Buying a first home in Canada increasingly looks less like a single household milestone and more like a family financing project. One widely cited figure says seven in 10 recent buyers could not have purchased without help with their down payment, while newer federal housing research shows first-time buyers are also turning to co-signers, gifts and longer periods of saving. Those numbers describe different forms of assistance, however, and they should not be combined into a claim that 70% of first-time buyers have joint mortgages. What they do reveal is a significant shift in how homeownership is financed. With prices still high relative to many incomes, parental wealth, shared borrowing power and family support are becoming increasingly important factors in determining who can move from renting to owning.
The Seven-in-10 Figure Needs a Precise Reading
The seven-in-10 figure captures the scale of Canada’s affordability problem, but not quite in the way the headline may initially suggest. Mortgage Professionals Canada reported in 2025 that 70% of people who had purchased within the previous two years said they could not have bought without financial help toward the down payment. The national research covered 2,000 Canadians and pointed to gifts, loans and other outside assistance becoming important parts of the purchase process. It did not find that 70% of first-time buyers held joint mortgages, nor was the finding limited exclusively to first-time purchasers. That distinction matters because a cash gift, a family loan and a co-signed mortgage create very different financial relationships.
More recent data from Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation provide a clearer measure of shared borrowing among first-time purchasers. CMHC’s 2026 Mortgage Consumer Survey, which reached more than 4,100 mortgage consumers, found that 28% of first-time homebuyers required a co-signer other than a spouse or partner. Among buyers in that group, parents were the most commonly identified co-signers, cited by 54%. Taken together, the two sets of findings point to the same broader transformation: outside help is playing a larger role in getting buyers across the ownership threshold, even though the exact form of that assistance varies substantially from household to household.
Co-Signers Are Becoming Part of the First-Purchase Toolkit
A co-signer can solve a problem that a larger down payment alone may not fix: mortgage qualification. CMHC found that more than one-quarter of first-time buyers needed a co-signer other than their spouse or partner in its 2026 research. Parents accounted for the largest share of those arrangements, although respondents also identified children, other relatives, friends and business partners. This makes family assistance relevant not only to how much cash a buyer can assemble before closing, but also to whether the household can satisfy a lender’s income and debt requirements. In practical terms, a buyer may have accumulated substantial savings and still find that the mortgage needed for a particular property is too large to qualify for on one income.
Consider an illustrative buyer with stable employment, good credit and enough money for the required down payment, but whose income does not support the necessary loan under mortgage qualification rules. Adding a financially stronger parent can change what the lender sees on the application, because lenders assess factors including income, debts, credit history and the requested mortgage amount. That assistance can turn a rejected application into a viable one, but it also changes the nature of the family relationship. The parent is no longer simply handing over money at closing; the parent can become legally responsible for the debt. For households already stretching to buy, that difference deserves as much attention as the property’s purchase price.
The Bank of Mom and Dad Is Writing Bigger Cheques
Family gifts have also become a substantial source of first-home capital. CIBC Capital Markets estimated in 2024 that 31% of first-time homebuyers received financial help from family members, up from about 20% in 2015. The average gift among first-time buyers receiving assistance had climbed to roughly $115,000, 73% above its 2019 level. The amounts were especially striking in expensive markets: CIBC estimated average first-time-buyer gifts of approximately $204,000 in British Columbia and $128,000 in Ontario. Those figures demonstrate how parental housing wealth accumulated over decades can be converted directly into purchasing power for the next generation.
Different datasets produce different numbers because they cover different buyers, periods and definitions of assistance. CMHC’s 2026 research found that 27% of first-time homebuyers had received a gift toward their purchase. Looking across homebuyers who received gifts, the median gift was $30,000, and more than one-quarter of recipients said they could not otherwise have bought a home that met their needs. Statistics Canada provides another perspective: among homeowners younger than 35, 32.9% had received some form of familial assistance specifically connected with entering the housing market. The measures are not interchangeable, but collectively they show that family capital has moved well beyond the occasional small contribution toward closing costs.
High Prices Keep Extra Income and Family Support Relevant
Canadian home prices have cooled from the most intense periods of the pandemic-era boom, but affordability remains challenging because the starting point is still high. The Canadian Real Estate Association reported a national average sale price of $674,819 in July 2026. Its national benchmark price was 3.3% below the level of a year earlier, yet that decline does not automatically make homes easy to finance for households whose incomes and savings have not caught up with years of price growth. Buyers borrowing from federally regulated lenders must also qualify under the mortgage stress test, generally using the higher of 5.25% or their negotiated mortgage rate plus two percentage points.
The pressure appears in the amount of time people spend preparing to buy. CMHC found that homebuyers took an average of 4.4 years to save their down payment in 2026, compared with 3.4 years a year earlier. First-time purchasers had typically spent years renting before ownership; 72% had rented beforehand, for an average of 7.6 years, while 27% had lived with family or friends before purchasing. More than half of homebuyers also reported paying the maximum amount they could afford. For a household already near its borrowing limit, a second borrower, parental gift or period of living at home can therefore become the difference between remaining on the sidelines and completing a purchase.
Family Wealth Is Creating a Two-Track Path to Ownership
The growing importance of family assistance raises a larger question about who gets access to homeownership in the first place. Statistics Canada has found a strong relationship between parents’ property ownership and the housing outcomes of their adult children. People born in the 1990s whose parents owned a home were roughly twice as likely to own property themselves as those whose parents did not. Having parents who owned multiple properties was associated with an even larger difference: their adult children were nearly three times as likely to be homeowners. The advantage can arrive through money, housing provided while a child saves, inherited assets, co-ownership or help obtaining financing.
Direct co-ownership is another visible sign of that intergenerational connection. Statistics Canada found that 17.3% of residential properties owned by people born in the 1990s in 2021 were co-owned with their parents. The share was particularly high in expensive markets, including 27.2% in Toronto and 23.4% in Vancouver. Co-ownership should not automatically be interpreted as mortgage co-signing, but it demonstrates how often parents appear on the ownership side of younger Canadians’ purchases. Statistics Canada has also calculated that the median renting family headed by someone under 35 held only $12,000 in liquid assets in 2023 and faced an $80,000 shortfall, even after liquidating those assets, relative to a 20% down payment on the median-priced home. Family wealth can therefore materially alter the starting line.
A Joint Mortgage Can Open the Door—and Spread the Risk
Shared borrowing can improve access to a home, but it should not be confused with a risk-free favour. The Financial Consumer Agency of Canada describes a joint borrower as someone who signs a loan or mortgage with one or more other people and notes that co-signing is another term used for such arrangements. A joint borrower becomes equally responsible for repaying any unpaid balance. That obligation can continue to matter even when the family members involved privately agree that only one person will make the monthly payments. The lender’s concern is the legal borrowing arrangement, not the informal understanding around the dinner table.
That is why the emotional simplicity of “helping the kids buy” can hide a more complicated financial commitment. An illustrative parent might intend only to strengthen a child’s application, yet signing the mortgage can expose that parent to repayment responsibility if the primary borrower later struggles. Families also need to think beyond the closing date: plans can change, homes can be sold, relationships can shift and borrowers may eventually want to refinance or remove a co-signer. Because property ownership, mortgage liability and tax consequences are not necessarily identical and can depend on how an arrangement is structured, independent legal and tax advice can be particularly valuable before relatives combine their finances.
Government Programs Help, but They Cannot Manufacture Family Wealth
Canada has expanded several tools intended to make the first purchase easier. Eligible buyers can contribute up to $8,000 annually to a First Home Savings Account, subject to a $40,000 lifetime contribution limit, while the Home Buyers’ Plan allows eligible withdrawals of up to $60,000 from an RRSP. Since December 15, 2024, 30-year insured mortgage amortizations have also been available to all first-time homebuyers as well as purchasers of new builds, and the price ceiling for insured mortgages was increased from $1 million to $1.5 million. These measures can improve savings efficiency, reduce required monthly payments in qualifying cases or broaden the range of homes eligible for insured financing.
They do not eliminate the underlying gap between households with family capital and those without it. Even after assembling a down payment, buyers have to budget for upfront and closing expenses that the Financial Consumer Agency of Canada estimates can typically equal 1.5% to 4% of the purchase price. A tax-advantaged savings account can help a buyer accumulate money faster, but it cannot reproduce a six-figure parental gift or add another strong income to a mortgage application. That is the deeper story behind the changing first-time-buyer market: homeownership is increasingly being influenced not only by what an individual earns and saves, but also by the financial resources available within the wider family.
