- Household credit stress — the synthesising view: Canada's G7 debt-service burden and the overall financial-stress rate.
- Consumer loan arrears — the non-mortgage breakdown (auto, credit card, instalment) that moves ahead of mortgage stress.
- Household debt — the underlying leverage on which repayment stress rests.
- Homebuying affordability — the cost of entering the market (mortgage payment + down payment), the other side of the mortgage story from repayment stress.
Canada's arrears rate has doubled in under four years, from a 0.14% trough in August 2022 to 0.28% in June 2026. That is the steepest proportional rise in the G7 over that window. Only the United States comes close, and it climbed from a far higher base. Italy and Japan have moved the other way. RBC's GTA chart is the institution-level expression of this national shift. Combined with Canada's G7-leading household debt (covered in the companion Household debt metric), the rate of change is what makes the indicator load-bearing for the financing pillar.
Mortgage-arrears statistics are not perfectly harmonized across countries. Definitions, observation windows, and reporting populations differ. The chart below uses each economy's closest equivalent to "90+ days past due as a share of outstanding mortgages," sourced from the national authority that publishes the indicator. Caveats are footnoted, but the picture is robust to those choices: Canada is at the low end of the G7, US and Italy at the high end, with the UK, France, and Germany clustered in between.
Sources: Canada — CBA DB50 (Jun 2026). US — MBA National Delinquency Survey, 90-day bucket (Q2 2026). UK — UK Finance, homeowner arrears ≥2.5% of balance (Q2 2026). France/Germany/Italy — EBA Risk Dashboard, residential real estate NPL ratio (Q3 2025). Japan — FSA Analytical Notes, regional bank housing-loan default rate (Oct 2025). Cross-country definitions differ slightly — see methodology notes below.
| Rank | Country | Arrears rate | Indicator |
|---|
The G7 picture. Canada's headline arrears rate (0.28%) is roughly one-fifth the US level and one-third the UK level. That cushion is real, and it explains why Canadian banks have not had to provision aggressively for mortgage losses despite the 2024–2026 rise. It is also narrower than it looks. (1) The CBA series excludes non-bank lenders, where stress runs higher. (2) Canada's doubling since the 2022 trough is the steepest rise in the G7. (3) Household debt-to-income leads the G7 at 176.4% in Canada at Q2 2026 (Statistics Canada, released 11 September 2026), against a United States that publishes no directly comparable stock-based ratio, so the same arrears rate translates into a much larger absolute dollar exposure per household.
The chart below measures the change in each country's mortgage-arrears rate from its post-pandemic trough (mid-to-late 2022, when policy rates began rising) through the latest available reading. Canada is the only G7 economy whose arrears rate has fully doubled. The United States has also climbed sharply, but from a higher starting base. Italy and Japan are now below their early-2022 readings, and the UK, though marginally above its own trough, has been falling since its 2024 peak.
Sources: Canada — CBA DB50 (Aug 2022 trough 0.14% → Jun 2026 0.28%). US — MBA 90-day bucket (Q4 2022 trough ~0.78% → Q2 2026 1.43%). UK — UK Finance homeowner arrears count (2022 trough → Q2 2026, now declining from 2024 peak). France/Germany/Italy — EBA residential RE NPL ratio (2022 → Q3 2025). Japan — FSA housing-loan default rate. Methodology: each country compared against its own series, normalising for definitional differences across the G7.
Two velocities in the G7. Canada and the US are the two economies with mortgage-stress acceleration. The Europeans (France, Germany) have crept up modestly. The UK rose then reversed: homeowner arrears fell 2% in the first quarter of 2026, and buy-to-let arrears were down 24% year-over-year. Italy and Japan are de-stressing outright. Canada combines the fastest acceleration with the deepest prior trough, which makes the move a return toward the historical mean after an artificially low post-pandemic period rather than an absolute crisis level.
The rest of this page unpacks the Canadian picture using the Canadian Bankers Association DB50 series, the national equivalent of RBC's institution-level GTA chart. Published monthly, it aggregates 3+-month arrears data across nine federally-regulated lenders covering roughly 80% of all outstanding Canadian residential mortgages. The series on this page runs monthly from January 2016. Longer-run anchors are cited from BMO's reading of the full CBA history.
Source: Canadian Bankers Association, DB50 Public — Number of Residential Mortgages in Arrears, June 2026 release. Series covers BMO, CIBC, National Bank, RBC, Scotiabank, TD, Manulife (since Apr 2004), Laurentian (since Oct 2010), Equitable (since Nov 2020).
The arc. Pre-pandemic baseline (2017–2019): ~0.24%. Pandemic spike then collapse via deferrals: peak 0.27% in Jun 2020, trough 0.14% in Aug 2022. Post-rate-cycle climb: doubled to 0.28% by Jun 2026, with 15 consecutive months of rising or flat readings from Mar 2025 through May 2026, before June posted the first monthly decline of the cycle.
Saskatchewan leads at 0.46%, reflecting persistent commodity-price exposure, with Manitoba next at 0.34%. The more consequential development is Ontario: a region that ran below the national rate for the entire 2017–2023 period now sits at 0.33%, third-highest of the eight regions and well above the national figure. Quebec, by contrast, remains well-contained at 0.18%, below its pre-pandemic norm.
Source: CBA DB50 Public, month ended June 30, 2026. The CBA reports the Territories as their own line; they are shown separately here and recorded no mortgages in arrears in this release, which the national total confirms.
| Region | Total mortgages | In arrears (3+ months) | Arrears rate |
|---|
For most of the past decade, Ontario's arrears rate sat below the Canadian average, a function of relative income strength, immigration-fuelled housing demand, and the rapid post-2017 mortgage stock growth in the GTA. That has reversed. Ontario's arrears rate has been above the national figure since September 2025, and the gap has widened in each of the four months to June 2026. RBC's GTA chart is the institution-level expression of this provincial shift.
Source: CBA DB50 Public, semi-annual points to 2026, then monthly. Ontario crossed the national rate in September 2025 and has stayed above it since. Points before 2026 are carried from the CBA monthly releases and are not reproduced in the companion workbook, which holds the national series in full and the provincial detail from March 2026.
Why this matters for the financing pillar. Mortgage arrears lead household-credit stress and, by extension, financial-system risk. The national 0.28% reading is still low by historical standards. BMO puts the long-run average near 0.40%, against an all-time high of 1.03% in 1983. The rate of change is the signal. A doubling in under four years, concentrated in the country's largest housing market, sets the constraint on how much further consumer-driven growth the economy can deliver without macro-prudential or fiscal support.
Individual-bank disclosures (RBC, TD, BMO investor presentations) are useful for institution-level credit-quality assessment but are not directly comparable to each other: each bank has a different geographic mix, borrower mix, originator network, and underwriting standard. The CBA's DB50 Public series solves this by aggregating reported figures across the major federally-regulated banks on a consistent definition (3+ months in arrears, measured against total outstanding mortgages) and publishing the result monthly with a 60-day lag.
The series has two acknowledged limitations. It excludes non-bank lenders (credit unions, private lenders, mortgage investment corporations) where arrears tend to run materially higher; CMHC's Residential Mortgage Industry Report tracks those separately. And it counts arrears by number of mortgages rather than dollar volume, so a wave of high-value GTA defaults could understate dollar-weighted system stress. For most national-trend purposes neither caveat changes the directional reading.
Arrears are the first stage of a funnel that ends, for a small minority of borrowers, in the lender taking the home. That is judicial foreclosure in Quebec, BC, Alberta, the Prairies, Nova Scotia, and the territories, or non-judicial power of sale in Ontario, New Brunswick, PEI, and Newfoundland. Whether that downstream stage tells a different story than arrears largely cannot be established in Canada: there is no clean national count of completed repossessions, because the concept fragments across provincial courts and land registries and no agency consolidates it. The closest public signal is CMHC's Residential Mortgage Industry Report, and through 2025 it pointed the opposite way to the bank arrears series: foreclosure rates and stage-3 impairments among mortgage investment entities (the higher-risk private lenders where stress shows up first) declined year-over-year even as the CBA arrears rate kept climbing.
Two forces drain the funnel before the final stage. Lenders strongly prefer workouts and term extensions over seizing an asset, and accumulated home equity means most distressed owners can sell on the open market rather than lose the property to the lender. Completions therefore stay low and lag arrears by many months, which reinforces the arrears reading rather than competing with it. The United Kingdom, the one G7 economy that publishes a hard possession count alongside its arrears series, illustrates the scale: roughly 5,160 homes were repossessed in 2025, up 39% year-over-year yet still historically low, with over two-thirds of cases on mortgages at least a decade old. Even a sharply "rising" possession year remains tiny next to the arrears stock that precedes it. That is why this metric is built on arrears and reads foreclosure as the downstream footnote.
Why this stays a footnote, not its own metric. Foreclosure is arrears plus a long lag and a heavy dampening factor, not an independent signal. Canada has no consolidated public completion series, and what CMHC does publish moved down in 2025 while arrears rose. A standalone foreclosure metric would rest on partial, lagged, definition-inconsistent data and would, at best, restate the arrears trend. The decoupling itself (stress building in arrears, absorbed by workouts and equity before completion) is the insight worth carrying, and it lives here.
At 0.28% (CBA, June 2026), Canadian mortgage arrears sit below the United Kingdom (0.89%), the United States (1.43% MBA 90-day), France (1.20%), Germany (0.80%), and Italy (2.10%). Only Japan (0.20%) is lower.
The Canadian arrears rate has doubled from 0.14% in August 2022 to 0.28% in June 2026, the largest proportional swing in the G7 over the same window. The climb ran for 15 consecutive months to May 2026 before June recorded the first decline of the cycle, a single month and a narrow one: 0.2855% in May against 0.2847% in June before rounding.
Ontario sat below the national rate throughout 2017–2023 at roughly 0.10%, then rose to 0.33% by June 2026, more than triple its 2023 level and above the Canadian average since September 2025. Saskatchewan leads the provincial table at 0.46%; Quebec remains contained at 0.18%.
BMO places the long-run average of the CBA national series near 0.40% and the all-time high at 1.03% in 1983. At 0.28%, the 2024–2026 doubling has returned the system toward, but not to, its historical norm. That is a more useful frame than any single prior peak. The CBA series published on this page begins in January 2016, so earlier cyclical highs are cited from BMO's reading of the longer history rather than reproduced here.
Canada's mortgage arrears rate of 0.28% is 2nd-lowest in the G7, well below the UK and the US, though it has doubled since its 2022 trough.
- Compared with
- The G7, on each economy's closest published equivalent to 90+ day mortgage arrears as a share of outstanding mortgages.
- Where Canada sits
- At 0.28% in June 2026, Canada ranks 2nd of 7, behind only Japan (0.20%). The US is at 1.43% and the UK at 0.89%.
- Which way it is moving
- Up. That is deteriorating. The rate doubled from 0.14% in August 2022 to 0.28% in June 2026, though June posted the first monthly decline of the cycle.
- What the verdict follows
- Position in the peer set. The level is low and the verdict reflects it, while the rise, the steepest proportional rise in the G7 on the page's own measure, is the reason to keep watching the trend. One place lower would be Watch.
- Data basis
- Canadian Bankers Association DB50 Public, June 2026 release, with MBA (Q2 2026), UK Finance (Q2 2026), EBA (Q3 2025), and Japan FSA (October 2025) for peers. Page last reviewed September 2026 · Data current to June 2026, the latest published by the Canadian Bankers Association.
Primary sources
- Canadian Bankers Association — DB50 Public (Mortgages in Arrears) — monthly national and provincial series, nine federally-regulated lenders.
- CMHC Residential Mortgage Industry Data Dashboard — quarterly bank, credit-union, MFC, and MIC breakdowns.
- Bank of Canada — Indicators of Financial Vulnerabilities — household debt-service ratio, loan-to-income, uninsured-mortgage share.
- Mortgage Bankers Association — National Delinquency Survey (US) — 90-day bucket Q2 2026.
- UK Finance — Mortgage Arrears and Possessions Q2 2026 — homeowner arrears ≥2.5% of balance.
- European Banking Authority — Risk Assessment Report (December 2025) — residential real estate NPL ratio (France, Germany, Italy).
- Japan FSA — Analytical Notes (October 2025) — regional bank housing-loan default rate.
- Equifax Canada and TransUnion — bureau-based delinquency data covering all lenders including private and MIC; series typically 5–10 basis points higher than CBA at any given time.
Methodology notes
- Cross-country comparability. Readings are not vintage-matched: Canada is June 2026, the US and UK are Q2 2026, France, Germany and Italy are Q3 2025 and Japan October 2025. On a page whose argument is about the speed of change, that spread matters. The European and Japanese points are up to three quarters older than Canada's, so Canada's measured move from trough to latest covers a longer window than theirs. Treat the velocity ranking as indicative and read each country against its own stated window. Mortgage delinquency definitions are also not perfectly harmonised. The G7 chart uses each economy's closest published equivalent to "90+ days past due as a share of outstanding mortgages." Using the broader MBA "seriously delinquent" measure (90+ days or in foreclosure) raises the US to 2.06%. The UK figure is UK Finance's "arrears of 2.5% or more of the outstanding balance," which approximates 90+ days past due for typical UK mortgages. France, Germany, and Italy use the EBA's residential real estate non-performing-loan ratio, which has a 90-day past-due trigger but also captures unlikely-to-pay classifications. Japan uses regional-bank housing-loan default rates from the FSA. Directional ranking is robust to these definitional differences; absolute levels should be treated as approximate.
- Canada headline figure. 0.28% national arrears rate as of month-ended June 30, 2026 (0.2847% unrounded). 14,021 mortgages in arrears out of 4,924,612 reported by the participating banks.
- Definition. Arrears = mortgages 3 or more months past due. CBA uses "mortgages in arrears" interchangeably with "90+ day delinquencies"; the two definitions resolve to the same population at month-end.
- Coverage. Nine lenders: BMO, CIBC, National Bank, RBC, Scotiabank, TD, Manulife (since April 2004), Laurentian (since October 2010), Equitable Bank (since November 2020). The CBA estimates this covers roughly 80% of outstanding Canadian residential mortgages.
- Historical comparison. The series published here starts in January 2016. Longer-run anchors (a long-run average near 0.40% and an all-time high of 1.03% in 1983) are taken from BMO Economics as reported by Canadian Mortgage Trends, not from the series on this page. Earlier drafts cited a 0.45% peak in late 2009; that figure could not be traced to a published source and has been withdrawn.
- Provincial classification. The CBA reports separately for Atlantic, Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, BC, and the Territories. The Territories are their own line and are not folded into the BC or Alberta figures; in the June 2026 release they held 10,559 mortgages and recorded no arrears.
- Series limitations. The CBA series excludes non-bank lenders (credit unions, private lenders, mortgage investment corporations) where arrears tend to run materially higher; CMHC's Residential Mortgage Industry Report tracks those separately. It counts arrears by number of mortgages rather than dollar volume, so a wave of high-value GTA defaults could understate dollar-weighted system stress.
- Companion dataset. Financing_Mortgage-Delinquencies_Data.xlsx contains the full monthly time series (Jan 2016 – Jun 2026), annual averages, the provincial snapshot, and the monthly provincial detail from March 2026 in editable form.
