Megan St. Rose says she was priced out of Halifax.

She said she moved after a decade in the city, where she was living with five roommates, paying $1,000 a month for a single room.

Despite working two jobs, she said she couldn’t find anything in her price range.

“It’s just becoming unlivable,” she said, adding that she was running into more people who were in a similar position to hers.

“If I went up in price, then I’d be making sacrifices everywhere else, whether it’s sell my car, whether it’s change my eating habits, which I didn’t have very expensive eating habits anyways.”

St. Rose has since packed her bags and relocated to Quebec City, where she now pays $1,750 per month for a newly renovated three-bedroom apartment.

“I’ve got a big open concept kitchen, dining room. I have lots of sunlight. It’s beautiful,” she said.

A new analysis from Rentals.ca found that Halifax’s average asking rental price has overtaken Ontario markets like Kingston and the East York area of Toronto. In March, the average asking price was $2,269. The report says the national asking average fell to $2,030 in February, down 2.8 per cent year over year.

An analyst with the rental agency says years of undersupply in the city’s housing market is a major contributor to today’s rental conditions.

“When people aren’t buying homes, they’re flooding to rentals, and then that increases the prices of rentals to the point where it’s just unaffordable,” said Giacomo Ladas, Rentals.ca’s associate director of communications.

“This is a result of decades of under-supplying the market.”

Kelvin Ndoro, a lead economist on the Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation’s economics and insights team, says Halifax is becoming one of the least affordable rental markets in Canada. The corporation’s 2025 rental market report found that the average price tenants are paying — not the asking price cited in Rental.ca’s report — is $1,826 for a two-bedroom apartment, which is a 6.7 per cent increase from 2024.

“I’ll probably say in the last five years, rents have gone anywhere from between 15 per cent to 20 per cen,” Ndoro said during an interview in his Halifax office.

Ndoro said there’s significant pressure at the bottom of the rental market, as many are reluctant to move out of a unit they secured at an affordable price years ago. He said this creates a barrier for new renters entering the market, as they’re forced to pay higher prices.

And with a lack of housing stock, those who’d historically move into home ownership are now occupying rentals longer.

“We need more home ownership options because, without home ownership options, people are stuck in rentals longer. It reduces the ability for people to move within the rental market and from the rental market to their home ownership,” he explained.

The CMHC reported an average 29 per cent rent hike when units are turned over to new tenants — which Ndoro says creates an incentive for people to stay put.

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