BC's housing squeeze is easing at the top and concentrating at the bottom
Rental vacancy has climbed to its highest level since at least 2010 as population growth stalled. The groups with the weakest footing in the labour market, recent immigrants and asylum claimants, are still the ones most exposed. Each finding below opens an in-depth page.
Construction is slowing into the lull
Starts fell from 50,490 in 2023 to 44,193 in 2025, and the first three quarters of 2026 are 3.0% lower again. Three of every four new homes started are apartments; single-detached starts have halved since 2021.
Open housing supply → Rental marketThe rental market has turned
Vancouver's vacancy rate went from 0.9% in 2023 to 3.7% in 2025 and Kelowna's reached 6.3%. Rents have not fallen: a Vancouver two-bedroom averages $2,363, 35% more than in 2019.
Open rental market → PopulationThe turn came from demand, not supply
BC gained 113,000 non-permanent residents on net in 2023 and lost 21,000 in 2025. Permanent immigrant arrivals fell 28% over the same two years. The population is nearly flat since late 2024.
Open population → AsylumAsylum is the one temporary group that kept growing
Claimants and protected persons living in BC quadrupled in five years. New claims then fell 44% in January–August 2026, and BC now holds 7.1% of Canada's claimant population, up from 5.3%.
Open asylum → Labour marketNewcomers carry the labour-market slack
9.1% of recent immigrants were unemployed in 2025 against 5.9% of Canadian-born workers. The gap is widest for women aged 25 to 54: 10.3% against 3.8%. Recent immigrants also participate in the labour force at a far higher rate.
Open labour market → Housing needHousing need is sharpest for refugees
In the 2021 Census, 47% of recent refugee-led renter households in BC were in core housing need, against 25% of all renters. A quarter of non-permanent-resident households were overcrowded.
Open housing need →Housing starts peaked in 2023 and are still falling
BC builds mostly apartments, mostly in Metro Vancouver. Both the total and the mix have shifted: fewer starts overall, far fewer detached houses, and large swings between municipalities from year to year.
Vacancy is the highest since at least 2010, and rents have not come down
Every major BC rental market loosened after 2023. Average rents kept rising, though at the slowest pace in Vancouver since 2021. Smaller centres saw faster rent growth than Vancouver over the past six years.
Population growth stalled when temporary residents started leaving
Almost all of the swing is in non-permanent residents. In 2023 they added 113,000 people to BC on net. In 2025 they subtracted 21,000. Permanent immigration also fell, and migration from other provinces turned slightly positive.
BC's asylum population quadrupled, then new claims fell by nearly half
Two different counts matter here. Claims are the people who ask for protection in a given month. The resident count is everyone living in BC whose claim is pending or who has been granted protection, wherever and whenever they claimed.
Newcomers work and look for work at higher rates, and are unemployed more often
Statistics Canada publishes labour-force figures for BC by years since landing. It does not separate refugees or asylum claimants, so the closest view of temporary residents is a remainder calculated from the published totals.
Refugee and temporary-resident renters carry the heaviest housing burden
These figures come from the 2021 Census and from tax records, so they describe conditions before the 2023–2025 rise in asylum claims. They are the most recent data that separate households by admission category.
Sources and method
Every figure in this dashboard was taken from the published table or report named under its chart. Derived figures are labelled as derived, and the calculation is described here.
Primary sources
- Statistics Canada 34-10-0135-01: CMHC housing starts by type of unit, quarterly, British Columbia, unadjusted.
- BC Stats, British Columbia Housing Starts for Urban Areas and Communities (April 2026): annual starts by metropolitan area and municipality.
- Statistics Canada 34-10-0127-01 and 34-10-0133-01: CMHC Rental Market Survey vacancy rates and average rents, October of each year.
- CMHC, Rental Market Report, Fall 2025: condominium vacancy and the attribution of softer demand to federal limits on non-permanent residents.
- Statistics Canada 17-10-0009-01 (population), 17-10-0040-01 (international migration components), 17-10-0020-01 (interprovincial migration), 17-10-0121-01 (non-permanent residents by type).
- IRCC, Asylum statistics, trends and data (data as of 31 August 2026) and the archived 2023 and 2024 annual pages.
- Statistics Canada 14-10-0472-01: Labour Force Survey by immigrant status, annual, British Columbia, Vancouver and Canada.
- AMSSA and BC Non-Profit Housing Association, An Examination of the Most Acute Housing Needs of BC's Newcomers (October 2024): 2021 Census custom tabulations.
- IRCC, Minister's transition binder, Immigration Outcomes (May 2025): Longitudinal Immigration Database, tax year 2022.
- IRCC, news release on Bill C-12 (26 March 2026): royal assent date and the new asylum eligibility rules.
How the data was checked
- Each series was read from the source table or document, then the values in this dashboard were sent back and compared against the source a second time. The second pass on 11 November 2026 found no mismatches in any numeric series.
- Quarterly housing starts by unit type sum to the published quarterly totals in all 47 quarters, and to the BC Stats annual totals in all 11 years.
- Monthly asylum claims for 2025 and 2026 sum to the totals IRCC shows for those periods.
Derived figures
- Annual starts by unit type are sums of the four published quarters. They match the BC Stats annual totals in every year from 2015 to 2025.
- Net interprovincial migration is in-migrants minus out-migrants.
- "Other permit holders and family" is total non-permanent residents minus the four published types.
- The "other" labour-force group is the BC total minus landed immigrants and Canadian-born. It contains non-permanent residents and Canadian citizens born abroad. Its unemployment rate (about 8.7% in 2025) is unemployed divided by labour force for that remainder and is sensitive to rounding in the published components.
- BC's share of asylum claims uses published annual totals for 2023 and 2024 and sums of rounded monthly values for 2025 and 2026.
What this dashboard cannot show
- No public source reports an unemployment rate for asylum claimants or refugees in BC.
- IRCC counts claims made in a period. Statistics Canada counts claimants and protected persons living in the province on a date, including people who claimed in earlier years or in another province. The two are not comparable.
- The charts show that trends coincide. They do not establish that any one group caused a change in rents, vacancy or unemployment.
- IRCC claim counts are preliminary and rounded to the nearest 5. Labour Force Survey estimates for small groups carry sampling error of several tenths of a point. Population and migration estimates for 2025 and 2026 are preliminary and will be revised.
- The change in an average rent is not the same as the rent increase on a given unit. CMHC reports Vancouver two-bedroom rent growth of 2.2% in 2025.
- The source report's figure for non-permanent-resident renters spending over half their income (34%) is worded ambiguously, so it is not shown.
- The Census housing figures are quoted from a secondary report. Its stated percentages differ slightly from its own tables (35% against 33% for refugee-led renters, 47% against 45% for recent refugee-led renters). The stated percentages are used here.