Toronto, ON · Newest permit date in this report August 19, 2026
Toronto renovation costs, seven categories side by side
Every figure below is the median construction value declared by the applicant when the permit was filed with the City of Toronto. It is not a quote, not an invoice and not a final spend. It describes the categories in the current active-permit sample. The earlier-period figures below describe older permits still present in that same active file.
- Newest permit date
- August 19, 2026
- Retained category records
- 3,261
- Permit dates covered
- Oct 2024 – Aug 2026
- Categories
- 7
All 7 categories
Ordered by median declared value, highest first. Each category name links to its own page, where the full distribution and sample for that job are set out. Property-type breakdowns appear where the records support them.
| Category | Median declared value | Typical declared range | Retained records | Permit dates covered | Active-file median vs prior 2 years |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Laneway suite | $300,000 | $150,000 to $450,000 | 260 | Oct 2024 – Aug 2026 | no change |
| Garden suite | $200,000 | $100,000 to $350,000 | 606 | Oct 2024 – Aug 2026 | ▲ +33.3% |
| Rear addition | $150,000 | $80,000 to $300,000 | 366 | Oct 2024 – Aug 2026 | ▼ −25.0% |
| Basement underpinning | $65,000 | $40,000 to $125,000 | 757 | Oct 2024 – Aug 2026 | ▼ −13.3% |
| Second suite conversion | $40,000 | $20,000 to $50,000 | 355 | Oct 2024 – Aug 2026 | no change |
| Deck construction | $30,000 | $10,000 to $59,250 | 588 | Oct 2024 – Aug 2026 | ▲ +20.0% |
| Front porch replacement | $20,000 | $10,000 to $50,000 | 329 | Oct 2024 – Aug 2026 | no change |
Median and middle half of applicant-declared construction values, City of Toronto building permit category records, 2024-10-02 to 2026-08-19. Counts are retained rows, not deduplicated projects. Prior window: 2022-10-03 to 2024-10-01. Download as CSV.
Laneway suite has a median declared value of $300,000, against $20,000 for front porch replacement — a factor of 15.0× between the highest and lowest category medians on the list. Both figures rest on 260 filings or more. The comparison does not establish equal project scope.
Change against the previous two years
Both windows are 730 days wide. The current one opens October 2, 2024 and includes later-dated records present when the report is generated; the newest included permit date is August 19, 2026. The prior window is the 730 days immediately before that. Both are computed by the same code, and a prior window that cannot clear the site’s usual 30-permit and 6-month bar shows no comparison at all rather than a guess.
4 of 7 categories moved: garden suite +33.3%, rear addition −25.0%, deck construction +20.0% and basement underpinning −13.3%. The remaining 3 returned an identical median in both windows, which is the round-number effect described below rather than a market that stood perfectly still.
Declared values cluster on round numbers. Applicants write $30,000, not $29,850. The median therefore moves in visible steps rather than smoothly, so a category shifting from $150,000 to $200,000 means the middle of the distribution crossed a round-number boundary. Read the figures as differences between the sampled records, not as a measure of changes in renovation prices.
The permit counts are not comparable between windows. The source is the city’s active permits file, and permits can drop out of it as work finishes and files close. Older surviving permits may differ in value or scope from those that disappeared. This can bias both the counts and the medians, so the comparison does not establish a change in all filings or in renovation prices.
Download the data
Category-level figures, the same ones in the table above, as a CSV. Regenerated from the database on each refresh, so a saved link keeps returning current numbers.
Columns: category_slug, category_name, page_url, median_declared_construction_value_cad, permit_count, window_start, window_end, prior_window_start, prior_window_end, prior_median_declared_construction_value_cad, prior_permit_count, median_change_pct, p25_declared_construction_value_cad, p75_declared_construction_value_cad, matched_rows_before_outlier_filter, distinct_permit_references_before_outlier_filter, analysis_window_start_utc, analysis_as_of_utc
The legacy CSV fields named window_start and window_end are the earliest and latest observed permit dates in each category, not the rolling-window cutoff. The analysis_window_start_utc and analysis_as_of_utc fields record the cutoff and report calculation time separately.
The file contains nothing below category level. There are no permit numbers, no addresses and no postal codes in it, by design rather than by omission — see what we deliberately do not do.
Archived aggregate releases
These files preserve the category-level results and a manifest of the rules used at release time. The changing City source file is not archived here, so a later download cannot be expected to reproduce an earlier release exactly.
- 2026-09-22: aggregate CSV and methods and record-flow manifest
How these figures are produced
Permits are matched to a category on their work-type, description and structure-type text. Values below the screening floor or outside the category band are excluded. Tukey fences at 1.5× the interquartile range remove statistical outliers, which are not necessarily errors. Only then is a percentile taken. A category is published only when at least 30 permits survive that, spread across at least 6 distinct months.
A declared construction value is what the applicant stated at filing. It is self-reported and unaudited, and the source does not consistently itemize the scope included. It does not record final invoices, later changes or final spending. The methodology explains the current rules, including which of the city’s two permit datasets we use and why the larger one is unusable.
What the current sample retains
The starting count below is the number of stored Toronto category rows within the current window, after the import has matched work descriptions, screened declared values and checked dates. The difference is removed by the statistical outlier rule; an outlier is not necessarily a mistake. These counts do not describe every row in the City source file.
| Category | Matched rows | Outliers removed | Retained rows |
|---|---|---|---|
| Laneway suite | 260 | 0 | 260 |
| Garden suite | 624 | 18 | 606 |
| Rear addition | 387 | 21 | 366 |
| Basement underpinning | 798 | 41 | 757 |
| Second suite conversion | 375 | 20 | 355 |
| Deck construction | 588 | 0 | 588 |
| Front porch replacement | 344 | 15 | 329 |
Total: 3,376 matched rows and 3,261 retained rows. The matched rows contain 3,367 distinct non-empty permit references. A reference can appear more than once, so these totals are not a unique-project count.
Citing this report
Journalists and researchers are welcome to cite and link this page, and to reuse the figures with attribution to Kildrin and a link back. If you need a cut that is not here — a different window, a category we have not published, or the working behind a specific number — ask and we will run it. We will also say plainly when the data cannot support the question.
Data and presshello@kildrin.ca(647) 874-4835
Suggested citation: Kildrin, “Toronto Renovation Cost Report”, https://kildrin.ca/toronto-renovation-cost-report. Include the date you accessed the current report.
The category pages
Each of these goes further than this page can: the shape of the distribution, available property-type comparisons, and what the job actually involves.