Last month, the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation released its latest market rental report, which showed Ottawa’s vacancy rates had risen moderately, up to three per cent in 2025 from 2.6 per cent last year.
So what does that mean for renters?
Despite this slight easing in the rental market, affordability in Ottawa’s rental market remains an issue. Over the last year, the average rent for a two-bedroom apartment in Ottawa went up by 3.4 per cent and sits at $1,926, according to the CMHC’s latest numbers.
The latest Canadian Rent Report from online rental service Zumper, which aggregates rental data from hundreds of thousands of current listings to calculate median rents, paints a similar picture.
Overall, its report finds that Ottawa rents are flat or modestly lower for one and two-bedroom units year-over-year, according to report author Crystal Chen.
“This cooling aligns with a notable increase in available supply, as our active listing count in the market rose about 30 per cent between December 2024 and December 2025,” said Chen, via email.
The data from rental companies and current listings can sometimes offer a different picture of current rental trends, as it is focused only on units presently for rent, rather than including data on long-term rental units.
The Ottawa Lookout spoke with Francis Cortellino, a senior economist at CMHC, to learn more about the current situation for renters in Ottawa.
Note: This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Julie Chadwick, Ottawa Lookout: Can you talk about the significance of the current vacancy rate in the Ottawa area?
Francis Cortellino, CMHC: If you go back a bit, in 2024, the 2.6 per cent was also an increase, and 2023 was 2.1 per cent, so the market has been softening in the Ottawa region. So basically, what's happening is that there's a lot of new supply coming to the market, a lot of new rental completions.
At the same time, the rental demand is a bit weaker. One of the reasons is mostly the slower population growth, because international migration is decreasing in Ontario, and in Ottawa as well, so the rental demand is a bit weaker. There's a lot of new supply coming to the market. So this is why we had this increase in the vacant rate in the last two years.
Ottawa Lookout: When you talk about migration decreasing, what does that mean for Ottawa and Ontario in general?
Cortellino: The latest numbers that we got are the provincial numbers for Ontario. To give you an example, if you look at the number of people coming from abroad, the international net migration to Ontario in January to September of 2024 was almost 300,000 people. And some of those people would go to Ottawa. If you look at the January to September 2025 numbers, it's actually minus 70,000 people.
There are more people leaving to go abroad than people coming into Ontario. Most of these people who were coming from abroad are permanent immigrants, but also international students, temporary workers from abroad, and they will be mostly renters when they arrive for their first year in Ontario or in Ottawa.
When you have this huge decrease in international migration, it's going to have an impact on the market. At the same time, in 2025 we had a record number of new rental units arriving to the market. In our last survey, it was close to 5,000 new units that were added to the rental market in Ottawa.
Just to give you a quick comparison, 10 to 15 years ago, it was 400 units per year. Once again, there's a huge difference between 400 units coming to the market every year, and now it's close to 5,000 new rental units. So you have a lot of supply, a weaker demand. And this is the perfect recipe, basically, to have an increase in the vacancy rate.
Ottawa Lookout: There were also some specific neighbourhoods that had noticeable changes to their vacancy rate. Can you speak to that?
Cortellino: If you look in the neighbourhood of Sandy Hill in Ottawa, where the University of Ottawa is, the vacancy rate went from two per cent to 3.3 per cent, once again, showing that probably there are fewer international students in the area right now, and that caused an increase.
I would say there's a lot of competition among developers right now to attract and keep their tenants. There are a lot of incentives on the market right now; a lot will give maybe one month of free rent, or two months of parking without any charge. People can move around from one structure to another to add those incentives. That can explain that in some neighbourhoods where there was a lot of supply coming, sometimes it adds an increase in the vacancy rate. The market is, I will say, different than a few years ago.
Ottawa Lookout: I’ve heard about these incentives, but also that there is a general overall reluctance to decrease rents, especially among corporate landlords. Do you see any numbers on that or have thoughts on it?
Cortellino: We don’t have numbers on that, but one of the reasons why they prefer to offer incentives — and we see the same thing in Quebec — is that if you decrease the rent and somebody wants to buy your building, the value of your building probably will be lower because the rents are lower in your building. So you don't want to decrease the value of your building with lower rents. You're going to give, maybe for a year or two, some incentives, and after that, you can keep those rents at the level you wanted, and then start to increase them again.
Also, if tenants and landlords need to go to the Landlord and Tenant Board, they're going to look at the rent and at the increase that should be on that apartment. The landlord will want to keep, I would say, a certain level of rent when they need to challenge their rent increase. There are a lot of regulations and market reasons why landlords would prefer to offer incentives rather than decrease the rent.
Ottawa Lookout: I saw in the rental market report that, despite the higher vacancy rate, affordability had worsened in Ottawa when looking specifically at the ratio of rent to income. Can you explain that?
Cortellino: Basically, rents have been increasing the last few years at a faster pace than income. Rent growth is starting to slow down now because there are more apartments available, so we're starting to see rent growth slow down.
But if you look at the past few years, the rent growth was quite high, faster than the income growth.
We're doing our forecast right now for 2026 and 2027, so we're going to do a forecast on vacancy rates and rent growth. Maybe that income growth will be able to catch up eventually, but for the last few years, it’s been a bit more difficult on the affordability side in the Ottawa rental market, for sure.
Ottawa Lookout: The vacancy rates for affordable and what are sometimes called “shelter rate” units still seem to be pretty low in Ottawa.
Cortellino: If we look at the units under $1,100 per month, the vacancy rate is 0.8 per cent. You can see that there aren't a lot of options available under $1,000 per month.
If you go to rent between $1,100 per month to $1,700 per month, vacancy is 1.5 per cent, still below the average of three per cent for the old market. Once again, not a lot of options available.
If you go to $1,700 per month to $2,400 per month, the vacancy rate is 3.4 per cent, and finally if you go to units above $2,400, it's around seven per cent. A lot of those are newer construction as well, recently built units. So, you can see that when you go into those more expensive apartments, you can have more options on the market.
Ottawa Lookout: So there's a difference between the newer builds and the older builds in terms of vacancy rate?
Cortellino: When you have recently built apartments and the average rent is maybe $2,000 or $2,500 per month, not every renter can pay this kind of money. This is why you're going to have a bit more availability.
At the same time, there's so many rental units coming on the market in the last few years, there's a lot of competition among developers and landlords to attract those tenants and also keep them in their building, because they know that if they put in a rent increase, that tenant can move to the other buildings two blocks away, or is going to have more incentives.
There are a lot of options available at the moment, and this is why we are seeing that vacancies are quite high — because tenants have a lot of options, and also because of the cost of those units. Not everyone can pay those kinds of rents every month.
Ottawa Lookout: So even if it’s expensive supply coming onto the market, can that still affect the overall vacancy rates for all renters?
Cortellino: Yeah, but to bring more supply on the market is a step in the right direction, because let's imagine, in the last two years, that no rental units were being built in Ottawa, and we had this important population growth in Ottawa. You would have a lot of people looking for the same apartment.
Even if the vacancy rate is six or seven per cent in those more expensive buildings, they're still maybe 92 per cent occupied, so there's a lot of families and households living in them, maybe not as much as the older structures, but still a lot of people. And if those structures didn't exist, you would have all those families and households looking for the same apartments that everybody else on the market is.
Putting more supply on the market at least removes a bit of that pressure. At the same time, we also need to take into account that there are some households that won't have the money to pay those kind of rents, and we need to find affordable options for them.
Ottawa Lookout: I noticed in the Gatineau/Hull region, there were some unusual things going on, where new units had a 10 per cent vacancy rate, and then the rent growth for two bedrooms had doubled? What’s going on there?
Cortellino: It's a bit of the same thing for Ottawa and Gatineau, there's a lot of availability in the recently-built rental units. As for the rent, this is something that we saw everywhere in the province of Quebec.
In B.C. and Ontario, when the tenant stays in the apartment, there is a cap on the rent increase that the government allows if their tenants stay there. In Quebec, the system is a bit different. The tenant and landlord housing board will give a recommendation on the rent increase based on a lot of different elements.
This year, they're going to use a new formula, a simpler one. Last year was a record increase with a recommendation of six per cent, and most landlords used that six per cent knowing that tenants wouldn't be able to challenge it, and also that probably most tenants wouldn't move out of the apartment.
For example, I talked to a landlord who's got structures in Gatineau and Ottawa, and the structures are maybe 15 kilometres away from one another, so pretty close. He told me that in Ontario and Ottawa, the rent increase set for tenants who stay in the apartment was 2.5 per cent, which was the cap allowed by the Ontario government. But the same landlord put that six per cent increase in the structures in Gatineau because it was okay to do so.
Ottawa Lookout: Was there anything about the report or the data that stuck out for you?
Cortellino: We were talking to developers and consultants in Ottawa and also in Quebec, and a lot of people were telling us that for new rental structures, it was a bit harder to attract tenants. So we were expecting vacancy rates to be quite important for those new rental units, and when we saw those numbers, I think that showed how much more difficult the market is now than it was four or five years ago for those new rental structures.
This is something that we had a lot of anecdotes about what was going on, but when we saw the numbers, it just confirmed what we had been hearing in the last few weeks and months.
