Personal FinanceJuly 31, 2026 · Harmony Budget

What Closing Costs Actually Look Like in Canada

Ten days before closing, your lawyer sends an email with a PDF attached and a number at the bottom. It's the first time anyone has told you exactly what you owe, and it is not the down payment you've spent three years saving.

Nobody hides this from you. It just never comes up. The realtor talks about the purchase price. The lender talks about the down payment and the monthly payment. The government talks about the FHSA. And then a statement of adjustments arrives and there's a line item you have never heard of, and the total is $20,000 more than the number in your head.

Here's what's actually on that page, and why the same $600,000 house costs $1,290 to close in Calgary and $8,475 to close in Toronto.

The number nobody quotes you

The Financial Consumer Agency of Canada puts it plainly on its buying a home page: be prepared to spend between 1.5% and 4% of the home's purchase price on upfront costs, on top of your down payment.

On a $600,000 home that's $9,000 to $24,000. It's a useful number to budget against, and it's also a national average that papers over the thing that actually drives the total — where you're buying.

One line item is responsible for most of the spread. Everything else is rounding.

1. Land transfer tax: the line that decides everything

Every province charges something to move a title into your name. What varies isn't whether you pay — it's whether it's a tax measured in percentage points or a registry fee measured in dollars.

Here's the same $600,000 home, closing in each province, for a buyer who is not a first-timer. Every rate below comes from the government that levies it.

Toronto — $16,950. Ontario charges land transfer tax at 0.5% up to $55,000, 1.0% to $250,000, 1.5% to $400,000, and 2.0% above that: $8,475. Then Toronto charges its own Municipal Land Transfer Tax on the identical brackets. You pay the same tax twice, plus a $102.56 administration fee.
British Columbia — $10,000. Property transfer tax is 1% on the first $200,000, 2% up to $2 million, 3% above that, and a further 2% on residential value over $3 million.
Manitoba — $9,650. Land transfer tax is free on the first $30,000, then 0.5%, 1.0%, 1.5%, and 2.0% above $200,000.
Halifax — $9,000. Nova Scotia lets each municipality set its own deed transfer tax. Halifax Regional Municipality is at 1.5%, the top of the range — but rates across the province run from 1.0% (Yarmouth, Pictou, Clare) through 1.25% (Berwick, Lunenburg) to 1.5%.
Ontario outside Toronto — $8,475. Same provincial tax, no municipal one.
Montreal — $7,349. Quebec's transfer duties (the "welcome tax") are set municipally on a graduated scale. Montreal's 2026 brackets run 0.5% / 1% / 1.5% / 2% / 2.5% / 3.5% / 4%, and Montreal is the only city in Quebec that goes that high.
New Brunswick — $6,000. A flat 1% of the greater of purchase price or assessed value.
PEI — $6,000. Also 1% of the greater of price or assessed value, with nothing owing at all below $30,000.
Newfoundland and Labrador — $2,498. Not a tax but a registration fee: $100 for the first $500 of value, plus 40 cents for every additional $100.
Saskatchewan — $2,400. A land titles fee of 0.4% of the title value above $6,300.
Calgary or Edmonton — about $1,290. Alberta has no land transfer tax at all. You pay Land Titles $50 plus $5 per $5,000 of value to register the transfer, and the same formula again to register the mortgage.

Read that list top to bottom and the point makes itself. The house is the same. The tax is thirteen times bigger at one end than the other.

First-time buyer relief, where it exists

Four of those numbers get smaller if this is your first home:

Ontario refunds up to $4,000 — enough to zero out the tax on the first $368,000 of price. You must never have owned a home anywhere in the world, move in within nine months, and apply within 18 months.
Toronto stacks its own rebate of up to $4,475 on top, on the same conditions. Our $600,000 Toronto buyer goes from $16,950 to $8,475 — still the highest in the country after both rebates.
British Columbia exempts the tax entirely below $500,000, and gives a flat $8,000 exemption from $500,000 up to $835,000. Between $835,000 and $860,000 it phases out to nothing. Our $600,000 Vancouver buyer pays $2,000 instead of $10,000 — but a $900,000 buyer pays the full $16,000, because the program stops dead.
PEI waives the tax completely for a qualifying first-time buyer who occupies the home for at least 183 consecutive days.

Everywhere else, check your own province and municipality before you assume you're on your own — some cities run grant programs that don't touch the transfer tax itself.

One thing that changed this year

Toronto introduced graduated MLTT rates on high-value homes effective April 1, 2026. Above $2 million the municipal rate steps up through 2.5%, 4.40%, 5.45%, 6.50%, 7.55% and 8.60% on value over $20 million. It doesn't touch a typical first purchase — but if you're looking at a detached house in the core, the municipal half of your tax bill is no longer a mirror of the provincial half.

2. The tax on the tax

This one catches almost everybody.

If your down payment is under 20%, your mortgage needs default insurance. The premium scales with your loan-to-value ratio — 2.80% at 85%, 3.10% at 90%, 4.00% at 95% — and you can roll it into the mortgage. That part is fine. Nobody writes a cheque for it.

But CMHC also says this: "Premiums in Quebec, Ontario and Saskatchewan are subject to provincial sales tax. The provincial sales tax cannot be added to the loan amount."

Cannot be added to the loan amount. Which means it's cash, on closing day.

Work it through on that $600,000 home. The minimum down payment is 5% of the first $500,000 plus 10% of the rest — $35,000 — leaving a $565,000 mortgage at 94.2% loan-to-value. The premium is 4.00%, or $22,600. Ontario applies 8% retail sales tax to insurance premiums, so $1,808 comes out of your pocket at closing. In Saskatchewan, at 6% PST, it's $1,356. Quebec charges its own tax on insurance premiums and it lands the same way.

Buyers in the other seven provinces pay nothing here. It is entirely a function of your postal code.

3. GST, but only on new construction

A resale home has no GST or HST on the purchase price. A brand-new one from a builder does — 5% GST, or the federal portion of HST, on the full price.

On a $700,000 new build that's $35,000, and it is very easy to discover this late, because builders quote both ways and "plus applicable taxes" does a lot of work in a sales contract.

The good news is genuinely new. The first-time home buyers' GST/HST rebate now recovers up to $50,000:

At or below $1 million, up to 100% of the GST comes back.
Between $1 million and $1.5 million the maximum is reduced on a straight line — a $1.25 million home, exactly halfway, gets 50% of the maximum, or $25,000.
At or above $1.5 million, nothing.

The conditions are strict. The agreement with the builder has to be signed on or after March 20, 2025 and before 2031, construction has to be substantially complete before 2036, and neither you nor your spouse can have lived in a home you owned in the current calendar year or the previous four. Neither of you can have claimed this rebate before, ever.

Note that the first-time test here is the four-year one, not the never-owned- anything one that Ontario and Toronto use for their land transfer tax rebates. The same buyer can qualify for one and not the other. If the builder doesn't credit it at closing, you claim it from the CRA yourself.

4. The small stuff, with real numbers

CMHC publishes actual dollar figures for the rest of the list in How much will my home really cost?:

Legal fees — a minimum of $500, and realistically more once disbursements, title searches and registration charges are added.
Home inspection — around $500. Optional, and the cheapest insurance policy on this entire list.
Appraisal — $250 to $350, if your lender requires one.
Survey or certificate of location — $1,000 to $2,000, if your lender asks for a current one.
Estoppel or status certificate — up to $100, and only if you're buying a condo. This is the document that tells you whether the reserve fund is healthy or whether a special assessment is coming. Have your lawyer read it.
Title insurance — quoted through your lawyer or notary; it covers losses from problems with the ownership of the property.
Property insurance — must be in force on the day the sale closes, not the day you move in.
Water and septic tests — rural properties only, but not optional there.

None of these is large. Together they're routinely $2,000 to $4,000, and they're the part of the bill people forget entirely because each individual line looks too small to matter.

5. Adjustments: paying the seller back

The statement of adjustments is where you reimburse the seller for things they prepaid that you'll now benefit from. Property taxes for the rest of the year. Condo fees for the current month. A full oil tank.

There's no rate to look up and no way to estimate it precisely in advance — it depends on the closing date and what the seller happened to have paid. Close on January 15 and it's small. Close on December 20 in a municipality that bills annually in March and you're handing back most of a year of property tax.

Ask your lawyer for a draft statement of adjustments as soon as they have one. It is the single most useful document in the whole transaction and most buyers see it for the first time three days before closing.

What you don't pay

Worth saying, because it's the most expensive misunderstanding in the other direction: the seller pays the realtor's commission. FCAC states it directly — when you buy a home, the seller pays the realtor fees. If you've been budgeting 5% for an agent, delete it.

Three real closings

Toronto, $900,000 condo, first-time buyer. Ontario LTT $14,475 plus Toronto MLTT $14,475, minus a $4,000 provincial rebate and a $4,475 municipal one: $20,475. Add $1,808 in RST on the mortgage insurance premium, roughly $2,000 in legal fees and disbursements, $100 for the status certificate, and you are over $24,000 — 2.7% of the purchase price, sitting near the top of FCAC's range before a single small line item.

Vancouver, $900,000, first-time buyer. Property transfer tax $16,000, with no first-time relief at all, because $900,000 is above the $860,000 cutoff. Buy the same home for $835,000 and the tax drops to $6,700 after the $8,000 exemption. That's a $9,300 swing driven by a $65,000 change in price — the steepest cliff in Canadian closing costs.

Calgary, $600,000, first-time buyer. Land Titles charges $650 to register the transfer and about $640 to register the mortgage: $1,290. No land transfer tax, no PST on the insurance premium. With legal fees, an inspection and an appraisal, the whole closing lands near $3,000 — under 0.5% of the purchase price.

Same buyer. Same savings. Three completely different closing days.

What to actually do with this

Budget closing costs as a separate number from the down payment. They come out of the same bank account on the same day, and a down payment that's exactly enough is a down payment that's short. Look up your own province's rate above, add roughly 1% of the price for everything else, and save that on top.

Check the first-time buyer relief before you set your price ceiling. In BC especially, the difference between offering $835,000 and $900,000 is $9,300 of tax you never see coming. In Toronto it's worth knowing you get two rebates, not one, and that both need an application.

If you're buying new, get the GST question answered in writing before you sign. Whether the quoted price includes it, and whether the builder is crediting the first-time buyers' rebate at closing or leaving you to claim it.

Route the money through an FHSA on the way there. Contributions are deductible and qualifying withdrawals are tax-free, there's no minimum holding period, and the refund is real money against a real bill. We wrote about the order to fill your accounts in FHSA vs TFSA vs RRSP, and if you want the down payment side of the picture for your city, our first home guide has benchmark prices and minimum down payments for Toronto, Vancouver, Calgary, Montreal and Halifax.

Frequently asked questions

How much are closing costs in Canada?

FCAC advises budgeting 1.5% to 4% of the purchase price. Where you land in that range is mostly decided by land transfer tax: on a $600,000 home it's about $1,290 in Alberta, $2,400 in Saskatchewan, $9,000 in Halifax and $16,950 in Toronto before any first-time buyer rebates.

Which province has the highest land transfer tax?

Toronto is the most expensive place to close in Canada, because Ontario's land transfer tax and Toronto's municipal land transfer tax use identical brackets and both apply. Of the provinces themselves, British Columbia's property transfer tax is the steepest at higher prices — 2% above $200,000, 3% above $2 million, and a further 2% on residential value over $3 million.

Do first-time home buyers pay land transfer tax?

Sometimes not. Ontario refunds up to $4,000 and Toronto up to $4,475 on top. British Columbia exempts the tax fully below $500,000 and gives $8,000 of relief up to $835,000. PEI waives it entirely for a qualifying first-time buyer. Most other provinces have no first-time buyer exemption on the transfer tax itself.

Is there GST on buying a house in Canada?

Only on newly built or substantially renovated homes, not on resale. First-time buyers can now recover up to $50,000 through the first-time home buyers' GST/HST rebate — the full federal tax on homes up to $1 million, phasing out to nothing at $1.5 million — if the agreement with the builder was signed on or after March 20, 2025 and before 2031.

Can I add closing costs to my mortgage?

Generally no. The mortgage default insurance premium can be rolled into the loan, but the provincial sales tax on that premium cannot — CMHC says so explicitly — and land transfer tax, legal fees and adjustments are all due in cash on closing day. That's the whole reason these costs surprise people.

What is a statement of adjustments?

The document your lawyer prepares that reconciles everything owing on closing day: the balance of the purchase price, land transfer tax, legal fees, and reimbursements to the seller for property taxes or condo fees they've already paid past the closing date. Ask for a draft version as early as your lawyer can produce one.

The bottom line

Closing costs aren't unpredictable. They're just unquoted. One number — the transfer tax in the jurisdiction you're buying in — sets 60 to 80% of the total, and you can look it up today, before you've made an offer, using the sources linked above.

Do that, add about 1% for the rest, and put it in a separate line in your budget. The statement of adjustments should confirm what you already knew, not introduce it.

General information for Canadians, not financial, tax or legal advice. Rates are current as of July 2026 and verified against the government that levies each one — provincial and municipal rates change, sometimes mid-year, so confirm the current figures for your jurisdiction and get your lawyer's numbers before you close.