$93,000 in Calgary. $36,000 in Edmonton.

Same province. Same building code. Same labour market. Three hundred kilometres apart. And that figure is not the cost of building the house — it is the municipal fee for permission to build it.

The gap is $57,000 per unit. Development charges in Alberta differ that sharply between its two largest cities, and almost nobody carries the difference into the feasibility model with the precision they apply to a materials quote.

Building costs barely move across Canada. Fees move by 22 times.

In June 2026, Desjardins Economic Studies published a comparison that deserves more attention than it received. The researchers priced two things that are physically identical wherever you build them — a fire and EMS station, measured per square foot, and eight metres of local road, measured per linear metre — across seven Canadian cities: Montreal, Ottawa, the GTA, Winnipeg, Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver.

The variation was modest. Same materials, same trades, broadly the same supply chain. Whatever else separates these markets, the physical act of construction is not it.

Then they looked at what municipalities charge for permission to build. The Canadian Home Builders’ Association, working with Altus Group, benchmarked 23 municipalities and found that fees on a single low-rise unit range from $8,700 to $195,000. That is a spread of more than twenty-two times, end to end, sitting on top of a construction cost that barely moves.

That gap is not infrastructure cost. It is policy — and policy is the one input a developer can still choose before committing to a site.

Where the charges actually land

The distribution is not random. The CHBA benchmark scores each municipality on three things — planning features, approval timelines, and government charges — and produces an overall ranking.

Toronto ranks last of 23 on charges in both categories. Seven of the bottom ten municipalities overall are in Ontario, and two more are British Columbia’s largest.

There is a detail here worth pausing on. Toronto ranks third best in Canada on planning features — the portals, the interactive zoning maps, the application tracking. It still finishes 21st overall. Good process does not survive a slow clock and a large invoice.

What development charges in Alberta actually look like

“Alberta is cheap” is too coarse an assumption to underwrite on, and the numbers say so plainly.

Calgary’s low-rise municipal fees run about $93,000 per unit — above the $82,600 national average. Edmonton’s run about $36,000, less than half of it. Two cities in the same province, operating under the same provincial building code and drawing from the same labour pool.

The picture changes again by density:

• Calgary: roughly $93,000 on a low-rise unit, roughly $11,100 on a high-rise unit — more than 8 times apart
• Edmonton: roughly $36,000 and $9,300 — under 4 times apart

In both cities, building up rather than out reduces the municipal bill dramatically. In Calgary the incentive is roughly twice as strong. Worth knowing before the site plan is fixed.

For contrast, the City of Vancouver runs the incentive in the opposite direction: its residential charges per square metre increase as floor space ratio increases, so higher density attracts a higher rate per square foot. Same country, inverted signal.

Time is a line item, and the two cities differ there too

Fees are the visible number. The clock is the invisible one.

The CHBA study publishes both the typical approval timeline and the indirect cost that accumulates each month a project waits — property taxes, financing, and escalation of materials and labour.

• Edmonton: 3.4 months, down from 10.5 months in the 2022 edition. Indirect cost of roughly $3,260 per low-rise unit per month.
• Calgary: 4.2 months, down from 5.4. Indirect cost of roughly $3,862 per low-rise unit per month.
• Canadian average: 11.2 months.

Multiply and the exposure becomes concrete: roughly $11,100 per unit in Edmonton, roughly $16,200 in Calgary. At the national average timeline, holding Calgary’s monthly rate constant, the same unit would carry more than $43,000. That arithmetic is mine rather than the study’s, but both inputs come from the same document.

One caution on the national figure: the study notes that part of the improvement in timelines is likely explained by fewer applications being submitted, not by faster processing.

The tax layer sits on top

For a European firm assessing Canadian entry, the municipal fee is the first layer, not the whole stack.

Alberta’s combined general corporate income tax rate is 23%, against 26.5% in Ontario and Quebec and 27% in British Columbia. Alberta is also the only province with no provincial sales tax: 5% GST only, against 13% HST in Ontario and 12% combined in British Columbia. The distinction matters operationally, because British Columbia’s PST is largely non-recoverable, while HST generally is.

These are headline rates. What any specific company pays depends on its structure, its credits and its activity — this is a signal about jurisdiction, not tax advice.

Stack the layers and the conclusion is not that Canada is cheap or expensive. It is that a materially cheaper jurisdiction exists inside the same country, subject to the same federal rules — and that the Calgary–Edmonton gap proves the analysis has to be done municipality by municipality, not province by province.

The caveats worth stating out loud

Three, and stating them protects the analysis rather than weakening it.

The data has a vintage. The CHBA benchmark draws on data collected from June 2022 onward and was published in March 2025. It is the most recent like-for-like comparison of 23 Canadian municipalities available, but it is not a 2026 snapshot.

These are blended rates. Altus constructed them on model projects. They are not the invoice attached to any specific permit, and your project’s actual charges will differ.

Beware two true numbers that measure different things. Desjardins reports a Calgary figure of $9,328 per unit; the CHBA reports $93,000. Both are correct. The first covers only the water and wastewater charge on a single-detached infill; the second is a blended total across all municipal charges. Placing them side by side produces a comparison that collapses on contact.

What to do with this

If you are underwriting a Canadian project — from Europe or from the next province — the practical conclusion is narrow and testable.

Pull the fee schedule of the specific municipality before the land is committed, not after. Model the density decision against the local ratio rather than a national rule of thumb. Price the approval timeline as a monthly carrying cost rather than a scheduling inconvenience. And treat the province as a tax and regulatory envelope, not as a proxy for what the project will cost.

The postal code moves the pro forma more than the contractor’s quote does. That is an uncomfortable finding, and it is the one the data supports.

SOURCES

• Desjardins Economic Studies, The Devil’s in the Development Charges: How “Growth Pays for Growth” Is Shaping Housing Supply and Affordability, 18 June 2026 — https://coop.desjardins.com/content/dam/pdf/en/personal/savings-investment/economic-studies/canada-development-fees-18-june-2026.pdf
• Canadian Home Builders’ Association, Municipal Benchmarking Study, 3rd edition, delivered by Altus Group, published 4 March 2025 — https://www.chba.ca/municipal-benchmarking/
• CHBA / Altus Group, Municipal Benchmarking Study, Calgary city sheet, 2024 — https://www.chba.ca/assets/pdf/Municipal-Benchmarking-Calgary_2024/
• CHBA / Altus Group, Municipal Benchmarking Study, Edmonton city sheet, 2024 — https://www.chba.ca/assets/pdf/Municipal-Benchmarking-Edmonton_2024/
• KPMG, Federal and provincial/territorial tax rates for income earned by a general corporation, 2025 and 2026 — https://assets.kpmg.com/content/dam/kpmg/ca/pdf/2026/01/ca-federal-and-provincial-territorial-tax-rates-for-income-earned-by-a-general-corporation-2025-and-2026.pdf
• BDO Canada, 2026 corporate income tax rates — https://www.bdo.ca/insights/corporate-income-tax-facts

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