The municipalities around Toronto
The Greater Toronto Area is the City of Toronto plus four regional municipalities, and those four are governments rather than lines on a map: each has a council, a budget and a levy that appears as its own column on every tax bill below. Their 24 member municipalities are here, each with its own hub and its own pair of calculators, all measured from two tables. The board's price index and the province's tax return. The interesting question is not what any one of them costs but how they differ, and in Ontario the number everyone compares is charged against a value from a decade ago.
All 24, sorted by distance from downtown
Price is TRREB's MLS® Home Price Index composite benchmark for July 2026, the same series and the same month the Toronto pages quote. The tax columns are the province's Financial Information Return for the 2024 tax year. The two rate columns are the point of this table. The first is what the councils publish, charged against the property's value on 1 January 2016. The second is what that works out to on what a home costs today, and they do not rank these places in the same order.
| Municipality | Region | km | Benchmark home | Year | Published rate | Rate you pay | Annual bill |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Toronto | Single tier | 0 | $928,200 | -3.83% | 0.71% | 0.47% | $4,332 |
| Vaughan | York | 26 | $1,128,500 | -5.52% | 0.71% | 0.47% | $5,314 |
| Mississauga | Peel | 29 | $880,200 | -5.04% | 0.95% | 0.55% | $4,850 |
| Markham | York | 30 | $1,058,600 | -7.65% | 0.68% | 0.49% | $5,149 |
| Richmond Hill | York | 34 | $1,166,500 | -6.16% | 0.72% | 0.50% | $5,799 |
| Brampton | Peel | 40 | $842,800 | -6.28% | 1.11% | 0.59% | $4,978 |
| Pickering | Durham | 41 | $875,700 | -5.04% | 1.10% | 0.60% | $5,297 |
| Oakville | Halton | 43 | $1,152,300 | -3.90% | 0.80% | 0.52% | $6,025 |
| Ajax | Durham | 48 | $848,900 | -5.11% | 1.14% | 0.61% | $5,202 |
| Whitchurch-Stouffville | York | 49 | $1,162,500 | -5.65% | 0.80% | 0.55% | $6,415 |
| Aurora | York | 52 | $1,138,900 | -4.57% | 0.83% | 0.47% | $5,386 |
| King | York | 56 | $1,572,200 | -5.23% | 0.86% | 0.44% | $6,858 |
| Halton Hills | Halton | 56 | $988,600 | -4.05% | 0.89% | 0.47% | $4,621 |
| Whitby | Durham | 57 | $914,400 | -4.61% | 1.26% | 0.62% | $5,688 |
| Milton | Halton | 57 | $876,800 | -2.74% | 0.77% | 0.61% | $5,375 |
| Newmarket | York | 60 | $1,008,500 | -6.26% | 0.87% | 0.49% | $4,962 |
| Caledon | Peel | 61 | $1,092,300 | -6.73% | 0.89% | 0.47% | $5,174 |
| Burlington | Halton | 65 | $855,600 | -2.98% | 0.86% | 0.60% | $5,096 |
| East Gwillimbury | York | 66 | $1,119,300 | -7.66% | 0.85% | 0.45% | $4,997 |
| Oshawa | Durham | 66 | $711,400 | -6.47% | 1.43% | 0.66% | $4,678 |
| Uxbridge | Durham | 72 | $1,059,500 | -8.47% | 1.18% | 0.56% | $5,943 |
| Georgina | York | 85 | $733,100 | -6.56% | 1.11% | 0.56% | $4,099 |
| Scugog | Durham | 85 | $939,400 | -2.28% | 1.26% | 0.56% | $5,278 |
| Clarington | Durham | 90 | $747,900 | -4.44% | 1.29% | 0.63% | $4,705 |
| Brock | Durham | 106 | $655,500 | -9.03% | 1.35% | 0.56% | $3,638 |
The rent is deliberately not a column. CMHC surveys the Toronto census metropolitan area by zone and the zones are not municipal boundaries, so there is no rent published for Brock Township or Halton Hills. Printing the regional average 24 times would look like a comparison and would be nothing of the kind. Every calculator in this layer opens with the regional two-bedroom figure of $2,045 and says on the page that it is regional. The rate you pay is this site's arithmetic rather than a published figure, derived below and applied identically to every row.
Every rate in Ontario is charged against a price from 2016
Ontario values property at its market value on a date the province fixes by regulation, and that date has been 1 January 2016 for every tax year since 2017. The reassessments due in 2020 and since were deferred and have not happened. So a rate published by a council in this region is not a rate on what a home is worth: it is a rate on what that home was worth a decade ago, and it can only be compared with another municipality's if their prices have moved by the same amount since. They have not.
A typical home in Brock is now worth 2.43 times its assessment; in Milton it is worth 1.26 times. Both are taxed on the old number. Milton is the clearest case of what that does: its prices rose 43.7% in the year to January 2016, so it was assessed at the top of a boom and has risen least of the twenty-four since. It publishes 0.77%, the 4th lowest rate of the 24, and a buyer there pays 0.61%, the 4th highest. Nothing about that municipality's budget did it. The valuation date did.
The freeze compresses the whole table. The published rates here run from 0.68% in Markham to 1.43% in Oshawa, a spread of 2.1 to one. The rates buyers actually pay run from 0.44% in King to 0.66% in Oshawa, a spread of 1.5 to one. More than half the apparent difference between these municipalities is an artefact of when they were last valued.
How the derivation works, because it is ours rather than the province's. Ontario publishes no ratio between assessment and market value, unlike North Carolina, which certifies one. What it does have is the same board publishing the same index for the same municipality at both dates. So each row's published rate is multiplied by that municipality's own composite benchmark in January 2016 divided by its benchmark in July 2026. One method, one publisher, every row. It is an estimate and it is marked as one wherever it appears; the annual bill beside it is not, because the published rate charged against the frozen assessment and the derived rate charged against today's price are the same number.
Two more things the rate column hides. Most of what you pay is not set by your council: in Oshawa, 1.43% is the total and the regional and education portions are the larger part of it. And the price spread is real regardless: Brock at $655,500 and King at $1,572,200 are in the same metropolitan area, a factor of 2.4.
All 24 of them fell
Every municipality in this layer is down on the composite benchmark over the year to July 2026, from -2.28% in Scugog to -9.03% in Brock. So is the City of Toronto, at -3.83%. That is the context for every calculator in this layer, and it is why the appreciation input on all of them opens at 1% and says plainly that a positive number is a long-run assumption rather than a description of the present.
The apartment index fell harder than the detached one almost everywhere. Of the 19 municipalities here with both indexes, the apartment benchmark fell further in 16, and the extreme is Brampton, where apartments fell 16.44% against 6.53% for detached houses. The City of Toronto's own pair, 7.09% against 4.40%, is the mild version of the same split. Which half of this market you are buying into matters more right now than which municipality you buy in.
5 of these municipalities have no apartment index at all: King, East Gwillimbury, Georgina, Scugog and Brock. There is not enough apartment stock trading in them to compute one, which is a fact about those places rather than a gap in the data. Their pages carry the composite and the detached benchmark and say so.
And in 1 of these 24, twenty percent down is the floor. Mortgage default insurance in Canada is capped at a purchase price of $1,500,000, and above it there is no insured mortgage at any down payment. A benchmark home is over the cap in King. The cap is on the price rather than the loan, which makes it a cliff rather than a slope.
Four regions, and all four are governments
Unlike the groupings on most pages of this site, these four were not invented here. Durham, Halton, Peel and York are upper-tier municipalities with councils, budgets and the levy that appears as the regional column in the province's tax return, and each municipality below is a lower-tier member of exactly one of them. That is also why the tax rates cluster the way they do: everyone in Durham pays Durham's levy, and it is the largest regional levy of the four.
Peel Region
Mississauga Canada's seventh-largest city, with the country's largest airport inside it. · Brampton The fastest-growing large city in the region, and the youngest. · Caledon The rural two-thirds of Peel, with a highway being built through it.
York Region
Vaughan The only municipality outside Toronto with a subway station. · Markham The lowest published tax rate in the region, and a technology corridor to pay for it. · Richmond Hill The municipality the subway is being extended to, on a line that floods. · Whitchurch-Stouffville A rail terminus, a village core and a great deal of protected land around both. · Aurora Smaller and older than its neighbours, and priced above both. · King The most expensive municipality in this layer, and the emptiest. · Newmarket A real main street, a regional hospital, and York Region prices. · East Gwillimbury The fastest-growing municipality in the country between two censuses. · Georgina Lake Simcoe frontage at half the York Region price.
Durham Region
Pickering The nearest Durham municipality to Toronto, with a nuclear station on its waterfront. · Ajax A wartime munitions town that became one of the region's most diverse suburbs. · Whitby Durham's seat of government, and its steadiest housing market. · Oshawa The highest published tax rate in the region and the largest gap between the rate and the bill. · Uxbridge The trail capital of Canada, on the moraine, with no train to Toronto. · Scugog Port Perry on a lake, and farmland in every other direction. · Clarington Four towns, a nuclear station and a GO extension being built toward them. · Brock The smallest, furthest and cheapest municipality here, and the one that fell hardest.
Halton Region
Oakville A town of 214,000 with the highest benchmark price in Halton. · Halton Hills Georgetown, Acton and the Greenbelt between and around them. · Milton The town that boomed before the assessment froze, and pays for it now. · Burlington Between the escarpment and the lake, and the steadiest market of the twenty-four.
The City of Toronto is the reference here rather than a row, which is the same call this site makes about Vancouver in Metro Vancouver and the opposite of the one it makes in the three Florida layers. A place gets exactly one hub, and Toronto's is at /toronto with four neighbourhood guides under it. Its line at the top of the table is on the same two tables and the same tax year as everything below it, so the comparison has a middle; the City's own 2026 rate of 0.767311% is on its pages, and it is a later year rather than a different number for the same one.
Sources
Every number above is published by someone else and dated, except the rate on market value, which is derived here by one stated method from two published figures. The forward-looking rates on the calculators (appreciation, rent growth, the return on invested savings) are assumptions rather than facts and are labelled as such on each page. Tax figures describe the 2024 tax year on assessments dated 1 January 2016.
Why 2024 and not 2025. The 2025 returns were still coming in when this layer was built: seven of these 24 municipalities had not filed, among them Pickering, Whitby, Milton, Newmarket and Aurora. A complete table on one year is worth more than a partial one on a fresher year, because the entire point of the comparison is that the rows are measured alike. It moves to 2025 in one step rather than piecemeal.
- Market Watch, July 2026: MLS® Home Price Index by municipality · Toronto Regional Real Estate Board, retrieved 2026-08-14
- Market Watch, January 2016: MLS® Home Price Index by municipality · Toronto Regional Real Estate Board, retrieved 2026-08-14
- Financial Information Return 2024, Schedule 22: Municipal and School Board Taxation · Ontario Ministry of Municipal Affairs and Housing, retrieved 2026-08-14
- Rental Market Survey: Toronto, average rent by bedroom type, October 2025 · Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation, retrieved 2026-08-14
- Census Profile, 2021 Census of Population · Statistics Canada, retrieved 2026-08-14
- Assessment Act, R.S.O. 1990, c. A.31 · Government of Ontario, retrieved 2026-08-14
- Calculating Land Transfer Tax · Ontario Ministry of Finance, retrieved 2026-08-11
- Municipal Land Transfer Tax rates and fees · City of Toronto, retrieved 2026-08-11
- Residential rent increases · Government of Ontario, retrieved 2026-08-11
- Retail Sales Tax · Government of Ontario, retrieved 2026-08-11
Nothing here is a listing, a lender quote or financial advice. Councils set rates every spring, the board publishes a new index every month, and whenever Ontario finally reassesses, every derived rate on this page changes at once. Confirm anything you plan to act on. Read the research and sourcing methodology for how the line between a fact and an assumption is drawn on this site.