Real Canadian mortgage math, including semi-annual compounding and default insurance. Enter your numbers and see where a purchase actually lands each month.
Estimate for planning purposes only, not financial advice. Your actual payment depends on your lender, rate, and qualification.
Canadian fixed-rate mortgages compound semi-annually, not monthly, which makes the math slightly different from American calculators. This calculator uses the correct Canadian formula, so the payment you see matches how lenders actually quote.
For homes up to $500,000 the minimum is 5%. Between $500,000 and $1.5 million it is 5% of the first $500,000 plus 10% of the remainder. At $1.5 million and above, the minimum is 20%.
If your down payment is less than 20%, you are required to carry mortgage default insurance, often called CMHC insurance. The premium is roughly 2.8% to 4% of the mortgage amount depending on your down payment, and it is added to the mortgage rather than paid in cash.
It depends on whether your mortgage is insured. With 20% or more down your mortgage is uninsured, and 30 years is commonly available. With less than 20% down the mortgage must be insured, and an insured mortgage is capped at 25 years unless you are a first-time buyer or you are buying a newly built home. Since December 2024 both of those groups can go to 30 years on an insured mortgage.
First-time buyers can take a 30 year amortization on an eligible insured purchase, new build or resale. That is the change that came into effect on 15 December 2024. Buyers who are not first-time buyers can generally only get 30 years on an insured mortgage when the home is newly built, or by putting 20% or more down so the mortgage is not insured at all.
Yes. CMHC adds a 0.20% surcharge to the premium when an insured mortgage runs past 25 years, in force since 1 August 2024. On a $835,000 mortgage with 5% down that moves the premium from 4.00% to 4.20%, or about $1,670 more, and the Ontario PST on the premium rises with it. This calculator applies the surcharge automatically when you choose 30 years.
A longer amortization lowers the payment and raises the total interest you pay over the life of the loan. Thirty years can be the difference between qualifying and not, and there is no shame in using it. Just go in knowing it is a cash flow decision rather than a saving, and remember you can usually prepay or switch to accelerated payments later to claw back some of the difference.
Accelerated bi-weekly means paying half of your monthly payment every two weeks. Because there are 26 half-payments in a year, you end up making the equivalent of one extra monthly payment annually, which can shave years off your mortgage.
Let's talk. No pressure, no pitch, just straight answers built on real local data.