Quick answer: More than 1.2 million Canadian mortgages renew in 2025 and 2026, most of them signed in 2020 or 2021 at rates near 1.7% to 2.2% that have not come back. Before you sign the renewal letter, shop it: you have up to 120 days before your maturity date to compare rates without penalty, and a mortgage broker does the legwork for free because the lender pays them. Choose fixed or variable on the math and on how much payment swing you can live with, and if the new payment does not fit, talk to your lender early about extending your amortization.
The letter shows up in your mailbox or your inbox, and you already know before you open it.
Your mortgage is coming due. The lender is writing to let you know what the new rate will be. And the number, when you see it, is not the number you have been paying for the last five years. It is higher. A lot higher. You do the rough math in your head, and something tightens.
That feeling is real. It is worth sitting with for a moment before you do anything else.
A lot of men I know are in exactly this moment right now. If you are one of them, you are not alone and you are not behind. But you do have a decision to make, and the way you make it will matter more than the rate itself.
What Is Actually Happening in Canada Right Now
More than 1.2 million Canadian mortgages are renewing in 2025 and 2026, according to TD Economics. Most of them were signed in 2020 or 2021, when the Bank of Canada's policy rate was at historic lows and five-year fixed rates were sitting around 1.7% to 2.2%. The Bank raised rates sharply through 2022 and 2023 in response to inflation. Rates have moderated since, but they have not returned to where they were. Not even close.
The result is a renewal shock that is landing on a significant portion of Canadian homeowners at the same time.
CMHC's 2024 data indicated that roughly 35% of Canadian homeowners either held a variable rate or had a term maturing within twelve months. That is a large number of families looking at a meaningfully different monthly payment than the one they have been carrying.
Here is what that looks like in practice, and it is the same shopping discipline I describe for a first purchase in the homebuying process guide. A family that bought in 2021 with a $500,000 mortgage at 2.1% was paying roughly $2,100 per month. That same mortgage renewing in 2026 at 5.2% runs closer to $2,950. That is $850 more per month. Over a year, that is more than $10,000, the equivalent of a TFSA maximum contribution with money left over.
Our mortgage renewal calculator lets you run your specific numbers, including what you would save by shopping your rate down even a quarter point.
I write that so you will sit with the actual number rather than the approximate dread before we talk about what to do. Fright is not the goal. The gap between "I know it is going up" and "I know exactly by how much" is where most anxiety lives. Knowing the number is almost always less catastrophic than not knowing it. And if the anxiety itself is the heavier thing right now, I wrote about what Matthew 6 actually means when you have a mortgage.
The weight is real. The good news is you have more options than the letter implies.
Why Your Lender Is Counting on You to Sign Without Looking
Here is something the renewal letter will not tell you: the bank is hoping you are busy.
Renewal inertia is one of the most reliable features of Canadian mortgage lending. The lender sends an offer. The borrower, juggling work and kids and everything else, signs it without shopping. The lender collects. A large share of Canadians renew with their existing lender without ever checking rates elsewhere, and lenders count on exactly that.
There is nothing underhanded in this. The bank has simply priced its offer knowing that most people will not check.
You have up to 120 days before your renewal date to shop for a new rate without penalty on most mortgages. That means if your mortgage renews in September, you could be negotiating with other lenders right now, locking in a rate while the clock still has room on it. Your current lender will often sharpen their offer if they know you are actually shopping.
A mortgage broker is the most efficient way to shop. A broker has access to rates from multiple lenders (banks, credit unions, monoline lenders), and the lender pays them rather than you. The cost to you is zero. The benefit is that someone is doing the comparison work on your behalf and advocating for the best rate available in the market.
Ratehub.ca is a useful starting point if you want to see where rates are sitting before you call anyone. It will not do a broker's job for you. It will give you a real sense of where rates are sitting before you negotiate.
A 0.25% difference in rate sounds small. On a $500,000 mortgage, it is $1,250 a year. Over a five-year term, that is over $6,000. It is worth one phone call.
One more thing worth asking for when you renew: prepayment privileges. Most mortgages allow you to make lump-sum payments against principal each year without penalty, often 10 to 20% of the original balance. The terms vary by lender, and they are negotiable at renewal. If you ever come into extra money and want to put it against the mortgage, you want this flexibility in place before you sign.
Fixed or Variable Is Partly a Question About You
The fixed vs variable question is the one most people think is purely about math. A good chunk of it is really about knowing what kind of man you are.
Here is the math side, briefly. A fixed rate locks in your payment for the term: three, four, five years, depending on what you choose. You know exactly what you owe every month. A variable rate floats with the Bank of Canada's policy rate. When the policy rate drops, your rate drops. When it rises, it rises.
Historically, over long enough time horizons, variable rates have cost borrowers less. But "over long enough time horizons" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Over the five years from 2022 to 2024, many variable-rate holders watched their payments climb as the Bank of Canada hiked rates twelve times. Some of them absorbed the increases fine. Some of them had to restructure.
Here is the question that matters more than the rate forecast: what happens to you psychologically when your payment goes up $200 a month because the Bank of Canada moved?
Some men genuinely do not mind. The variability is an abstraction to them, and if the long-run savings are real, they will take the uncertainty. Others find that watching the rate move creates a low-grade anxiety that costs them more in sleep than they save in interest. They need to know the number and have it stay there.
Figure out which man you are before you choose, because it is a lot harder to unwind that decision after.
If your household is running at tight margins, which a lot of families are right now, the psychological case for fixed is strong regardless of where analysts think rates are heading. Certainty has real value when the budget is tight. Nobody gets to predict the Bank of Canada, but you do get to decide how much variability you are willing to live with.
A shorter term is also worth considering. A three-year fixed rate is often lower than a five-year fixed rate, and it gives you another opportunity to reassess in three years if the rate environment has shifted. The trade-off is that you are exposed to renewal uncertainty sooner. Again: know your tolerance before you choose.
Four Things to Do Before You Sign Anything
This is the section I want you to keep.
Pull your mortgage statement and read it fully. Not just the payment amount. The full statement. You want to know the outstanding balance, the current amortization (how many years are left), the maturity date, and your current prepayment privileges. If you have been paying for five years and started with a 25-year amortization, you have roughly 20 years left. That number matters because it shapes every other conversation.
Check the 120-day window. Count back 120 days from your maturity date. If you are inside that window, you can start negotiating now. If your renewal is still months away, put a calendar reminder 120 days out so you do not miss the window.
Contact a mortgage broker before you respond to your lender. This does not mean you are switching lenders. It means you are going in with real information. A broker can tell you what the competitive landscape looks like, give you a sense of what a reasonable offer is, and in some cases negotiate directly with your current lender or an alternative. Again: this costs you nothing.
Have the honest conversation with your spouse before you agree to anything. Not a negotiation. A conversation. What does the new payment look like against your actual monthly budget? If there is a gap, it needs to be named before you sign. The renewal is the moment the mortgage becomes real again after five years of it being background noise. That is actually an opportunity. Use it to look at the whole picture together. If the new payment leaves you uncertain about where the margin is, the Christian budgeting guide will help you map out the full household picture before you commit.
When the New Numbers Stop Working
This is the section I want to address directly, because some of you reading this are sitting with a renewal number that genuinely does not fit. The math is not close. The new payment plus everything else in your life simply does not work. It helps to know what the ratio is supposed to look like, and how much of your income should go to housing gives you the benchmark.
This situation is more common than it should be.
The first thing to say is that if the numbers are genuinely tight, the worst thing you can do is avoid the conversation with your lender. Lenders have seen this coming in the renewal cycle of 2025-2026, and most would rather work something out with you than foreclose.
One option is amortization extension: asking your lender to re-amortize the remaining balance over a longer period. If you have 20 years left at renewal, extending to 25 brings your monthly payment down. The cost is real: you will pay more in total interest over the life of the mortgage. But if the alternative is defaulting or being unable to pay other essential expenses, a temporary reduction in monthly obligation while you stabilize is a legitimate move. Reaching for it is one of the tools a responsible borrower has, and using it wisely is part of the job.
A mortgage broker can advise you on whether a lender switch makes sense here. Sometimes the combination of a new rate and a re-amortization from a different lender produces a monthly payment that actually fits while still making financial sense.
What I would caution against is the two failure modes on either side: panic and avoidance.
Panic leads men to lock in the first offer they see because the uncertainty feels unbearable. They sign without shopping, accept a rate that is not competitive, and spend the next five years overpaying.
Avoidance leads men to not open the letter, not respond to the reminder notices, and wake up ninety days before renewal with no plan and no leverage.
The calm, informed decision is the steward's move. It requires sitting with discomfort long enough to gather real information, which, in practice, means making two or three phone calls and having one honest conversation with your wife.
What Provision Looks Like Here
There is a passage in Luke 14 where Jesus tells a quick story about a man who is building a tower. Before he starts, Jesus says, the man sits down and counts the cost. Makes sure he has enough to finish. The point of the story lands on the man who starts and cannot finish, the one who has turned the whole project into an embarrassment rather than an accomplishment.
The steward's instinct is to count the cost before you commit, and it comes from wisdom rather than fear. And if the renewal has stirred up something deeper than logistics, what contentment means when you have a mortgage sits with that side of it.
Mortgage renewal is a counting-the-cost moment. The payment you have been making for five years is not necessarily the payment you will be making for the next five. The difference matters. And the man who counts it honestly, shops it carefully, and signs only when he understands what he is signing, that man is exercising the kind of provision that is bigger than income.
You can do this. It comes down to a few phone calls, a real conversation with your wife, and a signature you have actually thought about, nothing more complicated than that.
The One Thing to Do This Week
Pull out your mortgage statement. If you do not have a paper copy, log in to your lender's online portal and find it. You are looking for four numbers: the outstanding balance, the amortization remaining, the maturity date, and your current prepayment privileges.
Once you have the maturity date: count back 120 days. Write that date down somewhere you will not lose it.
If you are already inside the 120-day window, contact a mortgage broker this week. Not next month. This week. The conversation is free, it takes less than an hour, and the information you get back will either confirm that your lender's offer is fair or give you leverage to negotiate a better one.
One conversation. One week. That is the whole thing.
Why This Matters
Here is what I keep coming back to.
The men carrying the most anxiety about this renewal are usually the ones who have not yet looked directly at the numbers, not the ones in the worst financial position. Most of the dread is coming from the part of the number you have not let yourself look at yet, far more than from the mortgage itself.
Opening the statement, doing the math, calling the broker: these shrink the dread down to the actual size of the problem, which is almost always smaller than the one your imagination has been building. None of them make the situation worse.
The letter arrived. The number is higher than you hoped. That is real, and it is hard, and it deserves a straight look.
A faithful man looks at it straight.
Common questions
Why is my mortgage payment going up so much when I renew in 2026?
Most mortgages renewing now were signed in 2020 or 2021, when five-year fixed rates sat around 1.7% to 2.2%, and rates have not returned there. More than 1.2 million Canadian mortgages are renewing in 2025 and 2026 at meaningfully higher rates. A $500,000 mortgage at 2.1% cost roughly $2,100 a month; renewing near 5.2%, it runs closer to $2,950.
Can I shop for a better mortgage rate before my renewal date?
Yes. On most mortgages you have up to 120 days before your maturity date to shop for a new rate without penalty. A mortgage broker compares rates across banks, credit unions, and monoline lenders, and the lender pays them, so it costs you nothing. Even a 0.25% difference is about $1,250 a year on a $500,000 mortgage, so it is worth one phone call.
Should I choose a fixed or variable rate when I renew?
Part of it is math, but a lot of it is knowing what kind of borrower you are. Over long horizons, variable rates have often cost less, though variable holders watched payments climb as the Bank of Canada hiked rates twelve times from 2022 to 2024. If your household is running at tight margins, or a moving payment costs you sleep, the case for fixed is strong regardless of the forecast.
What can I do if I can't afford my new mortgage payment after renewal?
Talk to your lender early rather than avoiding it. They would rather work something out than foreclose. One option is amortization extension: re-amortizing the remaining balance over a longer period to bring the monthly payment down. It costs more interest over the life of the mortgage, but it is a legitimate move when the alternative is defaulting, and a broker can tell you whether switching lenders produces a payment that fits.
How early should I start preparing for my mortgage renewal in Canada?
Count back 120 days from your maturity date; that is when you can start negotiating without penalty. Before you do anything, pull your mortgage statement and find four numbers: the outstanding balance, the amortization remaining, the maturity date, and your current prepayment privileges. If you are already inside the 120-day window, contact a mortgage broker this week.
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