The municipalities around Vancouver
Metro Vancouver is not a statistical area someone drew on a map — it is a federation with a board, a budget and a levy on every tax bill below. Twenty-one municipalities belong to it, plus an electoral area and a treaty first nation, and 2,642,825 people lived in them at the 2021 census; the region passed three million in 2024. These are the 20 municipalities other than Vancouver itself, each with its own hub and its own pair of calculators, and all of them measured from one provincial table — because the interesting question is not what any one of them costs but how they differ, and the number everyone compares is the wrong one.
All 20, sorted by distance from downtown
Every column but the rent comes from Schedule 704, the Ministry of Municipal Affairs' annual table of taxes and charges on a representative house — the same house in every row, assessed by BC Assessment as of 1 July 2025 for the 2026 tax year. The bill column is the one to read. It is the rate column plus the parcel taxes and utility charges that no advertised rate includes, and the two columns rank these municipalities in nearly opposite orders.
| Municipality | Part of the region | km | Representative house | Rate | Parcel + fees | Annual bill | Two-bed rent |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vancouver | Burrard Peninsula | — | $2,508,938 | 0.34% | $2,540 | $10,977 | $2,638 |
| City of North Vancouver | North Shore | 5 | $2,056,556 | 0.35% | $1,931 | $9,081 | $3,286 |
| West Vancouver | North Shore | 6 | $3,514,285 | 0.32% | $3,022 | $14,403 | $3,616 |
| District of North Vancouver | North Shore | 9 | $2,200,711 | 0.33% | $2,571 | $9,793 | $3,286 |
| Burnaby | Burrard Peninsula | 11 | $2,066,751 | 0.33% | $1,686 | $8,472 | $2,530 |
| Richmond | The Fraser delta | 13 | $1,910,200 | 0.35% | $2,251 | $9,010 | $2,678 |
| Belcarra | Tri-Cities and Indian Arm | 15 | $1,943,328 | 0.36% | $3,877 | $10,912 | $2,750 region |
| New Westminster | Burrard Peninsula | 18 | $1,621,483 | 0.48% | $4,695 | $12,467 | $2,498 |
| Port Moody | Tri-Cities and Indian Arm | 18 | $1,855,611 | 0.43% | $1,856 | $9,819 | $2,650 est. |
| Bowen Island | North Shore | 19 | $1,618,730 | 0.42% | $4,630 | $11,387 | $2,750 region |
| Anmore | Tri-Cities and Indian Arm | 20 | $2,595,128 | 0.36% | $3,350 | $12,736 | $2,750 region |
| Lions Bay | North Shore | 21 | $2,218,574 | 0.33% | $4,776 | $12,076 | $2,750 region |
| Surrey | South of the Fraser | 22 | $1,599,454 | 0.34% | $2,247 | $7,729 | $2,144 |
| Delta | The Fraser delta | 23 | $1,433,759 | 0.40% | $1,658 | $7,449 | $2,500 est. |
| Coquitlam | Tri-Cities and Indian Arm | 24 | $1,700,545 | 0.39% | $1,753 | $8,304 | $2,388 |
| Port Coquitlam | Tri-Cities and Indian Arm | 25 | $1,391,709 | 0.38% | $1,459 | $6,713 | $2,400 est. |
| Pitt Meadows | Ridge Meadows | 32 | $1,137,132 | 0.46% | $1,853 | $7,108 | $2,250 est. |
| White Rock | South of the Fraser | 37 | $1,864,503 | 0.43% | $1,962 | $10,015 | $2,550 est. |
| Maple Ridge | Ridge Meadows | 39 | $1,237,833 | 0.45% | $1,810 | $7,425 | $2,200 est. |
| City of Langley | South of the Fraser | 39 | $1,269,858 | 0.42% | $1,898 | $7,240 | $2,292 |
| Township of Langley | South of the Fraser | 44 | $1,470,866 | 0.36% | $1,922 | $7,242 | $2,350 est. |
The house value is not a sale price and not the benchmark on the Vancouver pages. It is BC Assessment's representative single-family dwelling, valued a year before the tax year, which is what makes twenty municipalities comparable with each other and what makes it a different series from the $1,088,800 MLS® HPI composite the Vancouver pages quote — that one is a current market index across all property types. The rent column is the weak one and is marked accordingly: unmarked where the publisher reports that municipality by name, “est.” where it is an interpolated regional figure, and “region” for the four villages with essentially no rental stock, which carry the Metro Vancouver average.
The lowest tax rate in the region buys the highest tax bill
West Vancouver has the lowest residential rate of these 20 municipalities at 0.32% — and the highest annual bill, $14,403. New Westminster has the highest rate at 0.48% on a house worth $1,621,483, less than half West Vancouver's. Both facts have one cause: a municipal budget is divided across an assessment base, so the wealthier the base, the lower the rate needed to fund the same fire hall. The rate is an output of the arithmetic, not an input, and ranking places by it tells you roughly the opposite of what you wanted to know.
The charges that are not in the rate at all. Parcel taxes are flat annual amounts levied per property rather than per dollar of value, and user fees are water, sewer and solid waste. Together they run from $1,686 a year in Burnaby to $4,695 in New Westminster — a gap of $3,009 a year that appears on no tax rate comparison anywhere. New Westminster's figure is the highest in the province for a reason worth knowing: it is the only city in British Columbia that runs its own electrical utility, so the power bill arrives from the city. The four smallest municipalities — Anmore, Belcarra, Bowen Island and Lions Bay — are high for the opposite reason: a village with no commercial tax base funds fire, roads and water through flat charges rather than through the mill rate, and Anmore's $1,795 in parcel taxes is the largest in the region.
And one levy that sits above all of it. The province charges an additional school tax of 0.2% on the slice of residential value between $3 million and $4 million and 0.4% above that — and West Vancouver is the only municipality in this region whose average house is over the threshold, at $3,514,285. That is about $1,029 a year, on top of every figure in the table. Budget 2026 raised those rates to 0.3% and 0.6% for the 2027 tax year, so the same house pays roughly half again as much next year without moving. None of it is in the rates above, and each municipality's page says whether it applies there.
The price spread is worth naming too: Pitt Meadows at $1,137,132 and West Vancouver at $3,514,285 are both in this regional district, and Port Coquitlam pays $6,713 a year against West Vancouver's $14,403 — a factor of 2.1.
In 14 of these 20, twenty percent down is the floor
Mortgage default insurance in Canada is capped at a purchase price of $1,500,000. Above that there is no insured mortgage at any down payment — so twenty percent is not a lender's preference but the only way in. A representative house is over the cap in 14 of these 20 municipalities. The 6 where it is not, and where a five-percent down payment still buys a typical house, are Pitt Meadows, Maple Ridge, City of Langley, Port Coquitlam, Delta and Township of Langley.
That cap is on the price rather than the loan, which makes it a cliff rather than a slope: a purchase one dollar over it is uninsurable however much you put down. In a region where the median house sits so close to the line, it is the single structural fact that most shapes who lives where — more than the tax rate, and more than the commute.
Six groupings, and none of them official
Metro Vancouver publishes no sub-regions — the regional district is flat, twenty-one members and a board — so the grouping below is editorial, built from the names people here actually use. What is not editorial is the pattern it exposes: the North Shore and the Tri-Cities inlet villages carry the region's highest bills, and the municipalities furthest from downtown carry its highest rates and lowest bills at the same time.
Burrard Peninsula
Burnaby The second city on the peninsula, with four town centres and the cheapest municipal services in the region. · New Westminster The old capital: five SkyTrain stations, the region's highest property tax rate and its highest utility bill.
North Shore
City of North Vancouver Twelve square kilometres, five kilometres from downtown, and the only North Shore address with rapid transit. · West Vancouver The most expensive municipality in Canada, and — because of it — the lowest property tax rate in Metro Vancouver. · District of North Vancouver The mountainside around the city: Lynn Valley, Deep Cove, Edgemont, and no rapid transit at all. · Bowen Island Nineteen kilometres from downtown and reachable only by ferry — which is the whole of the calculation. · Lions Bay Fourteen hundred people on the Sea to Sky, with its own water system and the bill to match.
Tri-Cities and Indian Arm
Belcarra Six hundred and eighty-seven people on Indian Arm, and the smallest municipality in Metro Vancouver. · Port Moody The head of Burrard Inlet, two SkyTrain stations, and the highest municipal levy in the Tri-Cities. · Anmore Acre lots above Port Moody, no sewers, and the second-highest annual bill in the region. · Coquitlam The fourth-largest city in the region, and the one the SkyTrain reached most recently. · Port Coquitlam The lowest annual property tax bill of any municipality in Metro Vancouver.
The Fraser delta
Richmond An island city on the Canada Line, a metre above sea level, with the airport in it. · Delta Three separate towns, farmland between them, and no rapid transit to any of them.
South of the Fraser
Surrey Six town centres, more people arriving than anywhere else in Canada, and a SkyTrain line being built through it. · White Rock Five square kilometres on the American border, the oldest population in the region, and its own water utility. · City of Langley Ten square kilometres inside the Township, and the end of the line the region is currently building. · Township of Langley Two hundred and eighty square kilometres, six communities, and the third-lowest tax rate in the region.
Ridge Meadows
Pitt Meadows Nineteen thousand people, mostly farmland, and the lowest assessed house in the region. · Maple Ridge The cheapest houses in Metro Vancouver, at the end of the commuter rail line.
Two members of the regional district are missing from all of this and it is worth saying why. Electoral Area A — the UBC campus, the University Endowment Lands, Barnston Island and the mountain watersheds, 18,612 people in 2021 — has no municipal council and therefore no municipal tax rate, so the table this layer is built on does not contain it. Tsawwassen First Nation is a self-governing treaty nation rather than a municipality and taxes property under its treaty rather than under the Community Charter, which the provincial schedule does not cover. Both are limits of the source rather than editorial choices.
Sources
Every number above is published by someone else and dated. 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 2026 tax year on assessments dated 1 July 2025; Vancouver's own market figures on its pages are the MLS® HPI composite for July 2026, which is a different series and is not mixed into this table.
- Schedule 704 — Taxes and Charges on a Representative House, 2026 — Province of British Columbia, Ministry of Municipal Affairs, retrieved 2026-08-13
- Additional school tax rate — Province of British Columbia, retrieved 2026-08-13
- Home owner grant — Province of British Columbia, retrieved 2026-08-13
- Metro Vancouver Rent Report, June 2026 — averages by municipality — liv.rent, retrieved 2026-08-13
- Census Profile, 2021 Census of Population — census subdivisions in British Columbia — Statistics Canada, retrieved 2026-08-13
- Metro Vancouver home sales lose brief momentum — July 2026 statistics — Greater Vancouver REALTORS®, retrieved 2026-08-13
- Interest rates charged for new and existing lending by chartered banks — Bank of Canada, retrieved 2026-08-13
- Regulations amending the Insurable Housing Loan Regulations and the Eligible Mortgage Loan Regulations (SOR/2025-55) — Canada Gazette, Part II, retrieved 2026-08-13
- Minimum qualifying rate for uninsured mortgages — Office of the Superintendent of Financial Institutions, retrieved 2026-08-13
- Property transfer tax — Province of British Columbia, retrieved 2026-08-11
- Rent increases — Province of British Columbia, retrieved 2026-08-11
Nothing here is a listing, a lender quote or financial advice. Assessments are reissued every January, councils set rates every spring, and the additional school tax rates rise in 2027. 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.