Mortgage delinquencies are the cleanest leading indicator of household-credit stress. On a 90+-day arrears basis — the closest definition each major economy publishes — Canada sits second-lowest in the G7 at 0.28% (CBA, March 2026), well below the United States (1.42%), the United Kingdom (0.91%), and the major European economies. Only Japan, where the post-bubble housing system has run on near-zero rates for two decades, comes in lower.
The level is not the story. The trajectory is. Canada's arrears rate has doubled in two years — from a 0.14% trough in August 2022 to 0.28% in March 2026 — while peer economies have stayed flat or declined. 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 (Mar 2026). US — MBA National Delinquency Survey, 90-day bucket (Q1 2026). UK — UK Finance, homeowner arrears ≥2.5% of balance (Q1 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 explains why Canadian banks have not had to provision aggressively for mortgage losses despite the 2024–2026 rise. But three things qualify it. (1) Coverage: the CBA series excludes non-bank lenders, where stress runs higher. (2) Velocity: Canada's two-year doubling is the steepest rise in the G7. (3) Leverage context: with G7-leading household debt-to-income (~173% in Canada vs. 100% in the US), the same arrears rate translates into a much larger absolute dollar exposure per household.
Looking only at the level is misleading because the level is a snapshot. The economically meaningful question is which direction each economy is moving, and how quickly. 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. Three of the seven — the UK, Italy, and Japan — are now below their early-2022 readings.
Sources: Canada — CBA DB50 (Aug 2022 trough 0.14% → Mar 2026 0.28%). US — MBA 90-day bucket (Q4 2022 trough ~0.78% → Q1 2026 1.42%). UK — UK Finance homeowner arrears count (2022 trough → Q1 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 — arrears fell for the second consecutive year in 2025. Italy and Japan are de-stressing outright. Canada's distinguishing feature is the combination of the fastest acceleration and the deepest prior trough — meaning the move is structurally a return to 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 has run continuously since 1995, providing the longest comparable Canadian time series available.
Source: Canadian Bankers Association, DB50 Public — Number of Residential Mortgages in Arrears, March 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% in Mar 2026 — 16 consecutive months of rising or flat readings since the Dec 2024 inflection.
The national average masks a sharply diverging regional picture. Saskatchewan leads at 0.50%, reflecting persistent commodity-price exposure. But the more striking development is Ontario: a region that ran below the national rate for the entire 2017–2023 period has now jumped to 0.31% — above the national average and triple its 0.10% level in late 2023. Quebec, by contrast, remains well-contained at 0.20%, broadly unchanged from pre-pandemic norms.
Source: CBA DB50 Public, month ended March 31, 2026. Territories included in BC (Yukon) and Alberta (NWT, Nunavut) figures.
| 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 is now above the national figure for the first time in this dataset, and the gap is widening month-on-month. RBC's GTA chart is the institution-level expression of this provincial shift.
Source: CBA DB50 Public, monthly. Ontario crossed the national rate in mid-2024 and has stayed above it since.
Why this matters for the financing pillar. Mortgage arrears are the cleanest leading indicator of household-credit stress and, by extension, financial-system risk. The national 0.28% reading is still low by historical standards — the 2009 peak was 0.45% — but the rate of change is the signal. A 100% increase in two 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. First, 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. Second, 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 — 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. The natural question is whether that downstream stage tells a different story than arrears. In Canada it largely cannot be measured: 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.
That gap is the substantive point. Rising arrears are not flowing through to rising completions, because 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 — the reason this metric is built on arrears, and foreclosure is read 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 — so 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, March 2026), Canadian mortgage arrears sit below the United Kingdom (0.91%), the United States (1.42% 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 March 2026 — the largest proportional swing in the G7 over the same window. 16 consecutive months of rising or flat readings since the December 2024 inflection.
Ontario sat below the national rate throughout 2017–2023 at roughly 0.10%, then rose to 0.31% by March 2026 — tripling in under two years and now above the Canadian average. Saskatchewan leads the provincial table at 0.50%; Quebec remains contained at 0.20%.
The CBA national series reached 0.45% in late 2009. The 2024–2026 doubling has not yet brought the system to that prior cyclical high, though the velocity from the August 2022 trough is steeper than the 2008–2009 rise.