Ontario · updated August 2026

The true monthly cost of owning each GTA property type

Most first-time buyers compare a condo to a house by looking at the condo fee and concluding the house is cheaper to run. It usually is not. Once you count utilities, insurance and the money you must set aside for repairs, a GTA condo apartment and a detached house land within a couple of hundred dollars a month of each other. The condo simply bills you for its costs, while the house waits and sends the bill all at once.

The five property types, side by side

These are researched GTA ranges for August 2026. They cover running costs only: no mortgage payment and no property tax (that one gets its own section below, because the way Ontario assesses it misleads almost everyone).

Read the totals column slowly. A condo apartment at $755-1,265 and a detached house at $760-1,170 are effectively the same monthly burden. The composition differs, and so does the risk profile, but the "condos have fees" argument does not survive the numbers.

A condo fee is not an extra, it is a bundle

The fee is not a tax on living in a condo. It is a pooled bill for things every homeowner pays for somehow: building insurance on the structure, the roof, windows, elevators, snow clearing, landscaping, common-area hydro, property management, and in most GTA apartment buildings your heat and water as well. A slice also goes into the reserve fund, the corporation's savings account for big future repairs.

That is why the condo apartment utility line above is only $75-110: you are mostly paying hydro, because heat and water came out of the fee. Compare the freehold townhouse at $260-345, where you pay gas, hydro and water yourself. The house owner did not escape those costs, they just feel each one separately.

The real difference is control and lumpiness. A condo fee is predictable and someone else organises the roof. A house gives you full control and no forced savings, which is fine right up until the furnace fails in February.

Fees go up, and occasionally they jump

Do not budget the fee you see today forever. In normal years Ontario condo fees have risen about 2-5 percent annually, and through the 2022-2024 insurance shock the increases ran 6-12 percent. Compounding at even 4 percent, a $700 fee is over $850 within five years.

Then there is the tail risk: the special assessment, a one-time charge on every unit when the reserve fund cannot cover a necessary repair. About one in six Ontario condo corporations issued one in the last five years, averaging around $3,500 per unit and occasionally landing in the $12,000-$20,000 range. Roughly 69 percent of Ontario condo corporations have been found to be under-reserved, which is why those assessments happen.

The repairs reserve nobody budgets

Every table above has a repairs reserve line, and it is the one buyers delete first. Do not. If you own a freehold home, you are your own reserve fund. Roofs, furnaces, windows, driveways and appliances all have finite lives, and the fact that none of them failed this year does not mean the cost was zero.

Why the 1 percent rule overstates GTA homes

You will read that maintenance costs 1 percent of the home value a year: about $542 a month on a $650,000 home, $750 on a $900,000 one. Those figures are too high here, for an honest reason. A large share of GTA value is land, and land does not need a roof. The rule was built where the building is most of the price; in Toronto and the inner suburbs the structure can be a minority of what you paid.

Budget against the building, not the price tag. That is why the ranges above scale with structure size and exposure: $50-100 for a condo apartment (you are responsible only for the inside of your unit), $200-350 for a freehold townhouse, $330-550 for a detached. Move it to a separate account monthly and it stops being an emergency.

POTL fees: the freehold townhouse surprise

Many newer Ontario freehold townhouses sit in a POTL (parcel of tied land) arrangement, sometimes called a common elements condominium. You own your house and lot outright, but you are tied to a small condo corporation maintaining shared private roads, visitor parking, snow clearing or a park. The charge runs $80-175 a month where it exists, and $0 where it does not, so two listings that both say "freehold townhouse" can differ by close to $2,000 a year. Ask before you write the offer. This is an Ontario structure many buyers have never encountered.

Half your condo fee is charged against your mortgage approval

This is the part that catches people who shopped by monthly cost alone. When a lender runs the GDS ratio, it adds 50 percent of the condo fee to your housing costs at the qualifying rate. Every $100 a month of fee therefore consumes about $8,370 of borrowing power on a 30-year amortization at a 6.04 percent qualifying rate.

In practice: a $900 fee instead of a $400 fee costs you roughly $42,000 of mortgage before you have negotiated a single dollar of price. A high-fee unit is not just more expensive to live in, it shrinks the range of homes you can be approved for. The mechanics are in the stress test, GDS and TDS guide, and you can watch the effect live by changing the fee in the Doorstone calculator.

Property tax, and why the posted rate misleads

GTA property tax rates sit around 0.68 percent, but that applies to the value assessed by MPAC, the provincial assessment agency, and Ontario assessments are still frozen at 2016 values. The bill you actually receive therefore lands closer to 0.35-0.45 percent of what you paid today: roughly $190-$244 a month on a $650,000 purchase, not the $370 the posted rate suggests. Rates vary meaningfully between GTA municipalities, so check the specific city, and note the assessment freeze will not last forever.

The costs nobody mentions at the showing

• Rental hot water tank. Common in Ontario resales at roughly $40 a month, on a contract that follows the property rather than the seller. That is nearly $500 a year, indefinitely. Require the seller to buy it out before closing, as a term of your offer.
• Selling costs, your problem later. Selling in Ontario runs about 5.5 percent of the price all in (roughly 5 percent commission, HST on it, plus legal), around $36,000 on a $650,000 home. If you might move within a few years, count it now.
• Where the market sits. As of mid-2026, GTA condo apartments are down about 9.4 percent year over year and still softening, with roughly two years of unsold inventory. Condo townhouses are firmest at about -0.9 percent, freehold townhouses about -5.5 percent, detached about -2 percent GTA-wide though flat to positive in Halton. Further out, GTA condo completions fall from roughly 22,000 units in 2026 toward about 2,000 by 2030, a tight future supply against a soft present.

Running cost is half the affordability question. The other half is the cash you need on closing day, covered in cash to close in Ontario, and the two together set your budget: see how much house you can afford in the GTA.