Property & Housing
The taxes and costs that land on you when you buy a home in Ontario — starting with the one most buyers underestimate. These tools price the closing-day bills, not the mortgage.
Two identical houses on opposite sides of Steeles Avenue sell for $800,000 on the same day. The one on the north side, in York Region, closes with $12,475 of land transfer tax. The one on the south side, in Toronto, closes with $24,950. Nothing about the houses or the buyers differs; the city limit runs down the middle of the road, and Toronto is the one municipality in Ontario with a land transfer tax of its own. This section has a single calculator because this is the one closing-day bill that turns on the address, the price and whether you've bought before — and the one buyers most often leave out of the budget.
Outside Toronto the tax is provincial only, and it's graduated: 0.5% on the first $55,000, then 1% up to $250,000, 1.5% up to $400,000, 2% up to $2 million, and 2.5% beyond that on a home with one or two units. Each rate touches only its own slice, so the tax as a share of the price creeps rather than jumps — $4,475 on $400,000, $8,475 on $600,000, $16,475 on $1 million, $36,475 on $2 million, which is 1.1% rising to 1.8%. A first-time buyer gets up to $4,000 of it back: nothing to pay on the first $368,000, a flat $4,000 off above that, so the $600,000 house costs $4,475 instead of $8,475.
Inside Toronto the same brackets run a second time under the city's name, and every figure above doubles: $8,950, $16,950, $32,950, $72,950. Past $2 million the two part company. The city carries on at 2.5% to $3 million and then, under the rates it introduced on April 1, 2026, climbs through 4.4%, 5.45%, 6.5% and 7.55% to 8.6% above $20 million — so a $3.5 million Toronto house pays $157,450 where the same house anywhere else in the province pays $73,975. The city's first-time rebate is set separately at $4,475, which is exactly the municipal tax on $400,000. A Toronto first-time buyer claims both rebates, $8,475 together, and pays $8,475 on the $600,000 house that costs a repeat buyer $16,950.
The two rebates share their conditions: at least 18, never an owner of a home anywhere in the world, moving in as your principal residence within nine months, and a spouse who hasn't owned one while married to you. Both are normally claimed at registration so they offset the tax on the day rather than coming back later; the provincial one can still be applied for up to 18 months afterwards. And both taxes are due in full at closing, in cash, on top of the down payment — which is how a buyer who sized the deposit to the dollar meets a five-figure line on the statement of adjustments they hadn't priced. The legal fees and title insurance beside it are small by comparison, and none of that is modelled here.