I am writing this for the people who got the letter, did the math on the back of it, and have not slept well since.
If that math came out frightening, start with the rate you put into it. The version going around Calgary right now takes a mortgage from 2021, renews it at 5.5%, watches the payment jump, and concludes that a lot of people are about to be forced to sell.
The arithmetic in that is fine. The input is not.
The number everyone is plugging in is the wrong number
Nobody with a prime five-year fixed renewal offer in hand is looking at 5.5% this week.
As of August 3, 2026, the rates.ca Alberta rate matrix showed five-year fixed at 4.09% on its homepage banner, a posted bank rate of 4.19%, and 3.69% in its insured, uninsured and 65% loan-to-value columns. Ratehub’s mortgage renewal page, updated August 2, 2026, stated that Canada’s lowest insured five-year fixed rate was 4.04%, with individual lender offers on the same page starting at 3.79%.
So a typical five-year fixed renewal offer is sitting around 4.1%, and the sharpest discounted offers are closer to 3.7%. That is more than a full percentage point below the 5.5% the alarming version of this story runs on, and at the low end it is closer to a point and three-quarters below.
Watch what that gap does to a real mortgage.
Take a household that bought in Calgary in 2021. CREB’s benchmark price for that year was $451,567, so call the purchase roughly $450,000. Twenty per cent down leaves a mortgage of about $360,000. CMHC’s Residential Mortgage Industry Report puts the 2021 average contract rate for uninsured five-year fixed borrowers at about 2.2%, which is the right column for a buyer with that down payment. On a 25-year amortization, that is a payment of about $1,560 a month.
Five years of payments later, the balance coming up for renewal is about $303,000, with 20 years left to run. Now renew it twice.
- At 5.5%, the circulating figure: about $2,075 a month.
- At a real current offer of roughly 4.1%: about $1,845 a month.
The payment goes up either way. Nobody is pretending otherwise, and $285 a month hurts a household budget. But the 5.5% version overstates the increase by roughly $230 a month, about $2,750 a year. That is the difference between a number most households can absorb by changing how they spend, and a number that sounds like a reason to list the house.
There is a plausible reason 5.5% keeps surfacing. CMHC’s Summer Update 2026 Housing Market Outlook forecasts the average posted five-year fixed conventional rate, meaning the sticker rate lenders advertise rather than the discounted rate borrowers actually sign, at 5.2% for 2026 and rising to 5.5% by 2028. A posted rate forecast for 2028 is not a renewal offer for this week. The gap between posted and discounted rates is a large part of why renewal math looks so much worse on paper than it does at the branch.
Sort yourself into the cohort you are actually in
“Renewal” is not one experience. The Bank of Canada’s Staff Analytical Note 2025-21, published in July 2025, broke the 2025 and 2026 renewal population apart, and the differences between the groups are larger than the averages.
Everything in this section is a projection. The Bank published it in July 2025, looking forward from a December 2024 baseline, so it describes what was expected rather than what has since been confirmed.
With that stated: the Bank projected that about 60 per cent of all outstanding Canadian mortgages would renew in 2025 or 2026, and that about 60 per cent of those renewing would see their payment increase. Measured against the whole mortgage population, that is roughly one-third of all mortgage holders in Canada facing an increase. Close to one-quarter were projected to see their payment go down by the end of 2026. Against the December 2024 baseline, the Bank projected average monthly payments up about 10 per cent for 2025 renewals and about 6 per cent for 2026 renewals.
Then the groups.
Five-year fixed from the 2020 and 2021 vintage. This is the cohort the headlines are written about, and if you are reading this worried, it is probably you. Five-year fixed mortgages were about 40 per cent of all mortgages and about 75 per cent of everyone facing an increase. The Bank projected average increases of 15 to 20 per cent across 2025 and 2026 renewals, and around 20 per cent for 2026 renewals specifically, calling this group “expected to face the largest average payment increases among mortgage holders renewing in 2026.”
Variable-rate, variable-payment. Your payment already moved, and it moved up long before this year. The Bank projected an average decline of 5 to 7 per cent for this group, and noted separately that these payments have passed their peak and should keep declining. If you are here, renewal is not your event. It already happened, in slow motion, and it is reversing.
Variable-rate, fixed-payment. The widest spread of any group. The Bank projected about 10 per cent of these borrowers facing increases above 40 per cent, and a quarter of them seeing decreases of at least 7 per cent. Same product, opposite outcomes, depending entirely on how much of your payment has been going to interest. This is the one group where I would not wait for the renewal letter to find out.
Short-term fixed. Most of the projected decreases sit here. If you signed a one, two or three-year term after the 2022 and 2023 rate hikes, you are renewing into something better than you have.
Now the number worth anchoring to. For mortgage holders facing an increase, the Bank projected the median debt-service ratio moving from 15.3% in December 2024 to 18.0% by the end of 2026. That is 2.7 percentage points more of gross income going to debt payments. To place yourself on that scale, divide your mortgage payment, principal and interest only, by your gross monthly household income. That is the Bank’s mortgage debt service ratio, the same measure behind the 15.3% and 18.0% figures, and it carries no built-in threshold for financial trouble: 18.0% is only where the Bank projected the median household facing an increase to land, so it tells you where you sit relative to that median and nothing more.
That is uncomfortable. It is a vacation, or the restaurant budget, or a chunk of the RESP contribution. It is not, for the median household in that group, a solvency event. Most of the people this describes are going to spend less on other things and stay exactly where they are.
How much of this is still ahead of us
Those figures come from a note written in July 2025 that looks across the whole 2025 and 2026 renewal window. The Bank published a newer read in its Financial Stability Report on May 28, 2026, and that one measures something different: not the whole wave, but what is left of it. It uses a December 2025 baseline and looks 12 months forward from May 2026, so its percentages describe a smaller and later population than the ones above. They are not two versions of the same count.
What that newer report says, in plain language: the Bank projected that over the following 12 months the last of the five-year, fixed-payment mortgages taken out during the pandemic would renew. That group is about 12 per cent of all outstanding mortgages in Canada, and the Bank projected their payments rising by about 15 per cent on average. The rest of the renewals in that window, roughly 14 per cent of outstanding mortgages, are variable-payment and shorter-term fixed mortgages signed after the 2022 and 2023 rate hikes, and on average the Bank projected no change in their payments at all.
Then the Bank’s own conclusion, quoted directly: “By the second half of 2027, nearly all mortgage holders facing large payment increases will have renewed.”
Read the two documents together and the shape is clear. The group facing a real shock is shrinking, it is identifiable, and the Bank has put an end date on it.
Did the wave show up in Calgary listings?
If renewals were pushing Calgary households into forced sales at any scale, the signal would be inventory. Distress sales are still listings. They arrive on the MLS like everything else, and enough of them at once makes the inventory count climb.
It is not climbing.
CREB’s August 2026 release, published September 1, 2026, put City of Calgary inventory at 6,509 units against 6,659 in August 2025, down 2.25 per cent year over year. Sales were 1,660, down 16.4 per cent. The benchmark price was $569,800, down 1.08 per cent year over year and up 0.1 per cent from July, and homes took 41 days to sell against 38 last August.
The number that matters most here is the one measuring homes arriving rather than homes sitting. New listings were 3,141, down 9.7 per cent year over year. That is the flow, and inventory is only the pool it fills. Sellers did not arrive in August. They stayed home.
One figure in that release did move the way the alarming version of this story predicts, and it is worth being precise about it rather than leaving it out. Months of supply rose to 3.92 from 3.35 a year earlier, and from 3.48 in July. But months of supply is inventory divided by sales, and Calgary’s rose because sales fell far faster than inventory did. Both halves of the fraction went down: sales by 16.4 per cent year over year against 2.25 per cent for inventory, roughly seven times the drop. A forced-sale wave does the opposite: it puts homes on the market, so inventory climbs. Calgary’s is lower than it was a year ago, and lower than it was last month.
One more qualifier, since the point of this section is to be checkable. The citywide count is not uniform underneath. Detached inventory went the other way month to month, up from 2,938 in July to 2,969 in August, and semi-detached is the one segment where inventory is genuinely growing, up 4.91 per cent year over year, with months of supply above three for the first time since January. Those are small moves against a citywide figure that fell on both comparisons, but they run in the direction the alarming version of this story predicts, and you should know they are there before you take my word for the citywide number.
That is a market that has cooled and slowed. It is not a market absorbing a supply shock.
The MLS records that a property sold. It does not record why. There is no renewal field and no box an agent ticks for financial pressure, and nobody can look at a sold record and tell you a mortgage renewal caused it. Motive is not in the data, so anyone reading it there is supplying it themselves.
A citywide inventory count is also a blunt instrument. It is one number covering every price band, every property type and every quadrant, and a genuine pocket of pressure inside one segment can sit under it without moving it. August is a clean illustration. Apartment-style homes carried 5.68 months of supply against the citywide 3.92, and an apartment benchmark of $295,400, down 8.18 per cent year over year against a citywide 1.08 per cent. Row homes sit at 3.85 months with a benchmark of $415,200, down 5.44 per cent. Both are behaving quite differently from the number at the top of this section. CREB puts the apartment story down to rental supply: “More rental supply is weighing on ownership demand from both first-time buyers and investors.” That is a supply-and-demand story rather than a renewal one. It is worth adding that even in the weakest segment the forced-selling signature is absent: apartment new listings were down 20.5 per cent and apartment inventory down 4.5 per cent. But it is a real divergence sitting underneath a calm citywide figure, and it is the kind of thing a citywide count is built to hide. The absence of a citywide signal is not evidence that no household in Calgary is struggling with a renewal. It only means the wave-of-forced-sales version of the story is not visible in the aggregate, which is exactly where it would have to appear first if it were real at the scale being described.
The national picture points the same direction. CMHC announced on May 12, 2026 that the renewal wave has peaked, and its Spring 2026 Residential Mortgage Industry Report puts the number of borrowers renewing in 2026 at about 13 per cent lower than in 2025, with rates trending down from around 4.8% in January 2025 to around 4.2% in January 2026. CMHC deputy chief economist Aled ab Iorwerth put it this way: “While the renewal wave is dissipating, many borrowers face increased financial stress.”
Both halves of that sentence are true, and CMHC published them in the same breath. Renewal stress is real. It is still not a wave of forced sales.
When renewal genuinely is a reason to move
There is a real list, and it is short.
Your amortization is already stretched as far as your lender will allow. Extending the amortization is the standard lever for absorbing a payment increase, and it is not one you can pull twice. If you are already at your lender’s limit, the new payment is the payment.
You hold a variable-rate mortgage with a fixed payment and you are in negative amortization. This is the group the Bank of Canada projected would include about 10 per cent of borrowers facing increases above 40 per cent. If your payment has not covered your interest for a while, you should not be finding out the size of your renewal from the letter.
The third case has nothing to do with the mortgage at all. A retirement, a job loss, a business that never came back, a separation: if your household income has materially changed since 2021, the renewal is not what changed. It is just the date the change becomes unavoidable, and the answer may genuinely be a smaller mortgage on a smaller home.
And then there is the house itself. Too big since the kids left, wrong side of the city for a new job, stairs that no longer work. If you were already circling a move, a renewal is a reasonable deadline to act on. It is a deadline, not a reason.
If you land in one of the first three, the order of operations still is not “call a realtor.” Call your lender, then call a mortgage broker, and only if the numbers still do not work, call me.
When it is not, and what to do instead
For most people reading this, the renewal is a budget event and not a housing event, and the useful first moves are all on the mortgage side.
Get your real number, in writing. Ask your lender for your current balance and the rate they are actually offering you. Not the posted rate, not the rate in a headline, and not the rate on your neighbour’s renewal.
Then run it yourself, before anyone runs it at you. Put your real balance, your remaining amortization and the offered rate into the mortgage calculator and look at the monthly figure. It takes two minutes.
The rate question itself goes to a mortgage broker. Which lender, which term, fixed or variable, whether to switch: that is their job and it is not mine. I do not give rate advice, and you should not take it from a realtor.
Only then decide about the house, and decide it on housing grounds. Space, location, stairs, commute, schools, whether you want to be in that home in five years. Those are the reasons to sell a house. If none of them apply and the new payment is survivable, the answer is to renew and stay.
If you do want the longer version of what a sale actually nets after costs, I worked through it in how much it costs to sell a home in Calgary.
The uncomfortable part for me is that the calm version of this story produces fewer listings than the alarming one. I would still rather you finish this, go renew your mortgage, and never call me.
Common questions
Should I sell my house because my mortgage renewal went up?
Almost certainly not, on its own. A renewal changes your monthly budget. Selling changes where you live, and it costs real money to do. Work out the actual new payment from your actual balance and your actual offered rate before you decide anything, because most people arrive at this question having applied a headline rate to their original mortgage amount rather than the balance they have left. Selling makes sense when the house has stopped working for you, or when you have already exhausted the options your lender and a mortgage broker can offer. It rarely makes sense as a first response to a renewal letter.
How much will my payment actually go up at renewal in 2026?
It depends on your product, and the spread is wide. The Bank of Canada projected in July 2025 that mortgage holders renewing in 2026 would see an average monthly payment about 6 per cent above the December 2024 baseline, but that average hides the split. Five-year fixed holders from the 2020 and 2021 vintage were projected to face the largest increases, averaging around 20 per cent for 2026 renewals. Variable-rate, variable-payment holders were projected to see average declines of 5 to 7 per cent. Short-term fixed holders were mostly projected to see decreases. Run your own balance rather than a national average.
Is Calgary about to get a wave of forced sales?
There is no sign of it in the listing numbers, which is where it would have to show up first. CREB’s August 2026 release put new listings at 3,141, down 9.7 per cent year over year, and City of Calgary inventory at 6,509 units against 6,659 in August 2025, down 2.25 per cent. A wave of forced selling puts homes on the market. Calgary’s sellers stayed home. Months of supply did rise, to 3.92 from 3.35, but that is because sales fell about seven times faster than inventory did rather than because listings piled up. Two caveats worth keeping. A citywide count is a blunt instrument and can hide pressure inside a single price band or property type, and August shows exactly that, with apartment-style homes carrying 5.68 months of supply and a benchmark down 8.18 per cent against a citywide 1.08 per cent. And nobody can read motive off listing data at all, because the MLS records that a home sold and never why.
What if I cannot afford the new payment?
Call your lender before you call anyone else, and call a mortgage broker after that. There are levers on the mortgage side that get used before the house is ever on the table, and which of them are available to you depends on your lender, your product and your equity position. Selling is the last item on that list, not the first. If you get to the end of those conversations and the numbers still do not work, then it becomes a housing decision and it is worth talking to a realtor about what your home would realistically sell for.
Should I renew with my current lender or switch?
That is a real question with real money attached to it, and it is not mine to answer. Rate, term, lender and product are a mortgage broker’s work. I do not give rate advice and you should not take it from a realtor. What I will say is that the difference between the offer your current lender sends unprompted and what is available in the wider market can be worth more per month than anything I could negotiate for you on a sale price, so it is worth an hour of somebody’s professional time.
Does a higher mortgage payment mean my house is worth less?
No. Those are two separate things. Your payment is set by your balance, your rate and your remaining amortization. Your home’s value is set by what buyers in your community are paying for homes like yours. CREB put Calgary’s benchmark price at $569,800 in August 2026, down 1.08 per cent from a year earlier, so values have softened modestly citywide, but that is a market movement and it has nothing to do with what your lender is quoting you. If you want to know what your specific home is worth, that is a question about your street, not about your mortgage.
The honest version
The decision in front of you is not whether Calgary is about to be flooded with forced sales. It is whether the payment on your actual balance, at the rate you have actually been offered, is one you can live with. The rate driving the alarming version of this story is not the one Alberta lenders are offering, the Bank of Canada projects the cohort facing a real increase to be through the worst of it by late 2027, and Calgary’s inventory is down year over year, which is not what a forced-sale wave looks like. An unaffordable renewal deserves a lender and a broker before it deserves a for-sale sign. An uncomfortable one is a budget problem wearing a housing costume. Get your real number first, and decide about the house second.
Know what your house is worth before you decide anything
Not because you should sell. Because knowing your equity position changes how a renewal letter feels, even if you do nothing about it.
