Property Tax Increase 2026 by Province (and City) in Canada: Where Rates Climbed Most

Before any narrative, here is the year in one place. The table below covers the major cities where 2026 budgets are set, ordered from the steepest increase down to the cities that held or cut their rate, with the headline figure and, wherever a municipality published it, the rough dollar impact on an average home. The figures reflect 2026 municipal budgets approved by each council and the relevant provincial 2026–27 budgets as of publication; a few smaller details were still being finalized at the time of writing where noted.

One thing to hold in your head as you read it: there are really three different numbers hiding inside "your increase." There is the rate change your city announces, the all-in bill change that can also include regional, education, and utility charges, and the assessment change on your specific home. Most of the confusion homeowners feel comes from treating those three as one. If you want the full mechanics of how a bill is built and what each layer pays for, our companion explainer on why property taxes are climbing across Canada walks through it in detail. Here, the focus is simpler: what is your number, and where does it sit nationally?

*Regina's $38.70/month figure combines property tax, utility, and library-levy increases for the average household, and the increase takes effect in June 2026.

Here is the piece most coverage skips, and it is the key to understanding why your bill can rise even when your city behaves itself. Your municipality sets one part of your property tax. Your province sets another part, collects it through the very same bill, and gets very little of the blame when it goes up.

The clearest example in 2026 is Alberta. The education property tax — the portion of your bill that funds the K–12 school system rather than your city's services — is set by the province and simply collected by your municipality. For 2026–27, the Government of Alberta raised that education requisition from $3.1 billion to $3.6 billion, a jump of about 19.8%, with residential and farmland education rates set at $2.84 per $1,000 of equalized assessment. That single provincial decision is why Calgary's all-in increase reached 8.1% even though the city's own portion barely moved. We will come back to Calgary below, but the lesson is national: when your bill jumps, your city council may not be the one who moved it.

Provinces shape your bill in quieter ways too. In New Brunswick, the province legislated a one-year freeze on the assessed values used for 2026 tax bills, holding most taxable assessments at their 2025 level while it works on a longer tax-system reform. The Government of New Brunswick framed it as temporary relief, and it is the reason a city like Saint John could actually lower its rate this year. In Quebec, the opposite pressure is at work: cities periodically file a new assessment roll — a fresh valuation of every property — and Montreal's latest roll lifted average values by about 12.2%, which pushes bills upward regardless of what the tax rate does.

In British Columbia, the province levies a school tax inside your bill and runs a property tax deferral program whose interest terms are changing in 2026, something the Province of British Columbia flagged in its tax-change summaries. Ontario, by contrast, has held its provincially set education rate flat for years, which is one reason Ontario's 2026 increases are driven almost entirely by municipal budgets.

The West holds both ends of the 2026 spectrum, which makes it the best illustration of how little the word "increase" means on its own.

In British Columbia, Vancouver is the headline. The City of Vancouver built its 2026 operating budget on a 0% property tax increase for homeowners — a genuine rate freeze. The catch is in the fine print: combined utility fees for water, sewer, and solid waste are set to rise 4.2%, so the bill is not as frozen as the headline suggests. Nearby, Surrey approved a 2.6% general increase, adding roughly $75 to the average single-family bill, while Burnaby layered a 2.9% services increase together with a separate 1.9% growth infrastructure levy for a combined increase of about 4.8%. Three neighbouring cities, three very different answers.

Alberta is where the provincial layer does its heavy lifting. In Calgary, the typical single-family home with a median assessment around $706,000 saw an overall property tax increase of roughly 8.1%, or about $390 a year — but the City of Calgary attributes the lion's share of that, around $338, to the provincial education portion rather than to city spending.

We covered the full breakdown when Calgary finalized its 8.1% increase, and it remains the cleanest case study in the country of a modest municipal increase wrapped inside a large provincial one. Edmonton approved a 6.9% increase for the final year of its four-year budget cycle, which works out to roughly $53 more for every $100,000 of assessed home value.

The Prairies hold the year's outlier. Regina passed a 10.9% mill-rate increase — the largest in the city's history — in a narrow council vote, paired with a 7.82% utility rate increase. The City of Regina estimates the combined effect of taxes, utilities, and the library levy at about $38.70 a month for the average household, with the change taking effect in June 2026. "Mill rate," by the way, is simply the rate applied per $1,000 of assessed value, the lever a city pulls when it needs more revenue. Saskatoon raised taxes about 6.7%, a reminder that even within one province the spread is wide. And in Manitoba, Winnipeg landed at 3.5%, a modest-looking figure that still matters given the city operates on one of the lowest per-capita municipal revenue bases of any major Canadian city.