Thunder Bay rent levels
Listings 2026-05-09–2026-08-06 · 315 of them · official data 2010–2025
This page is written for students and newcomers who have just arrived or are about to, and it answers one specific question: what your budget actually gets you, and how many places a week you get to choose from. The data is what our bot scrapes daily from Kijiji, RentPanda and others — 315 listings over the last 90 days. The official survey sits further down as long-run context: it comes out once a year and covers only purpose-built apartment buildings, which is mostly not the kind of place you will be renting.
Listings over the last 90 days
$1,625
Median asking rent
last 90 days
315
Listings on the market
across 4 platforms
$700
Cheapest tenth
mostly rooms in shared houses
$2,500
Dearest tenth
mostly whole detached houses
What listings are asking
Each bar counts the listings inside a $250price band. The dashed lines are CMHC's official averages — the official “average” lands mid-distribution and covers neither end: to its left are rooms in shared houses, which the official definition does not count at all; to its right are whole detached houses.
These are asking prices, not signed rents, and they carry a bias you cannot scrape away: good places are gone in days, so what stays listed skews expensive or hard to rent, and the median with it. Only 84 of these 315 listings state the layout, which is why this page does not break asking prices down by bedroom count.
How much choice your budget buys
“Average rent” is no use when you are arriving with a fixed budget — what you need to know is how many places at that price appear in a week. The bands below count exactly that, at a rate worked out over the 57 days we actually have data for.
| Budget | In 90 days | Per week | Share of all |
|---|---|---|---|
| Up to $700 | 43 | 5.3 | 14% |
| Up to $900 | 78 | 9.6 | 25% |
| Up to $1100 | 93 | 11.4 | 30% |
| Up to $1300 | 120 | 14.7 | 38% |
- At this price there are almost no self-contained units. Of the 78 listings under $900, only 4 state a layout — the rest are overwhelmingly rooms in shared houses or basement units, not an apartment of your own.
- And they are nearly all on one platform. 68 of those 78 come from Kijiji, with 10 on RentPanda. On a tight budget, don't look only at the polished rental sites — the cheap places are not there.
- We can't see all of it either.Facebook groups, WeChat groups and the schools' off-campus boards carry listings we never scrape, so the real choice is wider than the table — but those channels depend on already being here and being plugged in.
The long run (official data)
A few months of listings cannot answer “how much has this gone up”. For that, CMHC's survey: a two-bedroom went from $772 in 2010 to $1537 in 2025 — up 99% over 15 years.
Average rent (CAD/month)
View the data table
| Year | Bachelor | 1 bedroom | 2 bedroom | 3 bedroom |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2010 | $516 | $645 | $772 | $941 |
| 2011 | $529 | $664 | $787 | $981 |
| 2012 | $542 | $699 | $836 | $1,047 |
| 2013 | $585 | $731 | $875 | $1,060 |
| 2014 | $592 | $759 | $904 | $1,114 |
| 2015 | $626 | $769 | $931 | $1,170 |
| 2016 | $632 | $782 | $950 | $1,216 |
| 2017 | $660 | $794 | $962 | $1,138 |
| 2018 | $682 | $840 | $1,050 | $1,317 |
| 2019 | $741 | $878 | $1,093 | $1,376 |
| 2020 | $753 | $907 | $1,109 | $1,271 |
| 2021 | $769 | $954 | $1,103 | $1,286 |
| 2022 | $768 | $991 | $1,179 | $1,539 |
| 2023 | $848 | $1,086 | $1,352 | $1,738 |
| 2024 | $857 | $1,182 | $1,478 | $1,929 |
| 2025 | $1,026 | $1,213 | $1,537 | $1,913 |
Where to look
Listings: scraped daily by our rental bot from Kijiji, RentPanda, Zumper, Zillow and Rentals.ca, deduplicated per property, with obviously wrong prices (under $200 or over $10,000) dropped. These are asking prices, usually above what the place actually rents for, and they say nothing about whether utilities are included — the original listing governs before you sign.
Official data: Statistics Canada / CMHC Rental Market Survey, table 34100133(average rent), covering “Apartment structures of six units and over” — that is, apartment buildings of six units or more, and no detached, semi-detached or small-scale rentals. It is surveyed each October and published early the following year, which is why the latest year available is 2025. Fetched 2026-08-04.
Published 2026-08-06 · data updated 2026-08-06 · lakebbs editorial