Data Sources
Where our public data comes from, what is official, and how estimates are built.
Data freshness
- Pipeline run: Nov 5, 2026
- Latest rent observation in dataset: April 2026
- Dataset generated: Nov 5, 2026
- Fuel observation: 2026-09
- Effective mortgage rate observation: Aug 1, 2026
- Tax tables checked: Sep 8, 2026
How the estimates are built
True Income separates official reference data from planning estimates. City Costs V2 publishes Statistics Canada basic-needs budgets for 1-, 2-, and 4-person households, advertised rent, childcare, population, employment, income, and safety context. Every metric keeps its source period, geography, method, and quality tier.
Primary public sources and refresh status
Quarterly Rent Statistics (46-10-0092-01), Market Basket Measure tables (11-10-0066-01 and 11-10-0104-01), average retail food prices (18-10-0245-01), population, employment, income, childcare, CPI, fuel, Census Profile, and Crime Severity Index data.
Average effective rate on new uninsured 5-year+ fixed mortgages (series V122667786, monthly), applied to every province because it is published nationally only. The posted 5-year rate is tracked as a reference.
Rental market data and housing benchmarks used to sanity check housing assumptions where official city-level coverage is available.
Federal and provincial income tax references. The 2026 tax table is versioned with the site; see the refresh date under Data freshness.
CPP and EI payroll deduction references used by the income calculator.
City-cost methodology
Advertised rent measures current market entry and is shown separately. The Market Basket Measure is an official regional basic-needs threshold that already includes shelter, food, clothing, transportation, communication, and other essentials. The two values are never added together. Childcare is published at province or territory level and is also shown separately. The planning grocery estimate prices a ten-item basket with provincial average retail prices (Whitehorse and Yellowknife where published), so cities in the same province share it; Whitehorse and Yellowknife do not publish every item, so the missing ones use the national price adjusted by the territory’s price level across all products both publish; Iqaluit, where no prices are published, keeps the previous estimate adjusted with local CPI.
Salary-needed and affordability methodology
Salary-needed pages start from local monthly essentials and gross up to salary ranges for essentials, balanced, and comfortable planning. These are not employer salary recommendations; they are affordability thresholds for estimating whether after-tax pay can cover local costs.
Official data vs estimates
Official observations and modelled or fallback values are labelled independently. Planning estimates include the compact legacy city baseline, move-in setup costs, car ownership assumptions, and salary-needed ranges. Adjust them for your household, neighbourhood, lease, lender quote, and employer offer.
Fallbacks and limitations
When a city is not published separately, the metric records the exact provincial, territorial, or MBM-region fallback. Missing asking-rent observations remain missing in V2 instead of being presented as official values. Local prices can change faster than public datasets, especially rent, insurance, and fuel.
Update cadence
The GitLab pipeline runs weekly. It downloads all sources, builds a candidate, validates minimum coverage and abrupt changes, runs the complete frontend CI, and publishes only when every gate passes. Source periods change only when Statistics Canada publishes a new observation.