Canada’s aging housing stock emerged as a key driver of rising home insurance premiums, with older, poorly maintained properties in some cities helping push insurance inflation well above overall consumer prices, according to an analysis by MyChoice Financial Inc.
“Older homes with deferred maintenance pose higher risks for things like water damage, electrical fires, or structural failure,” said Aren Mirzaian, chief executive of the insurance technology company. “And when the cost of repairs goes up, homeowners may delay fixing things, which increases risk and ultimately pushes premiums higher.”
MyChoice’s report flagged Regina, Ottawa and London as particularly exposed. All three had a high percentage of older homes needing repairs, elevated renovation costs and home insurance inflation running above 10%. In Regina, renovation inflation alone hit 6.7%, compounding carrier risk when claims occurred.
Ottawa recorded the highest insurance inflation, with home premiums up 14.3% year over year. About 20% of its housing stock was built before 1960, leaving a large cohort of properties with aging plumbing, wiring and structural components that were more prone to loss and more expensive to remediate.
By contrast, Vancouver and Toronto – despite sitting at the center of Canada’s soft housing market – saw somewhat more moderate home insurance inflation. Newer housing and lower renovation inflation helped keep premium growth to 9.94% and 8.12%, respectively, though both still ran well ahead of headline inflation.
Nationally, home insurance inflation outpaced the 2025 consumer price index of 2.1% in all but two provinces. New Brunswick saw home insurance inflation slip slightly into negative territory at –0.25%, while Prince Edward Island posted a modest 0.69% increase.
Insurers had already tightened underwriting on older properties, particularly those with original plumbing, knob‑and‑tube wiring, outdated electrical panels or aging roofs. Brokers reported more conditional offers tied to specific upgrades and, in some cases, non‑renewals where repeated water or fire losses were linked to deteriorating infrastructure. Underwriters increasingly relied on property‑level data to distinguish between fully updated character homes and those with decades of deferred maintenance.
For brokers, the trend translated into more front‑end work -- collecting photos, documenting updates and pushing clients to review rebuild values annually. Retail and personal lines producers said they spent more time explaining why limits and premiums were rising even when market values were flat and there had been no claims, pointing to construction inflation and aging components rather than opportunistic pricing.
These structural pressures from aging homes sat on top of a climate‑driven loss pattern. Weather‑related events produced a record $8.5 billion in insured payouts in 2024 before dropping to $2.4 billion in 2025, according to the Insurance Bureau of Canada, leaving a five‑year trend of elevated, volatile catastrophe losses.
The findings underscore the two forces pulling pricing: deteriorating housing stock and severe weather. In older‑stock cities like Ottawa, Regina and London, that combination was likely to keep upward pressure on premiums and deductibles and drive increasingly granular underwriting between well‑maintained and neglected properties.
