Understand Oshawa before you commit to an address
Oshawa is 175,000 people, the largest city in Durham, built around the General Motors plant that has been assembling vehicles there since 1918 and around Ontario Tech and Durham College since 2003. It is the cheapest large municipality in this layer and the one with the highest published tax rate. The figures here come from two tables measured the same way in all 24 municipalities around Toronto: the board's own price index and the province's own tax return. The rent is a Toronto-wide figure rather than a local one, because nobody surveys rents municipality by municipality here.
What it actually costs to live here
Two calculators built on Ontario's own rules rather than a generic template: Canadian semi-annual compounding, the real minimum down payment tiers, and the closing costs this province charges rather than the ones it doesn't.
Rent or buy in Oshawa
Whether buying here beats renting, and the year it turns over. Both households start with the same cash and whichever has the cheaper month invests the difference, so the comparison is not rigged in either direction. Note that the municipal land transfer tax Toronto charges does not apply out here, which is worth real money.
Mortgage calculator
Semi-annual compounding, the payment frequencies that actually shorten the loan, the CMHC premium under twenty percent down and Ontario's 8% sales tax on it, and the provincial land transfer tax with its first-time buyer refund.
Then work out whether Oshawa is the right part of the region
There are no neighbourhood guides for Oshawa yet: the sourced, guide-by-guide treatment on this site runs to the City of Toronto's own neighbourhoods so far. What is here instead is the whole region on one comparable footing, and the city at the middle of it.
All 24 municipalities around Toronto
Every municipality in the four regions on one comparable footing: the benchmark price, the rate its council publishes, the rate a buyer actually pays once the 2016 assessment freeze is undone, and the gap between the two, which reorders the table.
Compare the region →Toronto, neighbourhood by neighbourhood
Sourced guides to the city at the middle of all this, one in each of its four community council areas, plus the two land transfer taxes a purchase inside the city limits attracts and this one does not.
Browse the city guides →What buying in Oshawa actually involves
Oshawa is the sharpest example of what this layer exists to show. The published residential rate is 1.43%, the highest of the twenty-four. But the typical home here is worth 2.18 times its January 2016 assessment, the third largest gap in the region, so the rate that actually lands on a buyer is about 0.66% of what the house costs. The published rate overstates the burden by more than half.
The market here has been reshaped twice in twenty years, first by the contraction of automotive employment and then by buyers priced out of everywhere west of it. What that means for a purchase is that the older neighbourhoods and the new subdivisions in the north of the city are very different propositions.
Check these before you commit
- The specific neighbourhood, because Oshawa's price range within the city is wider than most of this layer's
- The age and condition of a pre-1970 house's wiring, plumbing and roof
- Distance to the GO terminus and to the 401 interchange you would use
- For student-area property, whether any rental use is legal and licensed
The rent shown on these pages is CMHC's Toronto CMA average rather than a figure for this municipality, because the survey's zones are not municipal boundaries. It is marked as regional everywhere it appears and it is not a comparison between the places in this layer.
Sourced, dated, and separated from the guesswork
The calculators open with real Oshawa figures: the benchmark price, market rents, the property tax rate this city actually levies: each one cited and stamped with the period it describes. Every one of them is an editable input, because a figure that describes the whole city rarely describes your purchase.
Forward-looking rates are a different kind of number. Appreciation, rent inflation and investment returns are assumptions, not facts, and they are labelled that way wherever they appear. Read the research and sourcing methodology for how the line is drawn.
- Benchmark price and market rents: published statistics, dated to the month.
- Property tax, transfer costs and insurance premiums: the municipal and provincial schedules.
- Appreciation, rent growth and investment returns: assumptions you should change.
- Nothing here is a lender quote, a pre-approval or financial advice.