I built a $15 million Hamilton-Toronto portfolio before leaving Canada for the Caribbean in 2020, so when a Canadian abroad asks whether they can still buy property back home, I'm not reciting a statute — I've stood on both sides of that line myself. The question usually arrives as some version of: "I saw the headlines about Canada banning foreign buyers — does that mean me now?" It doesn't. But the reason it doesn't is more useful than most people realize.
The short answer
Yes — a Canadian citizen or permanent resident living anywhere in the world can still buy residential property in Toronto, or anywhere else in Canada, with no restriction from the federal foreign-buyer ban and no exposure to Ontario's Non-Resident Speculation Tax or Toronto's new municipal version of it. All three of those rules are built around citizenship and immigration status, not where you live or pay tax. The federal Prohibition on the Purchase of Residential Property by Non-Canadians Act defines a "non-Canadian" as someone who is not a citizen, not registered under the Indian Act, and not a permanent resident — full stop. A Canadian passport holder in Bridgetown, Dubai, or Basseterre simply isn't a "non-Canadian" under that law, so the ban never touches them. What actually changes once you become a non-resident for tax purposes isn't your right to buy — it's the ongoing cost of holding the property, renting it out, and eventually selling it. That's where the real planning lives, and it's almost never the part people are worried about when they message me.
Where this myth actually comes from
The confusion is baked into the language regulators themselves chose. Ontario's speculation tax is called the "Non-Resident Speculation Tax," and that word is doing a lot of quiet damage. In everyday English, a Canadian who's lived in Barbados or St. Kitts & Nevis for years is obviously a "non-resident" of Canada. But that's not the legal test the NRST uses — Ontario's own guidance states plainly that citizens and permanent residents are not "foreign nationals" and are exempt whether or not they reside in Canada. The federal ban runs on the identical logic through its "non-Canadian" definition. Two governments, two pieces of legislation, one shared design choice: citizenship in, tax residency irrelevant. Media shorthand compounds it — "foreigners banned from buying Canadian homes" is a punchier headline than the accurate version, and it's the one that lands, unread, in the inbox of every Canadian who's moved abroad.
I've had that exact conversation more than once — a client convinced by the headlines that they're locked out, right up until we walk through the actual definition together and the whole worry evaporates.
What the federal ban actually prohibits
The Prohibition on the Purchase of Residential Property by Non-Canadians Act came into force January 1, 2023; section 4 prohibits a non-Canadian from purchasing residential property, directly or indirectly. It was written as a two-year measure, then extended — Ottawa announced in February 2024 that it would run two more years, to January 1, 2027.
The scope is also narrower than the headlines suggest. "Residential property" covers buildings of not more than three units, semis, rowhouses, and condo units, and the prohibition only applies inside census metropolitan areas and agglomerations — rural and recreational property outside those boundaries is out of scope entirely, even for an actual non-Canadian buyer. Regulations loosened further in March 2023: work-permit holders with 183-plus days remaining can buy, vacant land was excluded, a development-purpose exception was added, and the corporate foreign-control threshold rose from 3% to 10%. None of this touches a Canadian citizen or PR — it's just context for how narrowly targeted the rule is even against the buyers it's meant to catch. Breach it as an actual non-Canadian, though, and the penalty is real: a fine up to $10,000, plus a court-ordered sale that caps what the buyer recovers at their original purchase price.
The taxes you don't pay — and the ones you still do
Ontario's NRST has applied province-wide since March 2022, and the rate has stood at 25% of purchase price since October 25, 2022. Toronto layered its own Municipal Non-Resident Speculation Tax on top starting January 1, 2025 — 10% on residential property of one to six units within city limits. Stack them and a true foreign national buying in Toronto now faces 35% in combined speculation taxes before a dollar of ordinary land transfer tax. A Canadian citizen or permanent resident, expat or not, pays zero of that — same citizenship-based exemption, both levels of government.
What you do still pay, as a Canadian buyer regardless of where you live, is ordinary Ontario Land Transfer Tax plus Toronto's Municipal Land Transfer Tax — the double land transfer tax that's just the cost of buying inside city limits, identical to any resident. One place expats genuinely lose ground: Ontario's first-time homebuyer LTT refund (up to $4,000) and Toronto's parallel MLTT rebate (up to $4,475) both require occupying the home as principal residence within nine months of closing. An expat who buys and stays abroad can't claim either — not a foreign-buyer penalty, just an occupancy condition that has nothing to do with citizenship.
One PR-specific caveat: the exemptions above apply the same way to permanent residents, but prolonged time outside Canada can jeopardize PR status itself under immigration law's residency obligation — a separate problem worth a conversation with an immigration lawyer if it applies to you.
The real friction: holding, renting, and selling as a non-resident
This is the part almost nobody asks about up front — and the part that actually costs money.
If you leave it empty, Toronto's Vacant Home Tax applies to every owner regardless of citizenship — 3% of Current Value Assessment, raised from 1% starting with the 2024 tax year. You also file an annual occupancy declaration even on a home you live in or rent out; miss it and the city deems it vacant by default. 2025-year declarations were due April 30, 2026, and a false declaration carries fines up to $10,000.
If you rent it out as a non-resident, the CRA treats gross rent as subject to 25% withholding under Part XIII. You can reduce that to withholding on net rent by filing Form NR6 — which requires a Canadian-resident agent to manage the property — paired with a mandatory annual section 216 return. Skip the paperwork and you're withheld on the full gross amount with no deductions.
If you sell it as a non-resident, section 116 requires the buyer to withhold 25% of the gross sale price, not the gain, unless you've obtained a CRA certificate of compliance on Form T2062 before closing. Processing commonly runs six to eight weeks or longer, so non-resident sellers routinely face a large temporary holdback on their own proceeds while it works through the system.
I've watched this catch people off guard more than once — someone assumes the certificate will come through in time, and instead a chunk of their own proceeds sits frozen for far longer than they'd planned for.
There's also a quieter change if this property was ever your home: the principal residence exemption's "plus one" year is only available if you were a Canadian tax resident in the year you acquired the property. Buy while already a non-resident, and you lose that extra year; years spent as a non-resident don't shelter any of the gain either.
One caution, stated plainly rather than as a scare line: owning a home in Canada counts as a "significant residential tie" in the CRA's residency test. On its own it doesn't make you a resident again — but paired with other ties, it can shift the analysis. If you're maintaining genuine tax residency elsewhere, that's worth a conversation with your cross-border accountant before you buy, not after. I've written in detail about how the CRA actually builds that residency case, and it's the same framework whether or not you own anything back in Toronto.
Financing it from outside Canada
Getting a mortgage as a non-resident is lender policy, not law — treat any specific number as a starting point. Most Canadian lenders I see ask non-resident applicants for roughly 20% to 35% down from their own resources, with terms varying by lender and profile, plus a rate premium of about a quarter to half a point above resident pricing and conditions like funds seasoned in a Canadian account for ~30 days and 90 days of proof of funds. The federal stress test still applies regardless of residency: the minimum qualifying rate for an uninsured mortgage remains the greater of contract rate plus 2%, or 5.25%. A straight lender switch at renewal has been exempt from that test since November 2024, but a new purchase mortgage is not.
The market you'd actually be buying into
TRREB's June 2026 Market Watch reported 6,770 GTA sales, up 9.4% year over year, against an average price of $1,058,658 — down 3.9% — with the MLS Home Price Index composite down 5.4% and new listings down 12.9% to 17,282. By segment, detached averaged roughly $1.36 million (down ~2%), semi-detached around $1.04 million (down 4.6%), and condo apartments around $631,000 (down 9.5%) — the clearest soft spot, and the segment most relevant to an expat eyeing a smaller investment rather than a family home. TRREB's 2026 outlook expects sales and prices to stay broadly stable amid ongoing affordability pressure.
Worth keeping in perspective: non-resident ownership of Toronto housing was always a small slice of the market. Statistics Canada measured it at 3.4% of Toronto CMA residential properties — 7.2% for condos — in its first release covering 2017, with Ontario's share at 2.2% by 2020. Those figures are dated, with no clean 2025-26 update, but they're a reminder the policy debate was built around a narrower problem than the rhetoric implied.
Why the ban mattered less than the taxes
By the time Ottawa's prohibition came into force in 2023, the provinces had already done the work. British Columbia brought in a foreign buyers tax in 2016 and raised it to 20%; Ontario's NRST arrived in 2017, six years ahead of the federal ban, and escalated from there. A surcharge at that level isn't a speed bump — it's a wall, and anyone still buying through it was paying a very deliberate premium to be there. So the federal ban landed on a foreign-buyer cohort that had already shrunk, working from a base the StatCan figures above show was never large to begin with. Removing a small share of demand from an expensive market doesn't make that market cheap — interest rates moved Canadian housing far more in one year than the ban did in four.
Where the ban did real damage was upstream, in pre-construction. A meaningful share of new condo supply is financed by pre-sales, and when you take a slice of pre-construction buyers out of the pool and add uncertainty about who's allowed to sign, projects get harder to finance and some don't proceed. The development-purpose exception Ottawa carved into the regulations in March 2023 was a direct acknowledgement of that. It's worth knowing if you're the expat eyeing the condo segment: the policy's clearest mark wasn't on what you'd pay for a resale unit, it was on how many new ones got built.
What happens when the ban expires in 2027
As of this writing, the federal ban is legislated to expire January 1, 2027, and signals from Ottawa suggest the Carney government won't simply extend it straight through again. Housing Minister Gregor Robertson — appointed May 2025, now running the $13-billion Build Canada Homes initiative launched that September, with 11,000-plus homes reportedly committed by mid-2026 — has floated openness to foreign capital filling the supply gap and pointed to Australia's model, which bans foreign purchases of established homes through mid-2029 but carves out new-build and large-scale rental development. Nothing has been tabled to replace the Canadian ban, so treat this as a direction of travel, not settled policy.
Two things are worth separating out of that, whichever way Ottawa goes. The first: the provincial and municipal surcharges don't expire with the federal ban. A foreign national buying in Toronto would still face the same 35% the day after it lifts, so unless Queen's Park or City Hall moves, the practical change for most foreign purchasers is much smaller than the headline suggests. Where lifting it could matter fastest is the pre-construction and development capital described above, not resale bidding wars. The second: the rules here have been rewritten twice in a decade — Ontario's surcharge in 2017, Ottawa's ban in 2023 — and a two-year measure has already become four. If a plan depends on a Canadian purchase becoming legal on a specific date, that's policy risk the buyer doesn't control, and I wouldn't build around January 1, 2027 holding in either direction.
But for a Canadian expat, none of it changes your own position either way. You were never the target of the ban, and you won't be the target of whatever replaces it.
What this actually means if you're thinking about it
If you're a Canadian citizen or permanent resident abroad, the door to buying in Toronto was never closed — it was never even the door this legislation was built around. The conversation that actually matters is the occupancy rebate you'll forfeit if you don't move back in within nine months, the Vacant Home Tax if the unit sits empty, the NR6 and section 216 filings if you rent it out, the compliance certificate you'll need lined up before you sell, and — if you're also holding genuine non-resident tax status elsewhere — how a Toronto property fits alongside everything else in your life. If a Toronto property is one piece of a bigger decision about where you're building a life and paying tax — including how Caribbean real estate or citizenship-by-investment might fit in — that's the lens I use with clients. Happy to talk through your specific situation: book a call.
Key takeaways
- The federal foreign-buyer ban and both the provincial and Toronto speculation taxes are triggered by citizenship and immigration status, not by tax residency — a Canadian citizen or PR abroad is exempt from all three, no matter how long they've lived outside the country.
- What actually changes for a non-resident isn't the right to buy — it's holding costs (Vacant Home Tax), rental withholding (Part XIII / NR6 / section 216), sale withholding (section 116 and the CRA compliance certificate), and forfeited first-time-buyer rebates that require occupancy.
- The federal ban is legislated to expire January 1, 2027, but Ottawa has signaled it may not simply extend it again — nothing is settled, and it doesn't change a Canadian citizen's position either way.
- The ban was never the binding constraint on foreign demand — the 25% provincial and 10% Toronto speculation taxes were, and they don't expire in 2027; the ban's clearest damage was to pre-construction financing and new supply, not to resale prices.
- Financing as a non-resident runs on lender policy, not law — expect meaningfully higher down payments and a modest rate premium, and expect the federal stress test to apply regardless of where you live.
- Owning a Toronto property is a residential tie the CRA can weigh in a residency dispute — not disqualifying on its own, but worth coordinating with a cross-border advisor if you're also maintaining non-resident tax status.
Frequently asked questions
Does Canada's foreign-buyer ban apply to Canadian citizens living outside Canada? No. The ban applies only to "non-Canadians" — a legal term meaning someone who is not a Canadian citizen, not a status Indian under the Indian Act, and not a permanent resident. A Canadian citizen living abroad doesn't meet that definition, so the ban simply doesn't apply to them, regardless of how long they've lived outside the country.
Do I owe Ontario's 25% Non-Resident Speculation Tax if I'm a Canadian citizen living abroad? No. Despite the name, Ontario's guidance explicitly exempts Canadian citizens and permanent residents from the NRST "whether or not" they reside in Canada. The same logic applies to Toronto's newer 10% municipal version. Both taxes are aimed at non-citizens, not non-residents.
What taxes does a non-resident Canadian actually pay when selling a Toronto property? Under section 116 of the Income Tax Act, the buyer must withhold 25% of the gross sale price unless you've obtained a CRA certificate of compliance beforehand — a process that commonly takes six to eight weeks or more, creating a real holdback on your proceeds if you don't plan ahead. You may also lose the "plus one" year in the principal residence exemption calculation if you were a non-resident when you originally acquired the property.
Did Canada's foreign-buyer ban make housing more affordable? There's no strong evidence that it did. Foreign buyers were already a small single-digit share of the market before the ban arrived, after years of provincial speculation taxes had deterred them, and interest rates have moved Canadian prices far more than this policy has. Its clearest effect was upstream, on pre-construction financing and new supply.
Will the federal foreign-buyer ban be extended again after January 2027? It's unresolved as of this writing. The ban is legislated to expire January 1, 2027, and signals from the current federal government suggest a straight extension isn't the likely path — but no replacement policy has been tabled. None of that affects a Canadian citizen's ability to buy either way.
Can a non-resident Canadian get a mortgage to buy property in Toronto? Yes, but expect different terms — this is lender policy, not a legal restriction. Down payments are typically higher, funds usually need seasoning in a Canadian account beforehand, and the federal mortgage stress test still applies regardless of where you live.
