- Do I have to declare if my Toronto home is occupied?
- Yes, every year, even when the home is occupied and even when nothing has changed. The declaration is the obligation — a property with no declaration filed is automatically deemed vacant.
- What happens if I miss the Vacant Home Tax declaration?
- The property is deemed vacant and taxed at 3% of its current value assessment. This is the most common and most expensive failure in the whole regime, because it catches owners of fully occupied homes who simply did not file.
The rate: 3% of assessed value
The Vacant Home Tax applies at 3% of a property's Current Value Assessment for any residential unit vacant more than six months in the taxation year. It started at 1% when the programme launched in 2022 and rose to 3% starting with the 2024 taxation year — a full tripling in two years, which is the kind of change worth checking for annually rather than assuming stays put.
Filing is mandatory even when the property is occupied
Every residential owner has to submit a declaration each year confirming occupancy status — the tax isn't self-reporting-optional the way it sounds. Miss the declaration and the property is automatically deemed vacant and taxed accordingly, regardless of whether anyone actually lived there. The tax becomes a lien on the property if unpaid.
As of 8 August 2026, the declaration window for the 2025 taxation year (deadline 30 April 2026) has closed; the City has not yet announced the 2026 taxation year's declaration dates. Multi-residential, commercial, industrial, vacant land without structures, and parking-space assessments are excluded from the requirement entirely.
Exemptions exist, but none are automatic
A property that's genuinely vacant can still avoid the tax under a defined list of exemptions — each one has to be claimed on the declaration with supporting documentation. Duration limits vary by category rather than following one uniform rule:
- Death of a registered owner — up to three consecutive taxation years
- Principal resident in hospital or a care facility for 6+ months — up to two consecutive taxation years
- Major repairs or renovations under permit — one year per claim, minimum six months, with renovations required to be actively carried out without unnecessary delay
- Legal ownership transferred during the taxation year — the year the transaction closes
- Owner or spouse's full-time employment requires them elsewhere — one year, minimum six months
- Court order prohibiting occupancy — one year, minimum six months
- New construction — developer inventory — up to two consecutive years
- A secondary residence needed for medical reasons — one year
How to file your declaration
Every declaration is filed through the City's own Vacant Home Tax portal at toronto.ca/VacantHomeTax — separate from MyToronto Pay, which is used only for payment. You'll need your customer number plus your property address or 21-digit assessment roll number, all of which appear on your property tax bill, tax account statement, or VHT notice.
Owners without internet access aren't required to use the online portal — you can declare by phone through 311 (or 416-392-2489 from outside Toronto), with service available in more than 180 languages, or in person at Toronto City Hall's tax counters or any civic centre. Every filing method now generates a confirmation number, which is worth keeping as proof of filing.
Filing on an owner's behalf
The City permits an authorized representative — a property manager, lawyer, or family member with authority — to submit the declaration for the owner. For a portfolio manager filing on behalf of several owners, the customer number and roll number for each property still need to be gathered individually; there's no bulk-declaration mechanism in the City's process.
Paying the bill
Declaring occupancy and paying the tax are two separate steps on two separate systems, and the bill itself typically lands well after the declaration deadline closes — for the 2025 taxation year, for example, payment is due in three installments running from mid-September to mid-November 2026, months after the April 2026 declaration deadline.
The fastest payment method is MyToronto Pay, which accepts EFT with no convenience fee, or credit/debit with a processor-charged convenience fee; you can also pay through your bank's online bill-payment portal. An unpaid VHT bill becomes a lien against the property, the same as unpaid property tax.
If your property is audited
The City can select any declaration — occupied, exempt, or vacant — for audit rather than taking it at face value. If yours is picked, you'll get a letter requesting evidence to support your occupancy or exemption claim, with 60 days from the date of the letter to respond. Acceptable proof includes vehicle registration and insurance, government-issued ID showing the address, income tax notices of assessment, a lease agreement, a will or probate document for the death-of-owner exemption, an employment contract or pay statements for the employment-elsewhere exemption, and homeowner's or tenant's insurance certificates.
The penalty for a false declaration
A false declaration of occupancy status, or a failure to produce requested audit evidence, can result in a fine of up to $10,000 — on top of the vacancy tax itself. That's the one figure worth building process around: the safest practice for a portfolio operator is keeping occupancy records (leases, utility accounts, insurance) on file year-round, rather than trying to reconstruct them after an audit letter arrives.
Disputing a deemed-vacant bill
If you missed the declaration deadline or disagree with how the City assessed your occupancy status, the recourse is a formal Notice of Complaint, filed within 90 days of the date shown on the bill — not an informal call to 311. If the City denies the complaint, you can escalate to the Appellate Authority (the Deputy Treasurer) within 90 days of that decision. Appeals are decided on a written record, with no in-person hearing, and the Appellate Authority's decision is final — budget for the full cycle to run several months, since it's two sequential 90-day windows plus the City's own processing time.
VHT, NRST and the federal UHT: three different taxes, easy to conflate
Property managers working across asset types often mix up the Vacant Home Tax with two unrelated levies. They're structured completely differently, and confusing them in a compliance memo is an easy way to give a client wrong advice.
Non-Resident Speculation Tax (Ontario) and Toronto's municipal top-up
The NRST is a one-time provincial land-transfer surcharge, not an annual occupancy tax — currently 25% of purchase price, in effect since 25 October 2022, applying when a non-citizen, non-permanent-resident buyer (or certain foreign corporations and trusts) purchases residential property anywhere in Ontario. Toronto layered its own Municipal Non-Resident Speculation Tax on top, effective 1 January 2025, at 10% of purchase price for foreign buyers of Toronto residential property — stacked with Toronto's Municipal Land Transfer Tax, a foreign buyer can face a combined 35% in land-transfer-type taxes at closing, entirely separate from whether the property later sits vacant.
Federal Underused Housing Tax — now eliminated
The UHT was a federal annual tax aimed mainly at non-resident, non-Canadian owners of vacant or underused residential property, with narrower triggers for some Canadian corporate and trust owners. It has since been eliminated: affected owners no longer need to file a UHT return or pay the tax for the 2025 taxation year or any year after. The filing and payment obligation still applies retroactively to the 2022, 2023 and 2024 calendar years for owners who were required to file in those years — historical UHT exposure hasn't disappeared, only the go-forward obligation has. With the UHT gone prospectively, Toronto's VHT is now the only annual, recurring vacancy-related filing most property managers in the city need to track.
Why this belongs on a portfolio operator's calendar, not just an owner's
A condo manager or vacation-property operator with off-season inventory, a unit between tenants, or a listing paused for renovation is exactly the profile this tax is built to catch. Miss one declaration across a portfolio of units and it isn't a rounding error — it's 3% of that unit's assessed value, for a property that may well have been rented most of the year.
Direct PMS tracks occupancy per unit across your portfolio, so the annual declaration is a report rather than a scramble through fifteen leases.
Portfolio occupancy →BC moved short-term rental regulation from the municipality to the province: a principal-residence requirement in most communities, a provincial registry, and a duty on the platforms to enforce both.
Alberta is the loosest short-term rental regime of the four big provinces — no provincial licence, no principal-residence test — which puts the whole of the compliance burden on the city and the tax.
Quebec put the enforcement duty on the platforms: a listing without a valid registration number is one the platform is not allowed to publish, and the fines for publishing it anyway are aimed at the platform as much as the host.
La France superpose trois régimes : la déclaration, qui est nationale ; le plafond de nuitées, qui dépend de la commune ; et le changement d'usage, qui ne concerne que les logements qui ne sont pas votre résidence principale.