Average Rent in Vancouver, and Why the Average Is the Wrong Number

The average one-bedroom in Metro Vancouver rents for $1,807 a month. The average one-bedroom being advertised right now asks $2,377. Both figures are accurate, both come from real surveys, and if you are searching for an apartment only the second one is a price.

That gap — roughly $570 a month on a one-bedroom — is the whole story of rent in this city, and almost every page that ranks for "average rent in Vancouver" quotes the first number without mentioning the second. Figures below are as they stood on 9 August 2026, and every one is attributed to a named source with a date.

The two numbers, and what each of them counts

CMHC surveys purpose-built rental buildings of three or more units across the country each October and publishes the average rent of the units that are occupied. That includes the tenant who signed in 2016 and has only ever had the annual capped increase applied. It is a portrait of the existing stock, not a price list.

Unit type	Average rent	Median rent	Vacancy	Units surveyed	Source
Studio	$1,667	$1,700	3.9%	15,226	CMHC Rental Market Survey, Oct 2025
One bedroom	$1,807	$1,779	3.8%	75,105	CMHC Rental Market Survey, Oct 2025
Two bedroom	$2,364	$2,295	3.2%	33,362	CMHC Rental Market Survey, Oct 2025
All units	$1,970	$1,875	3.7%	129,351	CMHC Rental Market Survey, Oct 2025
Rented condo, two bedroom	$2,900	—	1.5%	—	CMHC Rental Market Survey, Oct 2025
Asking rent, 1-bed, City of Vancouver	$2,377	—	—	—	Rentals.ca / Urbanation, July 2026
Asking rent, all types, Canada	$2,037	—	—	—	Rentals.ca / Urbanation, July 2026

CMHC's 2025 survey was published on 11 December 2025 and is the most recent full one; the next lands in December 2026. Every CMHC figure above is from its Housing Market Information Portal for the Vancouver CMA. The August 2026 Rentals.ca and Urbanation National Rent Report covers listings live in July 2026.

The two are not measuring the same thing, and it is worth being precise about how they differ. CMHC covers the whole census metropolitan area out to Maple Ridge and only counts purpose-built rental apartments and row houses. Rentals.ca covers the City of Vancouver and counts whatever is advertised, including rented condos, which CMHC's own survey shows renting at $2,900 for a two-bedroom against $2,364 in purpose-built buildings. Some of the $570 gap is composition. Most of it is not.

Average or median: use the median for a sanity check

The average sums every rent and divides. The median is the rent in the middle of the list. When the two diverge, the distribution has a tail.

They diverge here, mildly. Vancouver's two-bedroom average of $2,364 sits $69 above the $2,295 median, which tells you a modest number of expensive units are dragging the mean up and that most two-bedrooms cluster fairly tightly. The studio line runs the other way — a $1,667 average against a $1,700 median — because the cheapest studios sit far below the pack and pull the mean under the midpoint. CMHC's zone figures show that tail: studios average $980 in Maple Ridge/Pitt Meadows and $1,235 in Delta, against $1,684 in the West End.

Practically: if a page quotes you one number with no median beside it and no survey date, it does not know what it is quoting.

Why the sitting tenant pays hundreds less than you will

British Columbia has rent control on tenancies, not on units. This is the mechanism behind everything above, and it is the single most useful thing to understand about pricing here.

Section 41 of the Residential Tenancy Act says a landlord "must not increase rent except in accordance with this Part." Section 43(1) limits the increase to the amount set by regulation, an amount ordered by the director, or an amount you agree to in writing. Section 42 requires three full months' notice on the approved form and at least twelve months between increases. Section 22 of the Residential Tenancy Regulation sets the regulated amount at BC's twelve-month average CPI change ending in July, which produced a cap of 2.3% for 2026. Our guide to how the cap is calculated works through the arithmetic year by year.

Now the part that is not in the Act: there is no provision anywhere limiting what a landlord may charge a new tenant. When a tenancy ends, the unit reprices to whatever the market bears. That is vacancy decontrol, and BC has no vacancy control of any kind.

Compound the caps a 2018 tenant could have been served since — 2.5%, 2.6%, a freeze in 2021, then 1.5%, 2%, 3.5%, 3% and 2.3% — and the total is about 19%. A tenancy that started at $1,500 is near $1,780 today, and that assumes every increase was taken on schedule. The identical suite across the hall, vacated in June, lists at $2,400. CMHC averages the two and reports about $2,090, a number that describes neither apartment. If a landlord collects an increase that breaks Part 3, section 43(5) lets you deduct it from rent or otherwise recover it, though put the reason in writing before you short a payment or it reads as arrears.

One consequence people miss: moving is expensive twice. You lose the below-market rent you had accumulated, and you pay the new market rate. Staying put in a unit you tolerate is often worth more per year than any other decision in your budget.

Vancouver against Burnaby, New West, North Van, Richmond and Surrey

The city-versus-city framing is less useful than it looks, because the spread within Vancouver is larger than the spread between Vancouver and Burnaby. CMHC's October 2025 one-bedroom averages for occupied purpose-built units, by survey zone:

Survey zone	Average 1-bedroom	Source
North Vancouver (District)	$2,350	CMHC RMS, Oct 2025
Downtown Vancouver	$2,112	CMHC RMS, Oct 2025
North Vancouver (City)	$1,918	CMHC RMS, Oct 2025
Kitsilano / Point Grey	$1,915	CMHC RMS, Oct 2025
West End / Stanley Park	$1,830	CMHC RMS, Oct 2025
Central Park / Metrotown	$1,813	CMHC RMS, Oct 2025
Vancouver CMA average	$1,807	CMHC RMS, Oct 2025
North Burnaby (includes Brentwood)	$1,710	CMHC RMS, Oct 2025
Mount Pleasant / Renfrew Heights	$1,704	CMHC RMS, Oct 2025
Richmond	$1,676	CMHC RMS, Oct 2025
New Westminster	$1,645	CMHC RMS, Oct 2025
Surrey	$1,602	CMHC RMS, Oct 2025
Southeast Burnaby	$1,564	CMHC RMS, Oct 2025
Marpole	$1,494	CMHC RMS, Oct 2025

Read the middle of that table carefully. Metrotown averages $1,813 and Marpole, which is inside the City of Vancouver, averages $1,494. Moving from Vancouver to Burnaby saves money only if you also move away from a SkyTrain-adjacent tower district. CMHC folds Brentwood into its North Burnaby zone, so the $1,710 figure blends Brentwood's towers with much older walk-ups further east; expect the new buildings to sit above it, because almost none of their tenancies are old enough to have fallen behind the market.

On asking rents rather than occupied stock, the same July 2026 Rentals.ca report gives the City of Vancouver one-bedroom at $2,377, North Vancouver at $2,588 and Surrey at $1,794. It also recorded year-over-year drops of 6.6% in New Westminster, 6.1% in Richmond, 7.3% in Coquitlam and 7.6% in Langley. Burnaby appeared in that report among the BC cities where asking rents rose month over month but fell year over year, without a published one-bedroom figure, so we have not invented one. Our neighbourhood guide covers what the price differences actually buy you.

What moves the number on any given listing

Downtown one-bedrooms average $2,112 and Marpole's average $1,494, twenty minutes down Granville. The reasons behind a gap like that are mostly boring and mostly checkable before you view.

Purpose-built versus condo. CMHC's October 2025 numbers put the two-bedroom rented condo at $2,900 against $2,364 purpose-built, which works out to a premium of about 23%. Condo vacancy was 1.5% against 3.7% in purpose-built, so the softening has barely touched them. Condos are newer, come with in-suite laundry and a gym, and are let by individual owners rather than a management company. They also carry more risk of a landlord's-use eviction, because an individual owner can decide to move in.

Building age. Almost the entire below-average half of the stock is pre-1990 concrete and walk-ups in the West End, Marpole and East Hastings. New completions in Brentwood, Metrotown and Olympic Village price at the top because every tenancy in them started at market.

Included utilities and parking. Heat and hot water are usually included in older purpose-built buildings and often excluded in newer ones. A $60 hydro bill and a $150 parking stall turn a $2,200 listing into a $2,410 listing. Section 13 requires the written agreement to state which services and facilities are included, and section 27 bars a landlord from later cutting a service the tenant cannot live in the unit without, or one that is a material term of the agreement; for anything else they need 30 days' written notice in the approved form and must reduce the rent by the value of what they took away. Get it written into the agreement — see what belongs in a BC tenancy agreement.

Floor and view. In a Downtown tower this is real money, but no one publishes a schedule for it: each building prices its own stack of identical layouts upward floor by floor, and the step is whatever it thinks the view is worth. Ask the leasing office to quote the same layout on two floors and compare.

Incentives. With vacancy at 3.7%, one month free on a twelve-month lease is common in newer buildings. CMHC's 2026 Mid-Year Rental Market Update of 9 June 2026 reports that incentives intensified over the preceding six months, running to discounted parking, gift cards, move-in credits, cash bonuses and sometimes several months free. Do the arithmetic properly: one month free at $2,400 is an effective $2,200, but the rent of record is $2,400, next year's 2.3% applies to $2,400, and in year two the incentive disappears. Your actual cost rises about 9% on renewal without any rent increase being served at all.

Fixed-term versus month-to-month. A fixed term does not change the cap. Under section 44(3), a fixed-term agreement that does not require you to vacate rolls into a month-to-month tenancy on the same terms when it expires. A landlord may only require you to vacate at the end of a fixed term in the narrow case set out in section 13.1 of the Regulation, where the landlord or a close family member will occupy the unit. Back-to-back fixed terms with "sign a new agreement at a new rent or leave" is an end-run around Part 3, and the vacate clause propping it up is usually void.

Vacancy rate. The Vancouver CMA hit 3.7% in October 2025, up from 1.6% a year earlier and the highest since 1988. Asking rents followed: the Rentals.ca one-bedroom is down 4.8% year over year, and CMHC's June 2026 update found Vancouver's asking-rent-to-income ratios back at pre-pandemic levels, the largest improvement of any major market. This has not reached the bottom of the market. The same update found pressure remaining in the lowest rent segments, and described the first quartile — the cheapest quarter of the stock — as persistently tight, because new supply is not filtering down to it.

How to check the number yourself

Everything above will be stale eventually, so here is the method rather than only the snapshot.

1. CMHC Housing Market Information Portal for occupied purpose-built stock. Filter to Vancouver CMA, then to the survey zone you care about, and read average, median and vacancy together. Updated each December for the preceding October.
2. The monthly Rentals.ca and Urbanation National Rent Report for asking rents. Published in the first week of each month for the month before. Free, and it separates purpose-built from condo.
3. Your own search results. Sort by newest, filter to your unit type and area, and take the median of the first twenty genuine listings. This is the most accurate number available to you, because it is the actual set of apartments you can apply to this week.
4. Discount for stale listings. Anything that has been up for more than three weeks in a 3.7% vacancy market is overpriced or has a problem, and its asking price is not evidence of anything.

Then budget from take-home pay rather than the listing price. Our guide to what you can actually afford runs that calculation, and the full cost of living adds the $45 hydro, $117 transit pass and the rest that arrive with the apartment.

What the average will never tell you

It will not tell you whether you can get the unit. Cheap listings exist and they are heavily contested, because the loosening did not reach them: CMHC's June 2026 update found the first rent quartile persistently tight even at a 37-year vacancy high. The softening is happening in Downtown glass towers and new Brentwood completions, not in the $1,400 walk-up.

It also will not tell you what the move costs. First month plus half a month security deposit plus half a month pet deposit is two months' rent leaving your account in one week, before movers, and getting the last deposit back takes 15 days at best.

So treat $1,807 as a fact about Vancouver and $2,377 as a fact about your search. Budget against the second one, verify it against live listings in the specific zone you want, and check the date on any figure anyone quotes you — including this page.