Analysis
Why moving in Vancouver costs more than you think
British Columbia caps rent increases for sitting tenants and does not cap the rent charged to the next one. This analysis measures the resulting gap, when it opened, who bears it, and what the published evidence does and does not support.
The short version
- The province caps how much rent can rise during a tenancy. It sets no limit on what a landlord may ask a new tenant.
- Every unit has two prices, and the distance between them is what makes moving expensive.
- CMHC measures that distance. In October 2025 a Vancouver two-bedroom that turned over rented for about 23.6% more than one with a sitting tenant.
- The gap is not charged to anyone. It is a discount attached to a tenancy, and it ends when the tenancy does.
- The province examined this arrangement in 2018 and kept it. New York removed its equivalent in 2019.
Recap: the mechanism in brief
If you have watched the companion video, this is a refresher and you can move to the findings. If you have arrived here cold, this is what you need before the analysis begins.
Rent in British Columbia behaves like an airline fare. Two people in identical seats on the same flight can have paid very different amounts, and what explains most of the difference is when they booked. Housing works the same way, with one difference that matters: a flight ends in a few hours.
Two units on the same hallway, same layout, same building. One tenant signed in 2018, the other last spring. They pay very different rent, and no rule has been broken.
That happens because two separate rules govern two separate moments.
While a tenancy continues, the landlord may raise the rent once every twelve months, with three full months of written notice, by no more than a limit the province publishes each year. For 2026 that limit is 2.3% (Residential Tenancy Branch, "Rent increases"; BC Ministry of Housing 2025). Disputing a breach costs the tenant nothing.
When a tenancy ends, the rent for the next tenant is negotiated freely (Residential Tenancy Branch, "Rent"). Not the old rent plus the annual limit. A new number, set against whatever the market will bear that month.
So the protection attaches to the tenant, not the apartment.
A long-tenured tenant builds up a growing distance between what they pay and what their unit would rent for today. That distance cannot be sold, borrowed against, transferred, or carried to a new address. It exists while they stay, and it disappears in full on the day they leave.
The common name for this is vacancy decontrol. What follows measures it.
1. The mechanism has no name in the law that creates it
British Columbia's statutes contain no provision saying that rent resets when a tenant changes. There is no section to cite. That is much of why the arrangement is poorly understood: you cannot find it by searching for it.
It is instead the product of two rules that never reference each other.
Rule one, on increases within a tenancy. The Residential Tenancy Branch states that the annual limit applies to existing tenants, that rent may rise once every twelve months with three full months of notice, and that the twelve month clock runs from the point at which "rent was set at the beginning of a tenancy" or from the last lawful increase.
Rule two, on how rent is first set. Before a tenancy begins, the landlord and tenant negotiate the rent amount. No ceiling applies to that negotiation, and nothing ties the figure to what the unit rented for before.
Read separately, the first rule describes ordinary rent control and the second describes an ordinary market transaction. Read together, they produce a cap that binds to a tenancy, not to a dwelling, and tenancies end.
Two consequences follow. Any claim about vacancy decontrol in British Columbia has to be built from two sources. And any proposal to change it is an amendment to the second rule, not the first.
2. What the data shows
Four findings follow. Each gives the evidence, how it was derived, and what it does not establish. All figures describe the Vancouver CMA purpose-built rental market unless stated, and all were verified against source on 2026-08-03.
- 2.1
- The divergence between capped and market rents opened in three years, not gradually.
- 2.2
- A turnover unit rented for 23.6% more than a sitting-tenant one.
- 2.3
- Turnover accounted for about 2.0 of the 2.2 points of recent rent growth.
- 2.4
- Length of tenancy turns out to be a weak predictor of how large a gap is.
2.1 The divergence between capped and market rents opened in three years
About 14.4 percentage points of divergence built up between capped and market rents over 2021 to 2025. Roughly 92% of it arrived in 2021, 2022 and 2023.
Evidence
CMHC publishes rent growth for a fixed sample of continuing buildings, which reads fairly on what happened to existing stock (CMHC 2021 to 2024; CMHC 2025a). The Residential Tenancy Branch publishes the maximum allowable increase for each calendar year.
Method
Growth figures come from each year's own CMHC edition, not back-derived from the latest. Allowable increases come from the Branch's published history.
Limitations
Fixed-sample growth is measured over the year ending each October. The allowable increase is set on a calendar year. The two windows overlap without lining up, so the pattern holds but the individual decimals do not. The table also describes the average continuing building, not any particular tenancy.
A note on the 2025 pair
The last pair reverses. The allowable increase ran ahead of market growth, so a sitting tenant gained no ground and lost a little. One observation is not a trend, and it is treated here as a single data point. Section 6 returns to it.
2.2 Turnover units rented for 23.6% more than sitting-tenant units
In October 2025 a Vancouver two-bedroom that had turned over rented for about 23.6% more than one with a sitting tenant. At the October 2024 peak the figure was 27.9% (CMHC 2025a, Table 6.2).
Evidence
CMHC's Rental Market Survey records whether a unit's tenant is new, which allows a like-for-like comparison inside the same market and the same reference month.
CMHC grades the figure 'b' for reliability, on a scale running from 'a' (excellent) to 'd' (poor), where 'b' means very good. A source that grades its own output this way is useful, and most published commentary on Vancouver rent does not offer it.
Method, and a distinction that matters
Table 6.2 reports a percentage difference between turnover and non-turnover units. Table 6.0 separately reports average dollar rents for each group, $2,883 against $2,696 for two-bedrooms in the same survey.
These measure different things over overlapping populations. The 7% difference implied by the dollar figures is not a rival estimate of the premium: those averages mix unit types and submarkets that the like-for-like comparison holds constant. This analysis uses Table 6.2 for the premium, and cites Table 6.0 only where the dollar figures are themselves the subject.
Limitations
The figure is a regional average and is not a valuation of any single unit. It covers purpose-built rental only.
2.3 Turnover accounted for almost all recent rent growth
Two-bedroom rents rose 2.2 percentage points between October 2024 and October 2025. CMHC attributes about 2.0 of those points to units that turned over (CMHC 2025a, Tables 6.0 and 6.1).
Interpretation
Rent control governs increases inside a tenancy. In the year measured, that channel produced roughly 0.2 of the 2.2 points. The rest happened at the moment of tenant change, where no cap applies.
So the rise in what Vancouver two-bedrooms cost was, in this period, mostly a turnover effect and not a within-tenancy one.
For scale, the average purpose-built two-bedroom rose from $1,792 in October 2020 to $2,363 in October 2025, about 32% over five years (CMHC 2025a, Table 1.0).
Limitations
This is a single-year decomposition and should not be extrapolated. The attribution is CMHC's own and is not independently reproduced here.
2.4 Length of tenancy is a weak predictor of gap size
The allowable increase averaged 3.53% a year across 2003 to 2018, and 2.17% a year across 2019 to 2026. A tenant of twenty years has climbed a steeper schedule than a tenant of six.
Interpretation
The intuition that the longest-tenured tenant holds the largest gap does not follow from the data. Gap size depends mostly on whether a tenancy spanned the 2021 to 2023 divergence in 2.1, and only secondarily on how long it has run.
A tenancy starting in 2019 and one starting in 2006 can sit the same distance from market for different reasons.
Limitations
This describes the maximum permitted path. A landlord who skipped the full increase in some years leaves a wider gap than the schedule implies, and the survey gives no basis for estimating how often that happens.
3. What the gap costs a tenant
This section speaks to the reader directly, because the arithmetic is personal and the point of it is to be used.
People usually price a move by adding up its visible parts: a truck, a damage deposit paid before the old one comes back, a day off work. That total lands somewhere in the high hundreds.
It is the wrong quantity. The cost of moving is the gap, paid monthly, for as long as the next tenancy lasts.
Say you pay $1,900 for a two-bedroom. The Vancouver average in October 2025 was $2,363 (CMHC 2025a, Table 1.0).
That keeps running until either the market falls back to meet you or you stop renting. The truck is a rounding error against it.
Two things about this cost are worth stating plainly.
Nobody charges it. No bill is issued and no penalty is imposed. You simply stop being a person who signed in 2019 and become a person signing in 2026, and the market prices the second person differently.
You cannot get at it. The discount cannot be sold, borrowed against, assigned, or moved to another address. The only way to reach its value is to destroy it.
How often the reset happens. The premium is the size of the event. CMHC publishes its frequency separately: 11.6% of Vancouver purpose-built units turned over in the year to October 2025, up from 9.1% (CMHC 2025a, Table 1.0).
Those two figures together describe the system's throughput. The premium sets how large each reset is, the turnover rate sets how often one happens, and their product is the rate at which accumulated tenant discounts become higher market rents.
4. Consequence one: reduced mobility
Rent rules that make staying financially valuable reduce tenant mobility. The best-identified estimate of that effect is about 20%, from San Francisco.
Evidence
In 1994 San Francisco extended rent control to small multi-family buildings built before 1980 and left newer ones uncovered. Diamond, McQuade and Qian (2019) used that boundary to compare otherwise similar tenants separated only by the rule, and published the result in the American Economic Review.
This number does not transfer to British Columbia
The study looks at a rent control expansion, not vacancy decontrol, in a different city, under different law, in a different decade. The 20% is a San Francisco result. Anyone citing it as a British Columbia statistic is misusing it, including if they take it from here.
What does transfer
Where the law makes staying financially valuable, tenants stay longer than they otherwise would, including in homes that no longer suit them. That direction of effect is well identified and has turned up in several settings.
An argument, not a measurement
Vancouver's incentive may be stronger than the one Diamond and colleagues studied, because the local gap is created by turnover pricing and not just preserved by tenure. That is a plausible reading of the mechanism. It is not a measured result, and no equivalent natural experiment exists for British Columbia.
5. Consequence two: the distribution of eviction
The mechanism has a second consequence, and it follows from the landlord's side of the same arithmetic. If a sitting tenant's rent is capped and a new tenant's is not, the revenue a unit can produce depends partly on who lives in it.
A recently signed tenant sits near market. A long-tenured one represents a gap that cannot be collected while they stay.
So tenure and removal value move together. This is not a claim about how landlords behave, and most act on no such calculation. An incentive does not need universal adoption to shape a market. It needs enough adoption to show up in aggregate data, and that is measurable.
Evidence
Jones and Xuereb (2023), at the University of British Columbia's Balanced Supply of Housing, analysed Statistics Canada's 2021 Canadian Housing Survey, covering about 41,000 tenants. Between April 2016 and early 2021, 10.5% of British Columbia renter households reported being forced to move by their landlord, against 5.9% nationally. That is nearly twice the national rate, and the highest in the country.
The composition tells you more than the headline. Evictions split into at-fault, where the tenant's conduct is the stated cause, and no-fault, where the landlord wants the unit for sale, renovation, demolition or personal use.
British Columbia's at-fault rates look like everyone else's. The difference sits almost entirely in the other column: no-fault evictions are about 85% of British Columbia evictions against 65% nationally, or roughly 9% of renters against 4% (Wyton 2023).
Interpretation
The province where staying put builds the most value is also the province where tenants are most likely to be removed for reasons unrelated to their conduct. Both facts fit a single mechanism.
Limitations
These figures are self-reported. They record what tenants say happened, not what a tribunal found. Since most no-fault evictions are never adjudicated, self-report is close to the only instrument available, but the limitation is real and the numbers should be read with it in view.
Attributed commentary
Andy Yan, director of Simon Fraser University's City Program, described the effect to CBC as "a certain level of great precarity."
That talks to the type of hostile cities we are developing for those who want to set roots.
Andy Yan, SFU City Program, to CBC News
Craig Jones, who co-authored the UBC analysis and has been through two no-fault evictions himself, put it more simply: "having residential stability as a renter in B.C. is hard" (Wyton 2023). These are interpretations by named experts, offered as such.
One case, as illustration and not as data
Fiona Scott, a Vancouver travel writer, has been through three no-fault evictions in a decade. In 2022 she lost a Kitsilano apartment of seven years after the owner said he needed it for renovation. She now pays about $500 more a month. A year after the eviction she reported that the unit still looked empty (Wyton 2023).
A single account establishes nothing about the market. It is here because the figures above count several hundred thousand instances of the same event.
6. The 2025 reversal, and what it does not establish
The gap is the distance between two moving numbers, and in 2025 they moved toward each other.
Vancouver's purpose-built vacancy rate rose to 3.7% in October 2025 from 1.6% a year earlier, which CMHC calls the highest level since 1988 (CMHC 2025a, Table 1.0; CMHC 2025b). The turnover premium eased from 27.9% to 23.6% over the same period. And as 2.1 showed, the 2026 allowable increase ran ahead of fixed-sample market growth for the first time in the series.
What follows if the direction holds
A market where capped rents rise faster than market rents eventually flips the relationship this analysis describes. The sitting tenant becomes the one paying above market, and the accumulated discount becomes an accumulated penalty.
Why that is not a forecast
One year of easing shows a direction, not a trend. The 2025 observation is a single data point, the conditions behind it are not known to be stable, and CMHC's next survey will not appear until about December 2026. This analysis does not project an inversion, and the scenario tool below is labelled accordingly.
Two limitations bear on how this should be read
The easing has not reached everyone. Will Gladman of the Vancouver Tenants Union told Global News (2025) that tenants were "not seeing rents coming down on the ground," and that those in the greatest difficulty "are just not seeing the results." Softening concentrated in higher-priced stock does not help households already priced out of it, and the aggregate figures cannot tell the two cases apart.
Every headline figure here covers purpose-built rental. CMHC reports rented condominiums separately, and they behave differently: vacancy of 1.5% against 3.7%, and an average two-bedroom rent of $2,900 against $2,363 (CMHC 2025a, Tables 4.1 and 4.2). About 33.9% of Vancouver's rental stock is condominium.
A tenant renting from an individual condominium owner should expect these figures, and the calculators, to read optimistically for their situation.
7. Policy context: the arrangement was examined and kept
Vacancy decontrol is often discussed as though it were a structural feature of the rental market. The record does not support that.
In 2018 the province convened a Rental Housing Task Force and asked it, among other questions, whether rent control should attach to the unit instead of the tenant. The task force considered it and recommended against. Its Recommendation 10 is to "maintain rent tied to the renter, not the unit" (Rental Housing Task Force 2018).
The argument against vacancy control
If rent attaches permanently to a dwelling, the revenue that dwelling can produce is capped indefinitely, whatever happens to the owner's costs. The concern put to the task force was that capped rents would fall behind maintenance and improvement costs, and that deferred maintenance or withdrawal from the rental market would follow. This is a serious argument, it is held sincerely, and there is economic literature on both sides of it.
What the record establishes either way
The arrangement has an author, a date and a published rationale. It was examined directly and kept deliberately.
The comparison case
New York's Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, passed in 2019, ended vacancy decontrol and the automatic vacancy bonus for roughly a million rent-stabilized apartments, so the regulated rent now carries to the next tenant (New York City Rent Guidelines Board 2019).
| British Columbia | New York (since 2019) | |
|---|---|---|
| Increase during a tenancy | Capped, 2.3% for 2026 | Capped |
| Rent for the next tenant | Freely negotiated | Carries over, regulated |
| Where the protection sits | With the tenant | With the apartment |
| Reviewed | 2018, kept | 2019, removed |
Two qualifications. New York's rent stabilization system differs from British Columbia's in structure and history, so the reform is not directly portable. And its consequences are genuinely disputed: supporters point to the end of the reset, critics to reduced investment in stabilized stock, and the empirical work is younger than the argument. Treat any account that calls the outcome settled with caution.
What the comparison does establish is narrow and enough. Other places have looked at the same arrangement and chosen differently.
8. What to do with this
A closing note, in a different voice from the analysis above.
Nothing here lowers anyone's rent. No figure in this piece puts money back in an account, and an analysis that ended by implying otherwise would be lying to you.
What it offers is smaller, and I would argue still worth having.
You can price the decision instead of dreading it. Whether you can afford to move has a specific answer for your situation, and the three tools above will give it to you in about a minute. It may be smaller than you assume. If you signed recently, or the market has softened around your unit, it may be close to zero.
You can stop reading it as a personal failing. Staying somewhere that no longer fits is usually felt as a private failure of nerve or organisation. The arithmetic says otherwise. At a gap of several hundred dollars a month, staying is the correct answer, and a person who gets there has done the sum properly. The constraint is real, other people built it, and filing it under your own shortcomings is the one part of the arrangement that is genuinely optional.
And you can describe it accurately in public. Not as a campaign. But an arrangement with no name in the legislation, appearing in no single document, and landing its costs on individuals privately is unusually well protected from revision. Its durability owes less to its popularity than to the fact that almost nobody can describe it.
Which returns to where this started. Two passengers, identical seats, the same destination, very different fares, and what explains it is when each of them booked. Nobody can go back and book differently.
But there is a real difference between the passenger who does not know what the person beside them paid and the passenger who does. It is not the fare.
Read the fare. Then decide.
Appendix A. Methods and scope
Principal source. Nearly every figure comes from CMHC's Rental Market Survey, run each October and published in data tables around the following December. The 2025 edition, published 2025-12-11, is the most recent at the time of writing.
Annual, not continuous. The survey is a once-yearly observation. It suits questions about multi-year trajectories and does not describe this month's market. Figures dated October 2025 were true of October 2025.
Purpose-built unless stated. CMHC separates privately-initiated purpose-built rental apartments in structures of three or more units (Tables 1.0 and 6.x) from rented condominiums (Tables 4.x). Every headline figure here is purpose-built. About 33.9% of Vancouver's rental stock is condominium, and the two segments differ enough that combining them would mislead.
Reliability grades. CMHC grades published figures from 'a' (excellent) to 'd' (poor) by the statistical reliability of the sample. The turnover premium central to this analysis carries a 'b'. Grades are given where they matter.
Table 6.2 against Table 6.0. Table 6.2 gives the percentage by which turnover units exceed non-turnover units. Table 6.0 gives average dollar rents for each group. They are different measures over overlapping populations. Section 2.2 sets out why running them together understates the premium.
Allowable increase history. Taken from the Residential Tenancy Branch's published table, re-read 2026-08-03, and presented here in this analysis's own arrangement, not reproduced as published.
Figures. Both charts are generated from the same values cited in the text, by
tool/_gen_article_figures.py, so the picture cannot drift from the prose.
Out of scope. Basement suites and other unregistered rentals, which the survey does not reach. Purpose-built stock outside the Vancouver CMA. Non-market, co-operative and subsidised housing, which run under separate rules. Individual buildings, since every figure here is a regional average and no average values a specific unit.
Multi-year comparisons. Where several survey editions are used, figures come from each year's own publication, not back-derived. The fixed-sample growth series compares continuing buildings only, which is why it differs from a year-over-year change in the headline average.
Appendix B. References
BC Ministry of Housing and Municipal Affairs. 2025. "Rent increase cap for 2026 set at 2.3 per cent." BC Gov News release 2025HMA0067, August 26. https://news.gov.bc.ca/releases/2025HMA0067-000786
CMHC. 2021 to 2024. Rental Market Survey data tables, editions 2021 to 2024. Ottawa: Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/professionals/housing-markets-data-and-research/housing-data/data-tables/rental-market/rental-market-report-data-tables
CMHC. 2025a. Rental Market Survey data tables, October 2025. Ottawa: Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, published December 11, 2025. Tables 1.0, 4.1, 4.2, 6.0, 6.1, 6.2. https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/professionals/housing-markets-data-and-research/housing-data/data-tables/rental-market/rental-market-report-data-tables
CMHC. 2025b. Rental Market Report 2025. Ottawa: Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. https://www.cmhc-schl.gc.ca/professionals/housing-markets-data-and-research/market-reports/rental-market-reports-major-centres
Diamond, Rebecca, Tim McQuade, and Franklin Qian. 2019. "The Effects of Rent Control Expansion on Tenants, Landlords, and Inequality: Evidence from San Francisco." American Economic Review 109 (9): 3365 to 3394. https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20181289
Global News. 2025. "Vancouver rent report shows rates coming down." July 8. https://globalnews.ca/news/11280478/vancouver-rent-report-rates-coming-down/
Jones, Craig, and Silas Xuereb. 2023. Estimating No-Fault Evictions in Canada (CHS 2021). Vancouver: Balanced Supply of Housing, University of British Columbia. https://bsh.ubc.ca/research/estimating-no-fault-evictions/
New York City Rent Guidelines Board. 2019. Rent Laws of 2019: Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act. https://rentguidelinesboard.cityofnewyork.us/resources/rent-regulation-laws/rent-laws-of-2019/
Rental Housing Task Force. 2018. Recommendations and What We Heard Report. Victoria: Province of British Columbia, December. Recommendation 10. https://engage.gov.bc.ca/app/uploads/sites/121/2018/12/RHTF-Recommendations-and-WWH-Report_Dec2018_FINAL.pdf
Residential Tenancy Branch. "Rent." Victoria: Province of British Columbia. https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/housing-tenancy/residential-tenancies/rent-rtb
Residential Tenancy Branch. "Rent increases." Victoria: Province of British Columbia, updated March 4, 2026. https://www2.gov.bc.ca/gov/content/housing-tenancy/residential-tenancies/rent-rtb/rent-increases
Wyton, Moira. 2023. "More B.C. tenants are evicted through no fault of their own than anywhere else in Canada, report says." CBC News, May 14. https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/ubc-no-fault-eviction-study-2023-1.6843456
Source notice. Source: Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation (CMHC), Rental Market Survey, October 2025. This information is reproduced and distributed on an "as is" basis with the permission of CMHC.
Residential Tenancy Branch material is cited and linked, and presented in this analysis's own arrangement. Nothing here is legal advice.
Cite this article
Appendix C. Changelog
This page is dated and will be updated rather than silently corrected. Anything cited from it can be pinned to an entry below.
- 2026-08-04. First publication. All figures verified against source on 2026-08-03. CMHC data is the October 2025 survey. The allowable increase is the 2026 limit of 2.3%, confirmed current against the Residential Tenancy Branch page on that date.
Known to be superseded. The 2027 allowable increase is expected in late August 2026, and the October 2026 Rental Market Survey around December 2026, which will move vacancy, average rent, turnover and the premium. Both will be recorded here rather than replacing the figures above, so a citation of this page keeps referring to something specific.