The Cheapest Places to Buy a House in Ontario

The next tier, and the Toronto number

Four more cities landed just above the top 10, all on the same October 8 pull: Kingston at $655,000 across 411 listings, Fort Erie at $678,000 across 283, Brantford at $684,000 across 37, and Kawartha Lakes at $699,900 across 593. That cluster is the practical ceiling of cheap in Ontario right now. Above $700,000, you are no longer shopping for affordability. You are shopping for a location.

Toronto sits at a $1,399,870 median across 2,883 active house listings. The Thunder Bay median is 28.5 per cent of that. Even Kawartha Lakes, the most expensive city on this page, asks almost exactly half what Toronto asks.

Cheap to buy is not the same as cheap to live

The list price is the part that is easy to compare. The rest of the arithmetic changes city by city, and it usually moves against the cheap end.

• Commuting. St. Catharines and Niagara Falls are the only cities in the top 10 with weekday GO train service to Union Station. Everywhere else on this page, a Toronto salary is not part of the plan, so the local wage has to carry the mortgage.
• Two cars instead of one. Chatham-Kent, Quinte West and Kawartha Lakes cover a lot of ground with little transit between the pieces. Budget for a second vehicle before you compare a $400,000 house to a $1.4 million one.
• Land transfer tax cuts differently. Ontario's first-time buyer refund is capped at $4,000, which the province says covers the tax on the first $368,000 of the price. In Thunder Bay, that wipes out most of the bill. In Toronto, it is a rounding error against the purchase.
• Resale depth. Chatham-Kent cleared our cutoff with 51 active houses, and Timmins missed it with 29. Thin inventory works both ways: it limits what you can buy, and it limits who is around to buy from you later.

The cities that are missing, and why

Windsor, Sarnia, Cornwall, Brockville and Pembroke returned no active house listings in our Ontario feed on October 8, 2026. Sault Ste. Marie returned 4 and Greater Sudbury 12, both below the 30-listing cutoff. That is a statement about feed coverage, not about those housing markets. Coverage of the CREA feed is not uniform across Ontario, so a city can be busy locally and still show almost nothing here. If you are shopping in one of them, price it from a local source rather than assuming anything from this page. Timmins is a different case. It returned 29 active houses at a $389,900 median, one short of the cutoff, so it is out of the ranking even though its asking prices are among the lowest in the province.

Where to start

Pick two or three cities from the ranking, then watch them for a month before you decide anything. Medians move, and a single city's midpoint can shift by $20,000 when a dozen new listings land. You can search active Ontario listings on Zealty, save a search by city and price, and let the alerts tell you when the asking prices in your shortlist start moving.

Prices in this article are active asking prices pulled on October 8, 2026, and they change daily. This article is educational and is not financial or tax advice.

NOTE: This representation is based in whole or in part on data generated by Greater Vancouver REALTORS®, Fraser Valley Real Estate Board, Chilliwack and District Real Estate Board, or The Canadian Real Estate Association which assume no responsibility for its accuracy. This information is deemed reliable but is not guaranteed accurate by these organizations or by the agent or brokerage hosting this website. Data presented here is under the license agreement of Holywell Properties, a British Columbia Brokerage.