About $1,600 at one end. About $134,400 at the other. Those are municipal charges on a single high-rise unit, across the 23 municipalities the Canadian Home Builders’ Association benchmarked with Altus Group.

Development charges by city is not a marginal line in a Canadian pro forma. It is frequently the largest single variable in it, and the last article in this series covered why the postal code moves feasibility more than the contractor’s quote does. This one publishes the underlying table, because a reader asked a fair question: which cities were actually in the study?

Twenty-three of them. Here they are.

The full ranking

Each municipality is scored on three things — planning features, approval timelines, and government charges — and given an overall position. In every column, 1 is best; for charges, 1 is lowest.

Atlantic Canada takes three of the top seven

The Atlantic cities are the quiet story in this table, and they are rarely part of the national conversation about housing costs.

Moncton ranks first in the country on charges for both low-rise and high-rise housing — the only municipality to hold the lowest position in both categories. Charlottetown ranks second and third. St. John’s ranks third and fourth. Halifax finishes second overall and takes first place nationally on planning features.

Three of the four land in the top seven of twenty-three.

At the other end, Toronto ranks twenty-third on charges in both categories, the only municipality to hold the highest position in both. Combined with the published national ranges, that places Moncton at the bottom of a low-rise range starting around $8,700 and a high-rise range starting around $1,600, and Toronto at the top of ranges reaching roughly $195,000 and $134,400.

One caution on that last sentence, because it matters. The study publishes the ranges and it publishes the rank order. It does not print a dollar figure beside every city. Identifying who sits at each end is an inference from combining the two — a sound one, since rank one on a published range means the bottom of it, but an inference rather than a printed number.

The cities with the best software finish near the bottom

Here is the finding that reframes the whole table.

Planning features are the tools: the application portals, the interactive zoning maps, the machine-readable bylaws, the status tracking, the published historical data. They are what most municipalities point to when asked what they are doing about housing.

Moncton ranks 18th on planning features. St. John’s ranks 20th. Charlottetown ranks 22nd, third from last in the country. All three finish in the top twelve overall, two of them in the top seven.

Toronto ranks 3rd on planning features. Markham ranks 2nd. They finish 21st and 22nd.

Markham has the second-best planning system in Canada and the second-worst overall result. Charlottetown has the second-worst planning system and finishes seventh. The two numbers are exactly reversed.

That is not an argument against good planning software. Halifax proves the opposite case: it ranks first on planning features and second overall, and it is the only city in the study that holds both. Good tools plus competitive charges is the best combination available.

But the pattern across twenty-three municipalities is unambiguous about which factor is load-bearing. Nobody abandons a project because the zoning map renders badly. Projects die because the charges and the timeline destroyed the pro forma — and no amount of interface design touches either one.

The column nobody talks about

Approval timelines deserve more attention than they get, and the rankings are not where most people would guess.

Saskatoon ranks first in Canada. Moncton second, Regina third, Edmonton fourth, Charlottetown fifth. Hamilton ranks twenty-third, behind Toronto at twenty-second.

Winnipeg is the strangest line in the table: last in the country on planning features, fourth on low-rise charges, and it still finishes fourteenth overall. On this evidence, cheap outperforms polished.

What the ranking does not tell you

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

The data has a vintage. Research began with data from June 2022 onward, and the study was published in March 2025. It is the most recent like-for-like comparison of twenty-three Canadian municipalities in existence, but it is not a 2026 snapshot.

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

The ranking measures three things and no others. The study says so explicitly: it does not assess the quality of the working relationship between a municipality and the industry, and a city can rank poorly here while being straightforward to deal with in practice. It also excludes any effects of federal housing funding received by participating municipalities.

What to do with it

If you are underwriting a Canadian project, the table is useful in a narrow and specific way.

Use it to shortlist, not to decide. A municipality’s position tells you where to look harder, not what your project will cost. Pull the actual fee schedule for the specific municipality before land is committed. Price the approval timeline as a monthly carrying cost rather than a scheduling inconvenience. And treat a strong planning-features score as a convenience rather than a signal — on this evidence, it predicts very little about whether a project pencils.

The market prices two things: what the process costs, and how long it takes. Everything else is interface.

SOURCES

• Canadian Home Builders’ Association, Municipal Benchmarking Study, 3rd edition, delivered by Altus Group, published 4 March 2025 — https://www.chba.ca/municipal-benchmarking/
• CHBA, press release on the 2024 Municipal Benchmarking Study, 4 March 2025 — https://www.chba.ca/2025/03/04/chbas-municipal-benchmarking-study-shows-housing-affordability-has-worsened-due-to-municipal-development-charges-and-delays/
• CHBA / Altus Group, Municipal Benchmarking Study, Edmonton city sheet, 2024 — https://www.chba.ca/assets/pdf/Municipal-Benchmarking-Edmonton_2024/
• CHBA / Altus Group, Municipal Benchmarking Study, Calgary city sheet, 2024 — https://www.chba.ca/assets/pdf/Municipal-Benchmarking-Calgary_2024/

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