Vancouver rents keep dropping but remain the highest in Canada
While everything from food to gas to clothes seems like it’s getting more and more expensive, one thing Vancouver is continuing to get cheaper: rent.
Zumper, a rental marketplace, recently released its Canadian rent report, where it analyzed rental data from hundreds of thousands of listings nationwide in April.
It then aggregated them to calculate the median rent for the 23 most populous metro areas.
In April, the median Vancouver rent for a one-bedroom fell by six per cent year-over-year, from $2,520 down to $2,370.
The median two-bedroom price also fell by 3.5 per cent year-over-year, from $3,450 to $3,330.
However, Vancouver is still the most expensive city to rent in the country, according to Zumper’s data. In second place is another Metro Vancouver city, Burnaby, with median May rents for a one-bedroom at $2,200, a 4.30 per cent year-over-year decline. A two-bedroom unit is at $2,700, which saw a 6.90 per cent decrease.
The most affordable city for rent on Zumper’s list is Edmonton, where the median rent for a one-bedroom is $1,250 and $1,600 for a two-bedroom.
Edmonton was also recently ranked as one of the best places to buy a home in Canada, while Vancouver was ranked as one of the worst.
What about other B.C. cities?
All B.C. markets saw annual declines for both one and two-bedroom units. Victoria saw the biggest drop, with one-bedrooms dropping by 9.7 per cent from $2,160 to $1,950.
However, despite the drop, Victoria still climbed into the top five most expensive rental markets.
Kelowna was just behind Victoria, with rents falling by 9.6 per cent for a one-bedroom, from $1,880 to $1,700 year-over-year.
Zumper said that “it seems the province’s rental slowdown has further to go,” with completed rental units from the past four years continuing to enter the market.
In 2025, Vancouver delivered 2,300 units of rental units in 2025. Data from the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation also confirms this, which recorded over 30,000 housing completions across Metro Vancouver, 5,000 more than in 2024.
“We experienced a surge of housing completions — both in condominium and rental space — in the past year … and we expect this to continue for the next couple of years,” Shiva Moshtari-Doust, CMHC’s lead economist for B.C., told Daily Hive in March.
Rents are also dropping because of B.C.’s population decline of 41,000 in 2025, due to the federal government’s policy shift to reduce the number of non-permanent residents in Canada, especially international students and temporary workers. Non-permanent residents tend to make up a large share of renters, and as their numbers decline, vacancy rates are rising.
If you want to try to take advantage of the moment, Daily Hive recently spoke with experts to get advice on how to best negotiate a lower cost of rent.