming a 20 percent down payment. With the average GTA home at $993,000 in August 2026, that down payment is close to $200,000.
Because housing costs kept rising. Groceries are up 29 percent since 2021, gas is up about 23 percent in a year, and taxes at every level have climbed. The savings from lower mortgage payments are being absorbed by everything else.
Saving 20 percent down on an average home took about five and a half years in 1985. Today it takes more than 20 years for a typical household.
Buyers in the City of Toronto pay both the Ontario land transfer tax and the municipal Toronto land transfer tax. On average, that’s just over $32,000 for a million-dollar home paid in cash at closing. First-time buyers qualify for a partial rebate.
Among 25- to 39-year-olds, ownership fell from 48 percent in 1985 to 41 percent in 2021. Over the same period, the share of those living with their parents rose from 11 percent to 26 percent.
It can be challenging but not impossible. Without family financial assistance, it usually takes a clear savings goal, extra income, and flexibility on property type or neighbourhood. Condos, older bungalows and areas outside the core are often where average budgets go furthest.
The Fox Marin Perspective
Toronto’s affordability problem has never been only about house prices. The market has corrected, rates have come down, and the monthly payment on an average home is thousands of dollars lower than it was three years ago. What hasn’t come down is everything else: groceries, gas, taxes, childcare, tuition, and the thousand small costs of city life. That’s why so many people at every income level feel like they’re treading water.
If you want to own a property in the future, start by knowing your real numbers, setting a clear goal, and making decisions based on your own life rather than the latest headline. Our parents had an easier ratio between income and home price. While homeownership is still possible, it requires a focused plan, and that starts by surrounding yourself with the right people.
If you’re trying to work out where you stand, whether that means buying your first place, moving up, or deciding if ownership is even the right goal, contact the Fox Marin team. We’re happy to help.
Fox Marin is recognized as one of Toronto’s most trusted real estate teams, with 550+ five-star Google reviews, more than 1,000 successful transactions, and over $700 million in sales volume. (*Source: RE Stats Inc. / Loft47, Jan. 1, 2018 – Aug. 31, 2026)
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This article was written by Ralph Fox, Broker of Record and Managing Partner here at Fox Marin Associates. Ralph is a Torontonian native who recognized from an early age that the most successful people in life apply long-term thinking to their investments, relationships, and life goals. It’s this philosophy, along with his lifelong entrepreneurial drive and exceptional business instincts, that help to establish Ralph as a top agent in the real estate market in downtown Toronto.
Ralph Fox & Kori Marin
Kori and Ralph's love affair with Toronto Real Estate have spanned several decades! It is incredible to see how far their mad crazy passion for design, architecture and innovation has taken them, which is only the beginning of their bigger vision and relentless goal-setting! Kori and Ralph have created this forum for their readers to explore the good, the bad, and the sometimes ugly real estate. An honest perspective about the ins & outs of the business - one in which they live, work and experience first hand every day. Nothing is more interesting than the "real" in real estate!
