Short-Term Rental ROI Calculator Canada

Why investors look at STR in the first place

Toronto's private apartment vacancy rate rose from 2.5% in October 2024 to 3.0% in October 2025, and the average rent across all bedroom types still climbed from C$1,850 to C$1,913 over the same twelve months, per CMHC's Rental Market Survey data tables for Toronto. A long-term rental market that is loosening but still expensive is exactly the backdrop that pushes some owners toward short-term rental yield instead. What that backdrop doesn't change is that STR eligibility is a legal question, not a financial one, and it is answered differently in every city.

There is no federal short-term rental law

Short-term rental regulation in Canada is a patchwork of provincial and municipal rules that can bind independently of each other. British Columbia's Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act sets a province-wide principal-residence requirement that most BC municipalities inherit, while cities including Toronto and Calgary run their own separate registration or licensing regimes on top of, or instead of, that constraint. Quebec adds a third model: registration through CITQ, the province's delegated tourism-industry registrar. A calculation that ignores which of these applies to a given address is missing an input, not just a detail.

STR rules by jurisdiction, at a glance

British Columbia: one home, one secondary suite

BC's Short-Term Rental Accommodations Act limits hosting to "the usual place where they make their home day-to-day" plus one secondary suite or accessory dwelling unit on the same property — an investor cannot run a portfolio of stand-alone STR units under this rule. The requirement reaches communities with population 10,000 and over, smaller communities near larger ones, and any community that opts in; as of June 1, 2026 the province's own list ran past 80 communities, including Vancouver, Victoria, Surrey, Burnaby and Kelowna. Exemptions exist for strata hotels, fractional-ownership resorts and farm land, but the province's own page does not present that exemption list as exhaustive, so a specific property should be checked directly rather than assumed exempt.

Toronto: registration, the 180-night cap, and the C$390 fee

Toronto permits short-term rentals only in a host's principal residence, which the city defines as "where you live and the address you use for bills, identification, taxes and insurance". Entire-unit rentals are capped at 180 nights per calendar year; renting up to three individual bedrooms in an occupied home has no night cap. Registration costs C$390, is non-refundable regardless of whether the application is approved or denied, and is subject to annual increase — a fixed cost that has to clear before a single booking, and one that a naive ADR-times-365 model won't show.

Quebec: CITQ registration, and the fee depends on category

Under Quebec's law against illegal tourist accommodation, every short-term rental needs a CITQ registration certificate, valid for 12 months and showing the registration number, address, category, number of units offered, and issue/expiry dates. For 2026, the registration or renewal fee for a principal-residence establishment is C$54. Other establishment categories — non-principal-residence rentals — carry a different, higher fee schedule not covered by that figure, so a Montreal or Quebec City condo bought purely as an STR investment should not assume the C$54 rate applies.

Calgary: a business licence, with rules on egress and guest counts

Calgary requires a business licence for any stay of 0 to 180 consecutive days, split into a Primary Residence Licence, a Non-Primary Residence Licence, and a Short-Term Rental Company Licence for platforms, which carries an annual C$3,000 fee. Operating rules include no room without an egress window (multi-storey buildings exempt), a maximum of two guests per room, no overlapping bookings, a licence number required in every listing, and a C$1,000 fine per violation on conviction. Annual fire inspections by Calgary Fire Department may also apply.

What this page will not estimate: your occupancy rate

No Canadian government body — not CMHC, not Statistics Canada, not a provincial tourism ministry — publishes an official short-term rental occupancy or nightly-rate series for Canadian cities. Figures circulating online for average daily rate or occupancy by city come from private platforms or brokerages, not an official statistic, and this page will not present one as though it were. Enter your own researched ADR and occupancy assumptions into the calculator above and read the break-even occupancy it reports, rather than anchoring on an unsourced number you found elsewhere.

Model the regulatory risk, not just the yield

None of the rules above show up in an ADR-times-occupancy spreadsheet, but they cap your addressable inventory (BC, Toronto), add a fixed annual cost before your first booking (Calgary, Quebec), and can end a listing's eligibility outright if a bylaw tightens. Run the same property as a conventional hold with the rental property ROI calculator and check the yield against the cap rate calculator before treating short-term rental as the automatically higher-yield option — a property that only pencils as an STR carries a policy risk a long-term tenancy doesn't.