Monthly Down Payment Monitor: February 2025

When mortgage rates are all anyone talks about, it can be easy to forget just how important a down payment is to home buying success.

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.

Down payment requirements in Canada: February 2025

The information in the following table is based on Canada’s minimum down payment guidelines and the average sale prices for January 2024 provided by provincial real estate associations. (New Brunswick was omitted because its provincial average price wasn’t publicly available prior to publishing.)

	Average Sale Price — January 2024	Minimum Down Payment Required	20% Down Payment
B.C.	$949,560	$69,956	$189,912
Alberta	$503,078	$25,308	$100,616
Saskatchewan	$310,521	$15,526	$62,104
Manitoba	$351,128	$17,556	$70,226
Ontario	$834,050	$58,405	$166,810
Quebec	$511,879	$26,188	$102,376
New Brunswick	N/A	N/A	N/A
Nova Scotia	$449,312	$22,466	$89,862
PEI	$397,083	$19,854	$79,417
Newfoundland	$335,448	$16,772	$67,090

Regional highlight: Ontario

Ontario’s housing market got off to a slow start this year, but that hasn’t translated into softer prices or lighter down payment burdens for the province’s home buyers.

Greater Toronto:

Average detached sale price: $1,377,430.
Minimum down payment required: $112,743

Average condo price: $670,675.
Minimum down payment required: $42,068.

Hamilton:

Average detached sale price: $836,338
Minimum down payment required: $58,634

Average condo price: $455,014
Minimum down payment required: $22,751

Ottawa:

Average detached sale price: $821,202
Minimum down payment required: $57,120

Average condo price: $441,704
Minimum down payment required: $22,085

Kitchener-Cambridge-Waterloo:

Average detached sale price: $882,941
Minimum down payment required: $63,294

Benchmark condo price: $469,623
Minimum down payment required: $23,481

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.