What It Costs to Live in Vancouver

One person renting an average one-bedroom in Metro Vancouver spends about $2,434 a month. Two people sharing a two-bedroom spend about $3,495 between them, or $1,748 each.

Those totals cover rent, electricity, groceries, a transit pass, internet, a mobile plan and tenant insurance. They do not cover restaurants, travel, childcare, a car, debt payments or savings.

Almost every "cost of living in Vancouver" page ranking above this one is built on Numbeo, which is a website where anonymous users type in what they think things cost. It is not a dataset. Every figure below comes from a named source with a publication date, and every figure we could not source is labelled an estimate.

The monthly total, line by line

Line	One person, one-bedroom	Two people, two-bedroom
Rent	$1,807	$2,364
Electricity	$45	$57
Groceries	$325	$650
Transit pass (1-zone)	$117	$234
Internet (estimate)	$70	$70
Mobile phone (estimate)	$45	$90
Tenant insurance (estimate)	$25	$30
Total	$2,434	$3,495
Per person	$2,434	$1,748

Sharing saves $686 a month per person. That is the single largest lever in this table, and it is larger than every non-rent line combined.

What rent actually costs

CMHC surveys every purpose-built rental building in the country each October. The 2025 survey was published on 11 December 2025 and is the most recent one available. For the Vancouver census metropolitan area:

Unit type	Average rent	Median rent	Vacancy	Units surveyed
Studio	$1,667	$1,700	3.9%	15,226
One bedroom	$1,807	$1,779	3.8%	75,105
Two bedroom	$2,364	$2,295	3.2%	33,362
All units	$1,970	$1,875	3.7%	129,351

Source: CMHC Rental Market Survey, October 2025, via CMHC's Housing Market Information Portal.

Read that table with one caveat firmly in mind. CMHC averages every occupied unit, including tenants who moved in years ago and whose rent has only ever risen by the annual cap. It is not the price of a lease signed this week. Vacancy at 3.7% is the highest Vancouver has recorded since 1988, and CMHC's 2026 Mid-Year Rental Market Update of 9 June 2026 shows advertised two-bedroom rents in Vancouver at 89.8 against a Q1 2024 baseline of 100. Asking rents are falling. We have not put a dollar figure on a new lease because we do not have a sourced one, and inventing it is exactly what the pages above this one do.

The gap between rent-controlled stock and everything else shows up in CMHC's condominium numbers. Rented condos averaged $2,900 for a two-bedroom against $2,364 in purpose-built buildings, with vacancy at 1.5%.

Where you look changes the number more than what you do about any other line in your budget. One-bedroom averages, same survey:

Area	Average one-bedroom
Downtown	$2,112
English Bay	$1,950
North Vancouver City	$1,918
Kitsilano / Point Grey	$1,915
West End / Stanley Park	$1,830
Central Park / Metrotown	$1,813
Langley	$1,765
North Burnaby	$1,710
Tri-Cities	$1,708
Mount Pleasant / Renfrew Heights	$1,704
East Hastings	$1,692
Richmond	$1,676
New Westminster	$1,645
Surrey	$1,602

Moving from Downtown to New Westminster is worth $467 a month. Moving from Downtown to Mount Pleasant is worth $408. Both are on the SkyTrain. Our Vancouver listings are filtered by these same areas.

What utilities cost

BC Hydro's residential tiered rate, effective 1 July 2026, is a basic charge of $0.2344 per day, then $0.1187 per kWh for the first 1,376 kWh in a two-month billing period and $0.1408 per kWh above that. Rates are published by the BC Utilities Commission.

For a one-bedroom using 300 kWh a month, which is our assumption rather than a published figure:

• 300 kWh × $0.1187 = $35.61
• 30.4 days × $0.2344 = $7.13
• Subtotal $42.74, plus 5% GST = $44.88

For two people using 400 kWh: $47.48 + $7.13 = $54.61, plus GST = $57.34. Both stay inside Step 1, which works out to roughly 688 kWh a month.

Most Vancouver apartment renters never see a gas bill. Heat and hot water in older purpose-built buildings are billed to the building and folded into rent. If you do hold a FortisBC account, the Lower Mainland residential rate effective 1 July 2026 is a basic charge of $0.4216 per day plus $8.469 per gigajoule for delivery, $2.472 for storage and transport, and $1.660 for the gas itself, or $12.601 per GJ all in. The basic charge alone is $12.82 a month before you burn anything.

Ask what is included in rent before you sign. A listing at $1,900 with heat and hot water included beats one at $1,850 without.

What transit costs

TransLink fares rose an average of 5% on 1 July 2026. Current adult prices:

Fare	1 zone	2 zones	3 zones
Monthly pass	$117.20	$156.70	$211.65
Compass stored value	$2.85	$4.20	$5.40
Cash	$3.50	$5.10	$6.70

Source: TransLink fare pricing.

Two things save people real money here. Bus travel is always one zone regardless of distance, and every trip after 6:30pm on weekdays plus all day on weekends and holidays is charged as one zone. So the pass is only worth buying if you commute by SkyTrain or SeaBus across a zone boundary during weekday business hours.

Forty stored-value trips in one zone cost $114.00 against $117.20 for the pass. If you work from home two days a week, skip the pass.

What groceries cost

Statistics Canada's Survey of Household Spending is the only published measure of what BC households actually spend on food. In 2023, the most recent year available, the average BC household spent $8,500 on food purchased from stores (Table 11-10-0125-01). The 2021 Census puts the average BC household at 2.4 people.

• $8,500 ÷ 2.4 people ÷ 12 months = $295 per person per month, in 2023 dollars
• BC's food-from-stores price index rose from 177.2 to 189.3 between 2023 and 2025, or 6.8% (Table 18-10-0005-01) → $315
• Food from stores rose another 3.9% year over year as of June 2026 (The Daily, 20 July 2026) → about $325

That $325 is an estimate. The 2023 base is real, the census figure is real, the two inflation adjustments are real, and the multiplication is shown above so you can disagree with any step of it.

As a check, here is a deliberately plain month of food for one adult at Statistics Canada's actual recorded British Columbia prices for June 2026 (Table 18-10-0245-01). Quantities are ours.

Item	BC price	Qty	Cost
White bread, 675 g	$4.17	4	$16.68
Milk, 2 L	$5.64	4	$22.56
Eggs, 1 dozen	$5.63	2	$11.26
Block cheese, 500 g	$7.32	1	$7.32
Butter, 454 g	$6.13	1	$6.13
Yogurt, 500 g	$3.90	2	$7.80
Chicken breasts, per kg	$17.34	1	$17.34
Ground beef, per kg	$18.39	1	$18.39
Canned tuna, 170 g	$1.70	4	$6.80
White rice, 2 kg	$8.66	0.5	$4.33
Cereal, 400 g	$4.13	2	$8.26
Pasta sauce, 650 mL	$3.21	2	$6.42
Potatoes, 4.54 kg	$7.96	1	$7.96
Onions, 1.36 kg	$5.27	1	$5.27
Carrots, 1.36 kg	$5.07	1	$5.07
Broccoli, unit	$3.58	4	$14.32
Frozen mixed vegetables, 750 g	$4.10	2	$8.20
Apples, per kg	$6.71	2	$13.42
Bananas, per kg	$1.85	2	$3.70
Salad greens, 142 g	$4.99	2	$9.98
Peanut butter, 1 kg	$6.27	0.5	$3.14
Canola oil, 3 L	$10.94	0.25	$2.74
Coffee, ground, 340 g	$9.35	1	$9.35
Total			$216.44

So a bare staples basket comes to $216 and real BC households spend about $325 a head. The $109 difference is snacks, condiments, spices, drinks, brand-name products, the food that goes off in the back of the fridge, and the fact that nobody eats from a spreadsheet. We used $325 in the budget because that is what people actually spend.

What we estimated rather than sourced

Internet, mobile phone and tenant insurance are estimates. There is no government table for them, the price depends heavily on which promotion you catch, and we are not going to dress a guess up as data. Treat $70, $45 and $25 as placeholders and replace them with your own quotes. Together they are $140 of a $2,434 total, so getting them wrong by 30% moves the bottom line by less than 2%.

What BC law says about your rent going up

The 2026 rent increase limit is 2.3%, down from 3% in 2025. A landlord can raise rent once every 12 months and must give three full months' written notice stating the exact dollar amount and the date it takes effect. The cap applies even where utilities are included and the landlord's costs went up by more. See the Residential Tenancy Branch on rent increases.

On $1,807, a lawful 2026 increase is at most $41.56 a month.

Moving resets that protection. There is no vacancy control in BC, so a landlord can set any rent they like for a new tenant. This is why staying put is worth money, and why the CMHC average sits below what new tenants pay.

At the start of a tenancy, a security deposit and a pet damage deposit are each capped at half of one month's rent under section 19(1) of the Residential Tenancy Act (deposits and fees). On an $1,807 one-bedroom that is $903.50 each, or $1,807.00 in deposits if you have a pet. That is a full month's rent in cash on top of your first month's rent.

What this means against a Vancouver wage

BC's minimum wage went to $18.25 an hour on 1 June 2026 (Province of BC). At 37.5 hours a week that is $2,965.63 a month before any deductions.

The average one-bedroom alone takes 60.9% of that. Add the $627 of electricity, groceries, transit and the three estimated lines and the total is $2,434, which is 82% of gross pay before a cent of income tax comes off.

That arithmetic is the reason so many people in this city share, and it is not a problem a budgeting article can solve.

Where these numbers will be wrong

CMHC's rent figures are from October 2025 and are ten months old. They will be replaced in December 2026, and given current vacancy the new numbers will probably be flatter or lower. Utility and transit rates change on fixed dates, and the ones here are all effective 1 July 2026. The grocery figure is an estimate built on 2023 spending data, and the three lines we flagged as estimates are guesses with a dollar sign in front of them.

If a page tells you what a Vancouver apartment costs without telling you which month the figure is from, it does not know either. We publish live listings so you can check today's asking rents against these averages yourself, and the rest of our guides work the same way.