We are deliberately not filling it in for you with a worked example built on invented inputs. Every figure below can be established for a real home, and a made up total would be worse than no total at all.
The short version
- Five inputs: mortgage payment, strata fee, property tax divided by twelve, home insurance, and utilities.
- Four of the five can be established exactly before you buy. Only utilities need an estimate.
- Add a monthly amount for future repairs, judged from the depreciation report and the reserve fund balance.
- Mortgage insurance premiums are added to the loan rather than paid in cash, so they raise the payment.
- Do the same calculation for every home on your shortlist, not just your favourite.
Input one: the mortgage payment
Your payment depends on the amount you borrow, the rate and the amortisation period. Your lender or broker will give you the figure, and it is the only one on this list that they can produce precisely.
One thing to build in: if your down payment is less than 20 per cent, the mortgage must be insured, and the premium is normally added to the loan rather than paid in cash. CMHC publishes those premiums as a percentage of the loan, at 4.00 per cent for a loan to value ratio between 90.01 and 95 per cent, and 3.10 per cent between 85.01 and 90 per cent. A premium added to the loan raises the balance and therefore the payment.
Ask for the payment on the actual purchase you are considering rather than reusing a figure from a different home. It takes a broker two minutes and removes the largest source of error in this whole exercise.
| Loan to value | Premium on the total loan |
|---|---|
| Up to 65% | 0.60% |
| 65.01% to 75% | 1.70% |
| 75.01% to 80% | 2.40% |
| 80.01% to 85% | 2.80% |
| 85.01% to 90% | 3.10% |
| 90.01% to 95% | 4.00% |
Source: CMHC, mortgage loan insurance cost, accessed 29 August 2026. The premium is normally added to the mortgage rather than paid up front.
Inputs two and three: the strata fee and the property tax
The strata fee for a specific home is a published figure, not an estimate. Ask for it directly, and ask for the current budget alongside it so you know what it includes. Two homes with the same fee can include different things.
Property tax comes from the assessed value multiplied by your municipality's current rates, less the home owner grant if the home will be your principal residence. The Province sets the regular grant at $570, available in full up to an assessed value of $2,075,000, falling by $5 per $1,000 above that and reaching zero at $2,189,000, with at least $350 of tax payable after the grant.
Divide the annual tax by twelve for the monthly figure, whether or not you pay it monthly. A cost that arrives once a year is still a monthly cost; it is just one you have to save for.
Inputs four and five: insurance and utilities
Get an actual insurance quote for the specific home rather than using a figure from a friend's condo. Tell the insurer it is a strata home, ask for deductible or loss assessment cover, and set that limit against the strata's real deductible.
Utilities are the only genuine estimate on the list. Work out which ones are included in the fee and which you will pay, then estimate the rest based on the size of your household. If a current owner will share a year of bills, that is much better than a guess. On a brand new home nobody has that history, so use comparable homes and expect a higher first year while you learn the home.
The sixth line nobody includes
Add a monthly amount for your share of future repairs. Everybody leaves this out and it is the reason strata ownership surprises people.
You can size it sensibly rather than pulling a number from the air. Take the depreciation report, look at what the building expects to spend over the next ten years, and compare it with the contingency reserve fund balance and the annual contribution. If the plan and the fund are well aligned, your strata fee is already covering it and you need very little here. If there is a visible gap, that gap is going to be asked for, divided by the number of homes and by the number of months until it happens.
That calculation is rough and it is grounded in the building's own documents, which makes it far better than an arbitrary percentage. It also tells you something useful when you compare two buildings: a higher fee with a funded reserve is often cheaper over ten years than a low fee with an empty one.
For a brand new building the reserve starts empty by definition, and the depreciation report may not yet exist in its first form. That is not a warning sign in itself; it is simply the position every new building starts from. What it means for a buyer is that the sixth line matters more on a new building rather than less, because there is no accumulated fund standing between you and the first significant repair.
Against that, a new building has warranty coverage behind it for its first years, which an older one does not. BC Housing requires new homes built by a Licensed Residential Builder to carry warranty insurance covering materials and labour, the building envelope and the structure over set periods, so the early years carry a protection that partly offsets the empty reserve. Neither factor cancels the other, and both belong in the comparison.
Doing it for every home on the list
Run the same five or six lines for each home you are seriously considering, and write them side by side. The rankings change more often than you would expect.
A home that is $30,000 cheaper but sits in a building with a large repair coming and no money set aside is not cheaper. A home with a higher fee that includes water and heating may cost less in total than one with a lower fee that includes neither. None of that is visible from the asking price, and all of it is visible from the documents.
When you have the totals, compare them against what your household actually earns rather than against what a lender will approve. Those are different numbers, and the second one is not a budget. In our view a household that is comfortable at the total on this page, rather than stretched to it, is the household that still enjoys the home in year three.
Keep the calculation somewhere you can find it, and redo it once a year. Strata fees are reset with each annual budget, property tax follows a new assessment every January, and insurance renews annually, so the total drifts even when nothing about your life changes. Households that review it each spring are rarely surprised by it.
Two costs sit outside this monthly total and deserve their own line in a household budget: the one-off costs of moving in, and the cost of the things a new home turns out to need. Blinds, a second set of keys, a lawn mower for a garden you did not previously have. None of them are large and together they are not small, and they all arrive in the same month.
If you are buying with another household, do this calculation separately for each home rather than once for the family. Two homes in one building can carry different fees, different assessed values and different insurance, and a shared calculation hides which household is carrying more. Each household should know its own number before either of them signs anything.
That is not about mistrust between families. It is about each household knowing what it has taken on, so that a change in one household's circumstances is a problem with a known size rather than an unpleasant discovery.
Once both numbers exist, compare them. If one household is carrying noticeably more than it expected, that is a conversation worth having before completion rather than in the second year of ownership.
Questions buyers ask
More in Cost of Owning
Also worth reading
Where these numbers come from
Every figure on this page comes from the body that issues it. Rules and rates change, so each entry says when we checked it.
- CMHC mortgage loan insurance cost. Canada Mortgage and Housing Corporation. Accessed 29 August 2026.
- Home owner grant. Province of British Columbia. Page last updated 3 July 2026, accessed 29 August 2026.
- Strata Property Act, SBC 1998, c. 43, Part 6 (Finances), sections 91 to 94. BC Laws, Queen's Printer for British Columbia. Act current to 25 August 2026, accessed 29 August 2026.
- BC Assessment. BC Assessment Authority. Accessed 29 August 2026.
Want this checked against a real home?
Send us the address or the project name. We will look at what is actually on offer, tell you what the numbers on this page work out to for that home, and say so if it is a poor fit.