Cost defaults

Every default the calculator pre-fills is a researched, cited figure — not a guess baked into the code. Here is where each one comes from, and how much to trust it.

Property tax: 0.7673%

This is the City of Toronto’s published 2026 total residential rate — the city rate plus the education rate plus the city building fund levy — applied to assessed value. It is the hardest number on this page: an actual legislated rate, not an estimate. Note that it applies to your MPAC assessed value, which often lags market price; the calculator applies it to home value as a simplification.

Maintenance: 1% of home value per year

A heuristic, and honestly labelled as one. The widely cited rule of thumb is to budget this share of the home’s value annually for upkeep and repairs; surveyed opinions run from 1% to 3% (occasionally 5%) for older homes. CMHC’s own guidance recommends a maintenance plan but publishes no percentage. Treat the default as a floor for an older Toronto house.

Insurance: about $2,000 per year

Home insurance is the one cost that genuinely does not scale with market value — premiums track rebuild cost, not what the land is worth — so no credible percentage-of-home-value figure exists. Published averages for a Toronto detached home cluster around $2,000 annually (Ontario-wide averages ran from roughly $1,400 in 2025 to about $2,200 by mid-2026, with Toronto near the top of that range). One honest caveat: the calculator’s input is expressed as a rate on home value, which sits awkwardly with a dollars-per-year reality — on an expensive Toronto lot, a percentage-based figure will overstate insurance, so check the implied dollar amount against a real quote.

Utilities: $400 per month

Hydro, natural gas, and water/wastewater for a detached GTA home. Published guides put the seasonal range at roughly $250–$580 a month (gas dominates in winter); the default is the approximate midpoint.

Selling costs: 5.8% of sale price

Built up from the standard Toronto arrangement: a 5% commission split between the listing and buyer’s agents, plus 13% HST on that commission (5.65% of the price so far), plus roughly $1,000–$1,600 in seller-side legal fees. That lands at about 5.8% all-in for a typical sale — negotiated or discount commissions can bring it closer to 4%. The engine deducts these costs from sale proceeds before computing any capital gain, matching CRA’s treatment of selling outlays.