Vancouver Rental Market 2026: Asking Rents 14% Below the Peak, Vacancy the Highest on Record

The asking rent for a one-bedroom apartment in Metro Vancouver averaged $2,280 in the second quarter of 2026, according to Statistics Canada. At the peak, in Q3 2023, it was $2,640. That's 14% lower, a drop of $360 a month.

Two-bedroom asking rents are down even more, 15% from their peak. Vacancy in purpose-built rentals hit 3.7% in CMHC's last survey, the highest in its records back to 1990. And yet tenants who stayed put are paying more than ever: the average rent actually paid on a one-bedroom keeps going up.

So is Vancouver's rental market getting cheaper? For people moving, yes. For people staying, not really. Below is the data from CMHC, Statistics Canada and Rentals.ca, broken down by bedroom count, city and neighbourhood, plus what it means if you rent, own a rental condo, or are deciding whether to buy one.

Asking rents fell, paid rents didn't

There are two different "average rents" and they've been moving in opposite directions. Asking rent is what a landlord advertises for a vacant unit today. Paid rent is what tenants in occupied units are actually paying, including people who signed their lease years ago. Statistics Canada publishes both for Metro Vancouver every quarter.

In Q3 2023, a one-bedroom on the market cost $1,090 a month more than the average tenant was paying. That gap was the "lock-in" that kept people in units they'd outgrown: moving meant a big jump in rent. By Q2 2026 the gap was down to $390.

Paid rents keep rising for a simple reason. BC caps increases for sitting tenants once a year (2.3% in 2026, 2.2% for 2027), and those increases compound. Meanwhile, every time a long-term tenant moves out, the unit gets re-rented closer to today's asking rent. When asking rents were far above paid rents, turnover pushed the paid average up quickly. Now that the two are closer, I'd expect paid rents to keep rising, but more slowly.

Source: Statistics Canada, table 46-10-0092-01 (experimental estimates), Vancouver CMA, apartments. Data starts in Q1 2019. StatCan doesn't publish a paid-rent figure for studios or 3+ bedrooms in this table for Vancouver.

Vacancy is the highest on record

From 2006 to 2024, Vancouver's purpose-built vacancy rate stayed between 0.6% and 2.2% every year but one. It jumped to 2.6% in 2020, the first pandemic year, and fell back under 1% by 2022. CMHC's October 2025 survey found 3.7%, more than double the year before and the highest since its series starts in 1990. The previous high was 2.7%.

By unit size, studios (3.9%) and one-bedrooms (3.8%) had the most vacancies. Two-bedrooms were tighter at 3.2%.

Even with more empty units, the average rent CMHC recorded across all purpose-built units still went up, to $1,970 in October 2025. On units surveyed in both years, the increase was 2.0%, tied with 2020 for the smallest since 2010. That's the paid-rent effect again: most tenants in those buildings aren't new.

Source: CMHC Rental Market Survey, purpose-built row and apartment units, October of each year, Vancouver CMA. "Same-unit rent change" compares only units surveyed in both years, so it isn't pushed up or down by new buildings.

Rents and vacancy by city

Source: CMHC Rental Market Survey, purpose-built row and apartment units, October of each year, Vancouver CMA, by census subdivision. Municipalities with at least 1,400 purpose-built units. "n/a" = CMHC suppressed the figure for reliability. These are rents across all existing tenancies, not today's asking rents.

Burnaby (5.9%) and New Westminster (5.8%) had the highest vacancy among the big rental markets, along with White Rock (5.1%). Burnaby also has the second-most rental starts in the region this year (3,184 from January to September, behind only the City of Vancouver), so I wouldn't expect its vacancy to tighten quickly. The City of Vancouver, with 65,611 of the region's 129,351 surveyed units, was at 2.7%. The UBC area (1.3%), Delta (1.5%) and West Vancouver (1.6%) were the tightest. CMHC rates some of these municipal figures as less reliable (New Westminster's is marked "use with caution"), so read them as a rough ranking.

The rent levels in this table look low next to anything you'll see advertised. That's because they're averages over every occupied purpose-built unit, including tenancies that started a decade ago. For what a unit costs to rent today, use the asking-rent numbers in the next sections.

Vancouver neighbourhoods: where vacancy is highest

Downtown stands out at 4.3%. It's also the most expensive zone in the city for purpose-built one- and two-bedrooms, with a $2,112 average one-bedroom, and it has the most units of any zone in the city. East Hastings is next at 3.8%.

The tightest parts of the city are the older rental neighbourhoods: the West End (1.7%), Kitsilano and Point Grey (1.7%) and South Granville/Oak (1.8%). When sitting tenants pay well under today's asking rents, they don't move often, so fewer units come up.

Source: CMHC Rental Market Survey, purpose-built row and apartment units, October of each year, Vancouver CMA, by survey zone.

What 2026 looks like so far

CMHC's survey only runs once a year, and its October 2026 results aren't out yet. For more recent numbers, Rentals.ca and Urbanation track listings every month. Their September 2026 report, released October 7, put the average asking rent for an apartment or condo in the City of Vancouver at $2,741. That's 1.3% lower than a year earlier, the city's 34th straight month of year-over-year decline. In August the annual drop had been 4.1%.

Two things changed recently. Vancouver's asking rent rose 1.4% from August to September, leading the monthly gains among Canada's six largest rental markets, and the annual decline narrowed a lot. Urbanation's president, Shaun Hildebrand, said Rents in both cities have trended higher over the past six months, referring to Vancouver and Toronto. North Vancouver, at $2,983, is the most expensive rental market in Canada outside the six biggest cities.

My read: the steep part of the decline looks done, but I wouldn't call it a turnaround yet. Rentals.ca still has Vancouver below last year, CMHC's vacancy is the highest on record, and supply keeps coming. CMHC counted 10,230 purpose-built rental starts in Metro Vancouver from January to September 2026, up from 7,251 a year earlier. I went through those numbers in the housing starts post. Those buildings open over the next few years.

If you own (or are thinking of buying) a rental condo

Part of Vancouver's rental supply isn't purpose-built at all. It's condos owned by investors. If that's you, falling asking rents and rising vacancy hit you directly. Here's a rough gross yield by city: a year of the average Rentals.ca asking rent, divided by the median asking price of condos for sale on EstateBlock this week.

Sources: EstateBlock.com active condo listings, snapshot October 17, 2026 (asking prices, not sales); rents from Rentals.ca and Urbanation, September 2026 National Rent Report (released Oct 7, 2026). Gross yield = 12 × average asking rent ÷ median asking price, before strata fees, property tax, insurance, vacancy and mortgage interest. Both figures mix unit sizes, so treat this as a city-level comparison, not a quote for any unit.

Somewhere around 4% to 5% gross, before a single expense. Strata fees and property tax alone take a real bite out of that, and I'd expect most buyers carrying a mortgage to be cash-flow negative at these prices. I think that's a big part of why investors have pulled back from presales, and why condo starts fell this year while rental starts rose.

If you already own one, the practical question is how to keep it rented. With vacancy at 3.7% and studios and one-bedrooms the slowest to fill, I'd price a vacant unit off what's actually leasing in your building and neighbourhood right now, not off what the last tenant paid. An empty month costs you about 8% of a year's rent. Under BC's rules you also can't raise the rent on a sitting tenant by more than the annual cap (2.2% from January 1, 2027), so the rent you set at the start of a tenancy matters for years. My other blog has the details on the 2027 rent increase limit. For anything specific to your tenancy, check with the Residential Tenancy Branch or a lawyer.

My read