A million mortgages renew this year. Yours might be one.

There is a particular kind of letter that lands about four months before your mortgage term ends. It is polite, it has a number on it, and it is designed to be signed without a phone call. For about a million Canadian households this year, that letter is coming.

The coverage around it tends to swing between two unhelpful poles — either a crisis is upon us, or everything is fine. The actual data sits in between, and it is public, so let’s use it.

What the numbers actually say

CMHC reports that roughly 1.5 million households have already renewed into higher borrowing costs, with about another million due over the coming year. Put together, something close to 60% of every outstanding mortgage in the country sits inside this window.

What that means for a payment depends almost entirely on what you signed last time. Bank of Canada analysis found households on a five-year fixed term renewing across 2025 and 2026 could face an average increase of roughly 15–20% against their December 2024 payment.

But the same analysis found something people rarely mention: households on variable products with variable payments could see their payment fall by around 5–7%. This is not one wave hitting everyone equally. It is a sorting exercise, and which side you land on was largely decided years ago.

The quiet trap in the CMHC data

Here is the finding that should have led the coverage and didn’t.

Most mortgage renewing households chose to increase their amortization period to lower monthly payments.— CMHC, on how households responded to renewal

Extending amortization is the standard response, and it works exactly as advertised: the payment drops, immediately and visibly. It is also, quietly, the most expensive decision available in the room.

Stretching the remaining balance over more years means more years of paying interest on it. Do it once in a genuinely tight moment and it is a sensible piece of cash-flow management. Do it at every renewal because it is what gets offered when you say the payment feels high, and you can find yourself still carrying a mortgage well past the age you planned to be free of it.

The problem is not that it is a bad tool. It is that it usually gets used by default rather than chosen deliberately, and nobody at the other end of the phone is incentivised to walk you through what it costs over twenty years.

Who is actually under strain

Arrears are rising nationally — CMHC recorded an increase of seven basis points between the third quarter of 2023 and the third quarter of 2025. That is real, and it is also small. Canadian arrears remain historically low.

The strain is concentrated rather than general. Toronto is the clearest case: arrears there are projected to reach 0.340% by the end of 2026, against 0.095% in late 2023. CMHC attributes that to a combination of high household debt, small-scale investors carrying negative cash flow as rents soften, falling prices reducing the option to sell quickly, and a weaker labour market than other major centres.

Vancouver is rising more slowly. Montreal is stable. Calgary is moderate, Edmonton more exposed. Ottawa, Winnipeg and Halifax show smaller increases.

If you are in Waterloo Region, London or southwestern Ontario, you are not in the eye of this. That is not a reason to ignore your renewal — it is a reason to approach it as a planning exercise rather than an emergency.

What to actually do, 120 days out

Four months before your term ends, most lenders will hold an offer open for you. That gives you a floor to measure everything else against, at no cost and with no commitment.

• Get your own numbers first. Your balance, your remaining amortization, your renewal date. Not estimates — the actual figures from your statement.
• Model the payment before it arrives. Running it yourself removes the surprise, and a surprise is what makes people sign things quickly.
• Treat the letter as an opening position. Your lender’s retention desk has discretion. What they open with and what they will do are frequently not the same number.
• Price the alternative before you decide. At renewal there is no prepayment charge for leaving, because your term has ended. You do have to requalify elsewhere, including the stress test — but knowing what else exists costs you nothing.
• Decide on amortization deliberately. If you extend, do it because you chose to, having seen what it costs over the full term. Not because it was the fastest way to make the payment look manageable.
• Check your credit early. Checking your own file is a soft inquiry and changes nothing. If something needs correcting, you want to find it now rather than three weeks before closing.

The bottom line

A renewal is the one moment in a mortgage where you have leverage and no exit cost. The term has ended, the penalty for leaving is gone, and every lender in the country is willing to talk to you. It is genuinely the best negotiating position you will ever be in on this debt.

Most people spend that moment signing a letter. That is the actual story in the data — not the payment increases, which are manageable for most households, but how many people take the first offer without ever finding out what the second one was.