More Homeowners Are Feeling Mortgage Payment Stress, StatCan Finds

What the New Survey Actually Found

If your mortgage payment has felt heavier than you expected, the newest national data say you are far from alone. According to Statistics Canada's 2024 Canadian Housing Survey — a joint project with Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), reported by Canadian Mortgage Trends on September 21, 2026 — more than one in three mortgage holders, 36.2%, said higher mortgage payments had caused them financial difficulty over the previous twelve months. That is up sharply from 28.3% just two years earlier, in 2022.

Statistics Canada's own analysis, published the same week, found a related but distinct figure: 26.1% of homeowners with a mortgage were living in what the agency calls unaffordable housing in 2024, up from 23.6% in 2022. Unaffordable is a specific, before-tax threshold — shelter costs consuming 30% or more of household income — not a subjective read on how expensive things feel.

Across all Canadian households, not just mortgage holders, 23.2% were living in unaffordable housing in 2024, up from 22.0% in 2022. Statistics Canada was direct about where that increase came from: homeowners with mortgages drove it. Unaffordability among private-market renters did not move at all over the same two years.

Recent First-Time Buyers Feel It Most, With One Important Exception

The strain is not spread evenly. Among households that bought their first home between 2019 and 2023, 27.4% were living in unaffordable housing in 2024, and 34.1% reported financial difficulty from higher mortgage payments — more than double the 16.4% recorded among recent first-time buyers surveyed back in 2018. Their satisfaction with affordability fell just as fast: 33.1% said they were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied in 2024, compared with 13.4% in 2018.

A separate CMHC analysis of the same survey adds context that is easy to miss in the headline numbers. Despite reporting more financial difficulty, recent first-time buyers remain relatively unlikely to fall into what CMHC calls core housing need — a broader measure than the 30% threshold that also weighs whether a home is adequate, suitably sized, and whether a household could afford a suitable alternative nearby. Just 4.6% of first-time buyers fell into that category in 2024, compared with 6.0% of other homeowners and 22.1% of renters.

Why This Reads Like a Renewal Story, Not a Purchase-Day Story

The most useful line in Statistics Canada's release is almost a footnote: fixed mortgages coming due for renewal in 2025 were, in large part, originally signed when the Bank of Canada's policy setting sat at or below 1%. Most of the households showing up in this survey did not overextend themselves on the day they bought. The ground moved later, at renewal, when their payment reset against a much higher cost of borrowing than the one they locked in years earlier.

That distinction matters for how you read your own situation. Homeowners without a mortgage and renters in the private market were not the ones driving the affordability decline between 2022 and 2024 — mortgage holders were, specifically. Homeowners with a mortgage also posted the sharpest rise in dissatisfaction of any group measured, climbing to 28.2%, nearly matching the 28.9% reported by private-market renters, a group that has historically reported more dissatisfaction than owners. Higher borrowing costs are likely to keep shaping how mortgage holders feel about affordability in the years ahead, as Statistics Canada noted, as more pandemic-era mortgages work their way through to renewal.

If You're Feeling This, the Data Say You're Not Imagining It

It is easy to treat a stressful renewal as a personal budgeting failure. This survey is a useful corrective: more than a third of mortgage holders nationally reported the same thing you might be feeling right now, and the share has grown by nearly eight percentage points in two years. That is a structural shift in what payments cost relative to what households earn, not a story about any one household managing badly.

It is also not a reason to assume nothing can be done. A renewal offer from your current lender is exactly that — an offer, not a verdict. It is generated automatically, priced for the lender's convenience, and rarely reflects a comparison against what else is available or what restructuring your amortization or term could do to the payment. This survey largely measures what happened to households that waited for that offer and accepted what it said.

What Actually Helps Before Your Renewal Date

The single biggest lever is timing: start the review well before your renewal date arrives, not the week the letter does. A short runway leaves you accepting whatever number shows up in the mail, with little time to compare it against anything else.

• Know your options, not just your renewal offer. Staying with your current lender, switching to a new one, or restructuring your term or amortization are three different paths with different costs and different paperwork, and staying put is sometimes the right call even when another lender's number looks better on paper.
• Model the real payment before you decide. Our calculators include a payment tab and a Break or Stay comparison, built on the same Canadian semi-annual compounding math a lender actually uses.
• Understand what switching actually triggers. Renewing with your existing lender does not re-run the qualifying stress test. Switching lenders is treated as a new application, and it does — worth knowing before assuming the better-looking number is automatically the better deal.
• Get a second read on the numbers before you sign anything. A conversation before your renewal date leaves time to compare paths properly; one after you've already signed usually doesn't.