Monthly Down Payment Monitor: March 2025
When mortgage rates are all anyone talks about, it can be easy to forget just how important a down payment is when you're a Canadian home buyer.
Even when rates were at historic lows, you would have been left out of the feeding frenzy if your down payment savings fell short of the required minimums.
That’s why NerdWallet developed our Monthly Down Payment Monitor: to help Canadian home buyers understand how much they might need to save in order to get approved for a mortgage.
Unlike interest rates, your down payment is something you can control. Once you have an idea of how much to save, you can build a savings strategy around that target amount.
Every dollar you put away literally gets you closer to owning your own home.
Read the 2025 Canadian Home Buyer Report
Find out how would-be buyers and current home owners are feeling about the state of the market.
Down payment requirements in Canada: March 2025
The information in the following table is based on Canada’s minimum down payment guidelines and the average sale prices for February 2024 provided by provincial real estate associations. (New Brunswick has been omitted because its provincial average price wasn’t publicly available prior to publishing.)
Average Sale Price — February 2024 | Minimum Down Payment Required | 20% Down Payment | |
|---|---|---|---|
B.C. | $964,349 | $71,435 | $192,870 |
Alberta | $509,468 | $25,947 | $101,894 |
Saskatchewan | $345,688 | $17,284 | $69,138 |
Manitoba | $382,440 | $19,122 | $76,488 |
Ontario | $848,289 | $59,829 | $169,658 |
Quebec | $515,899 | $26,590 | $103,180 |
New Brunswick | n/a | n/a | n/a |
Nova Scotia | $451,969 | $22,598 | $90,394 |
PEI | $373,993 | $18,700 | $74,799 |
Newfoundland | $309,844 | $15,492 | $61,969 |
Regional highlight: Quebec
Despite the economic uncertainty gripping the country, both home sales and prices continue rising in Quebec’s two largest cities.
The combination of tariff chaos and rising down payment requirements is a double whammy for the province’s home buyers, but home prices are still relatively low compared to other major Canadian cities.
Real estate boards sometimes use different measurements when analyzing their data, like average price, median price and benchmark price. (We explain the differences below.) For now, just focus on those minimum down payment numbers.
Montreal
Median single-family sale price: $600,000
Minimum down payment required: $35,000
Median condo price: $420,000
Minimum down payment required: $21,000
Quebec City
Median detached sale price: $440,000
Minimum down payment required: $22,000
Median condo price: $300,000
Minimum down payment required: $15,000
Down payment savings tip: Tap that tax refund
If you’re a home buyer in line for a hefty tax refund this year, it can be a great opportunity to boost your down payment savings.
A large refund can feel like free money, which makes it easy to spend on non-essentials. It’s more accurate to think of it as money being returned to you. That’s what it is: money you couldn’t put to work last year because the government was holding it as tax.
Now that your money is back in your hands, consider doing with it what you could have done if it hadn’t been scraped off your paycheque: save it.
A First Home Savings Account can be the ideal place to stash your tax refund. It can be invested to generate tax-free returns, and the amount you contribute will be tax-deductible next year. In addition to getting closer to buying a home, you can increase next year’s refund and repeat the process again in 2026.
- Home price terminology
Average price: This is the total sales volume, calculated in dollars, divided by the number of home sales. A monthly average price can be swayed by a few expensive properties, which makes it a somewhat unreliable metric for describing market trends. If three $10 million homes are sold in one month in Toronto, for example, it would increase the average price, but it wouldn’t necessarily mean all prices are rising.
Benchmark price: Benchmark prices are an interesting alternative to average prices. They’re the prices that buyers are expected to pay for a particular property type. Benchmark prices are determined using the Canadian Real Estate Association’s MLS Home Price Index, which is more of a modelling tool than an analysis of what’s actually happening in the market.
Median price: Median price is essentially the mid-point between the lowest- and highest-priced homes sold over a particular period. Half of the homes sold would be more expensive than the median, the other half would be less. It’s difficult to gauge the market using median price since it leaves you wondering how high home prices might be.
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