Moving to Alberta from Ontario
If you are leaving Ottawa, Hamilton, Waterloo Region or London, every Toronto-based comparison you have read overstates your saving — by roughly half. Here is the accurate version.
Less than a Toronto guide will tell you, unless you are actually in Toronto. Ontario’s provincial land transfer tax is graduated from 0.5% up to 2%, with a 2.5% band above $2 million on one- and two-family residences — and Toronto is the ONLY Ontario municipality that levies a second, municipal land transfer tax on top. A buyer in Ottawa, Hamilton, Kitchener, Waterloo or London pays the provincial tax alone, so their saving on moving to Alberta is roughly half a Toronto buyer’s on the same price. Ontario also refunds up to $4,000 of provincial LTT to first-time buyers, eliminating it entirely on the first $368,000 — relief you give up by leaving, though Alberta has no transfer tax to need relief from.
The correction that matters
Toronto is the only municipality in Ontario with its own land transfer tax. Every other Ontario buyer — Ottawa, Hamilton, Kitchener, Waterloo, Cambridge, London — pays the provincial tax only.
This matters because nearly every "moving to Alberta" comparison online is written from Toronto, where the two taxes stack. Copy that number to an Ottawa reader and you overstate their saving by roughly double. The saving is still real and worth four to five figures on a typical home — it is simply half the headline.
- Ontario provincial LTT: graduated 0.5% → 1% → 1.5% → 2%, with a 2.5% band above $2 million on one- and two-family homes.
- First-time buyer refund: up to $4,000, which wipes out provincial LTT on the first $368,000 of price. Worth knowing you are giving it up — and worth noting Alberta has nothing to give relief from.
- 13% HST in Ontario versus 5% GST in Alberta, on everything you buy after you arrive.
What Alberta charges instead
Alberta has no land transfer tax and no provincial sales tax — the only province with neither. What you do pay at closing is a land titles registration levy, and it is worth stating exactly because it rose in October 2024 and most comparison pages still quote the old number:
- $50 plus $5 per $5,000 of value on the transfer of land, and
- $50 plus $5 per $5,000 of the principal on the mortgage registration.
On a $650,000 purchase with a mortgage that is roughly $1,400 in total — real money, and still a rounding error against a percentage transfer tax. Alberta’s provincial income tax runs 8% to 15%; it exists, and pages telling you otherwise are confusing it with the sales tax.
An honest word about your city specifically
The Ontario-to-Alberta corridor is real and large, but it is overwhelmingly a Greater Toronto phenomenon — driven by a housing-price shock that Ottawa, Hamilton, Waterloo Region and London never experienced to the same degree. Ottawa in particular has been gaining population from internal migration, on the same side of the ledger as Calgary itself.
So if you are leaving one of those cities, you are probably moving for a specific reason — a job, a family situation, the mountains — rather than fleeing a market. That changes what you should optimise for, and it means the loudest arguments in most relocation content were not written for you.
Your numbers, not a table that rots
Every comparison page on the internet quotes a benchmark price from the month it was written. This one doesn’t: run what your current home nets, put that into what it buys here at today’s live rates, and check the answer against real inventory. Three tools, your actual figures, current today and current next year.
Your city’s numbers, not Toronto’s
Tell me which Ontario city you’re leaving and what your home is worth. I’ll send the comparison built on YOUR transfer tax — provincial only, unless you’re actually in Toronto — what your equity buys in Calgary, and what changes for your household. One reply, no drip campaign.
Last updated 2026-08-26 · Written by Mohammad Emon, REALTOR® (SRES®) & Licensed Property Manager, KO Realty · RECA licence LIC-00666633