The uninsured mortgage boom

For years, the defining story of Canadian mortgage lending was the insured borrower: the first-time buyer scraping together a five % down payment, navigating mortgage default insurance, and entering homeownership at the market's most accessible threshold. That story has not ended. But new data from Statistics Canada suggests it is no longer the dominant one.

Uninsured residential mortgage funds advanced by chartered banks reached $54.4 billion in April 2026 - a 40.9% increase from $38.6 billion in April 2025, according to Statistics Canada's Table 10-10-0006-01, released this week.

Insured mortgage lending, meanwhile, grew 26.6% to $10.8 billion over the same period. Both numbers represent strong market activity. But the gap between them is the story. Uninsured mortgages now account for 83.5% of all new residential mortgage funds advanced - up from 81.9% a year ago, and the highest share in the dataset's history.

The picture this paints of Canada's spring 2026 market is one in which higher-equity, conventional borrowers - those with down payments of 20% or more, purchasing homes above $1 million, or refinancing outside the insured framework - are driving activity at a pace that far outstrips what is happening in the entry-level market. For mortgage brokers whose client books have historically skewed toward insured borrowers, the data is a prompt to ask whether they are positioned where the volume is going.

Why the shift is happening

The growth in uninsured lending is not a single-cause story. At least three structural forces are pushing in the same direction simultaneously.

The first is the rise in home prices in major urban centres over the past decade. In Toronto and Vancouver, where average prices have long exceeded the $1-million threshold above which CMHC insurance is unavailable, a growing share of buyers simply cannot access the insured market regardless of their down payment preferences. As Canadian Mortgage Professional has reported, price dynamics remain sharply divergent across the country in 2026 - with condo softness concentrated in Toronto and Vancouver while Quebec City, Montreal and Prairie markets see above-average growth - but the long-run effect of urban price appreciation has been to push a growing proportion of transactions into the uninsured tier.

The second is the federal government's decision in late 2024 to raise the maximum home price eligible for mortgage insurance from $1 million to $1.5 million. That change, which came into force in December 2024, should theoretically have pulled some transactions back into the insured market - and the Statistics Canada data shows insured lending growing strongly year-over-year. But the uninsured market has grown faster still, suggesting that the structural shift toward higher-equity borrowers is larger than any one policy measure.

The third is the renewal wave. As Canadian Mortgage Professional has documented extensively, residential mortgage debt crossed $2.4 trillion in December 2025, up 4.8% year-over-year, with a large cohort of fixed-rate borrowers coming to renewal.

Many of those borrowers took out mortgages in 2021 at historically low rates on properties that have since appreciated substantially. They are returning to the market as uninsured refinancers, with equity positions that put them well outside the insured framework - and with every incentive to shop.

Uninsured mortgage switches increased 34% between the second half of 2024 and the second half of 2025, according to data reported by Canadian Mortgage Professional, suggesting these borrowers are actively comparing offers rather than accepting the first renewal letter that arrives.

What the outstanding balance data reveals

If the funds advanced figures describe the flow of new lending, the outstanding balance data describes the stock - and it tells a complementary story. Insured outstanding balances fell 1.3% year-over-year to $375 billion in April 2026, while uninsured outstanding balances grew 2.9% to $1.25 trillion.

The decline in insured outstanding balances is notable. It reflects not just a shift in new lending activity but the ongoing repayment and maturation of the insured mortgage stock built up through the pandemic era. CMHC noted in its spring 2026 Mortgage Industry Report that 75% of outstanding mortgages across the country were uninsured last year, as reported by Canadian Mortgage Professional - a figure that, viewed alongside this month's Statistics Canada data, suggests that proportion is continuing to rise.

For lenders, CMHC flagged that growing uninsured concentration "puts lenders at greater risk of financial losses if mortgage delinquencies increase." For brokers, the practical implication is different: the uninsured borrower - higher equity, stronger income profile, more likely to be a repeat purchaser or refinancer - is not only the dominant client type in the current market but likely to remain so as property values in major centres continue to outpace the insured price thresholds.

The broker opportunity - and the warning

The dominance of uninsured lending creates a specific competitive dynamic for brokers. Uninsured borrowers who are renewing - particularly those who originally purchased at pandemic-era prices and are now sitting on substantial equity - are, in many cases, the most valuable clients in the market: high-balance mortgages, strong credit profiles, the ability to qualify under standard stress-test parameters, and, crucially, the motivation to seek competitive offers. Canadian Mortgage Professional has reported that the elimination of the stress test for uninsured borrowers switching lenders at renewal has meaningfully lowered the barrier to moving, increasing broker leverage in the renewal conversation.

The warning is embedded in the same data. The share of new uninsured mortgages with a total debt service ratio above 45% dropped to 31.3% in Q2 2025, down from 33.8% two years prior, according to Canadian Mortgage Professional's coverage of CIBC Capital Markets research.

That suggests lenders are underwriting more conservatively, and that some borrowers who might previously have qualified for large uninsured mortgages are not doing so now. The household debt-to-disposable-income ratio remains stubbornly high at 181.8%. Brokers who present their clients as straightforward uninsured approvals without running the full debt-service analysis are making an assumption the data does not support.

What brokers should be doing with this data

The Statistics Canada release is more than a market update. It is a directional signal that should prompt a specific response from mortgage professionals.

The client base that is driving growth right now is the higher-equity, conventional borrower - the refinancer coming off a low-rate pandemic mortgage, the move-up buyer trading one property for another with accumulated equity, the investor holding property worth more than $1 million. If your prospecting and referral network is concentrated in the first-time buyer segment, this data should prompt a question about whether that balance is right for the market as it is now, rather than the market as it was five years ago.

The uninsured renewal conversation, in particular, is one that rewards preparation. Knowing which clients have mortgages maturing in the next six months, modelling the difference between the bank's retention offer and the best whole-of-market rate, and making contact before the renewal letter arrives: those are the interventions that translate a broad market trend into a specific client outcome.

The numbers are large, the growth is accelerating, and the client base is changing. Brokers who have updated their positioning accordingly will find this moment more rewarding than those who have not.