Why a salary of $115K isn’t enough to purchase a house in some parts of

Ron Butler says that when he started in the mortgage business 30 years ago, it was quite easy for a grocery store produce manager or part-time nurse to find the five per cent down payment needed to buy a home.

“Those days are gone,” Butler said recently at a parliamentary finance committee hearing looking into household debt in Canada.

Asked how long it would take someone with a solid, full-time job to save up the minimum down payment on a home today, Butler said that when it comes to the Greater Toronto Area, “the reality is they never could.”

“If you’re running about $110,000, $115,000 income, you have to pay rent, you have to eat, you have to live. You pay taxes,” Butler said. “You could not possibly accumulate a satisfactory down payment for a house price that’s still sort of just under a million dollars.”

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In Ontario before 2015, a family making $115,000 a year “had a shot” at home ownership, Butler said. They would have to go to places like Ajax, Burlington, Hamilton or the Niagara region to find a single-family home, but they would be able to find something to buy.

“Today, a $115,000 income earner, they really can’t buy anything.”

According to March 2026 figures from the Canadian Real Estate Association (CREA), the national average sale price for a home in Canada was $673,084. That means the minimum down payment required would be just over $42,000.

But in the Greater Toronto Area, the average price was $1,017,796, while in Greater Vancouver, it was $1,201,123. In those cases, the minimum down payment would be about about $76,000 and $95,000, respectively.

It’s not just in parts of Toronto and Vancouver where a single income in the $100,000 range is insufficient to be able to buy a home.

“Over the last few years, it’s spread to other locations,” said Mike Moffatt, founding director of the University of Ottawa’s Missing Middle Initiative (MMI) and a researcher into Canada’s housing supply and affordability crisis.

For example, CBC calculated that by using CREA’s March 2026 median house prices and assuming a mortgage rate of 4.39 per cent amortized over 25 years, a person would need to make $122,300 to afford a 10 per cent down payment, a $4,000 annual tax bill and to pay $150 monthly in heating for a home in Calgary.

In Montreal, one would need to make $127,800, and in Ottawa $132,100 to do the same.

A report published in February this year by MMI found that across 23 Canadian metropolitan areas, newly built family-sized starter homes are now more than twice as expensive relative to median income as they were in 2004. According to the report, in the last two decades, new home prices at the lower end of the market have risen by 265 per cent on average, while young dual-earner incomes grew just 76 per cent.

Another MMI report published in November found that across 23…