Etobicoke Property Taxes: What You Actually Pay and Why Your Neighbour Pays Less

Every residential property in Toronto pays the same property tax rate. In 2026 it is 0.767311 per cent of assessed value. So when your neighbour's bill is lower than yours on a nearly identical house, the rate is not the reason. The assessment is, and the reason those assessments are strange is that they are still built on values from January 1, 2016.

Budgeting for a purchase and want the real carrying costs? Talk to us and we will put the tax, utilities and fees on one page before you commit.

The 2026 rate, broken down

Source: City of Toronto, Property Tax Rates and Fees, 2026.

The 2026 budget raised the combined residential rate by 2.2 per cent, made up of a 0.7 per cent increase on the property tax line and 1.5 per cent on the City Building Fund levy. On the City's average assessed home, valued at $692,140, that works out to about $91.53 a year, or $7.63 a month.

What the bill looks like

Calculated at the 2026 total residential rate of 0.767311 per cent. These are assessed values, not market prices.

The part that confuses everyone

That last line matters more than any of the numbers above it. The assessed value on your tax bill is not what your house is worth. Property assessments for the 2026 tax year are still based on fully phased-in values as of January 1, 2016. Ontario was due to move to a January 1, 2020 valuation date, postponed it during the pandemic, and has renewed that postponement every year since.

Ten years is a long time for a market to drift away from a snapshot. Parts of Etobicoke that were quiet in 2016 and are not quiet now, south of the Queensway in particular, carry assessments that look low against today's prices. Areas that were already expensive in 2016 have had less room to run. Two houses that would sell for the same number today can easily carry different assessments and different bills, purely because of where each one sat in 2016.

The other costs that catch buyers out:

• Land Transfer Tax in Toronto: What Etobicoke Buyers Actually Pay in 2026
• What Do Etobicoke Sellers Actually Net? The Real Math on Your Bottom Line
• How Much Money Do You Need to Buy a Home in Etobicoke in 2026?

What buyers should actually do about it

Check the current tax figure on any listing you are serious about, and treat it as a starting point rather than a promise. If the house has been substantially renovated or rebuilt, MPAC can and does update the assessment for the improvement, and the bill you inherit may not be the bill the seller has been paying.

Then put the monthly number into your budget properly. On a $1,000,000 assessment the tax alone is $639 a month, which is roughly what a two-bedroom condo pays in maintenance fees. Buyers coming out of a condo often plan carefully for the mortgage and forget that the fee they were escaping has a freehold equivalent.

The counterpoint

There is a fair argument that Toronto homeowners have had it easy on this line. Toronto's residential rate is among the lowest of any major Ontario municipality, and the frozen assessment base has protected owners in fast-appreciating pockets from bills that would have followed their market values up. The flip side is that owners in areas that appreciated more slowly since 2016 have been carrying a proportionally heavier share.

Whenever the province does restore a current valuation date, that unwinds, and it unwinds hardest in the neighbourhoods that gained the most since 2016. Nobody should plan a purchase around a reassessment that has been postponed year after year, but if you are buying in a pocket that has run well ahead of its 2016 value, it is worth knowing that today's tax bill is the floor rather than the ceiling.

Want the full carrying cost on a specific Etobicoke property? Start here and we will pull the numbers.

Dave Dubbin
Etobicoke Real Estate Expert
Dave Dubbin & Associates
Real Estate Broker for Etobicoke and Toronto
Sotheby's International Realty, Canada