Data · extracted 29 August 2026
Toronto laneway and garden suite permits, 2018 to 2026
Toronto has issued 2,286 permits for new laneway and rear-yard suites since legalising them, according to the city’s own open data. The first full year produced 2. In 2025 the city issued 676, and 2026 is at 452 by late August. Together those permits account for 2,333 new dwelling units.
Free to cite or link with credit. Methodology, including the exact filters and what is excluded, is at the bottom.
01 — Permits by year
| Year issued | Permits |
|---|---|
| 2018 | 2 |
| 2019 | 44 |
| 2020 | 77 |
| 2021 | 107 |
| 2022 | 147 |
| 2023 | 315 |
| 2024 | 466 |
| 2025 | 676 |
| 2026 (to 29 Aug) | 452 |
Growth has been continuous, with the steepest jumps between 2022 and 2023 and again into 2025. 2026 is a partial year.
02 — Toronto and Vancouver, going opposite ways
Vancouver invented laneway housing in Canada and its permitting peaked in 2018 at 730, then settled into the 300s. Toronto legalised laneway suites that same year, but only in the Toronto and East York District; the city-wide expansion followed on 16 July 2019, which is why the count jumps from 2 permits in 2018 to 44 in 2019. It has climbed every year since, reaching 676 in 2025 against Vancouver’s 365.
One caveat that matters, so treat the trajectories as comparable and the absolute counts as indicative: Toronto classifies these permits as Laneway / Rear Yard Suite, which includes garden suites, while Vancouver’s Laneway House category does not. The two cities are counting slightly different things.
03 — What they declare it costs
| Year issued | Median declared cost | Permits with a value |
|---|---|---|
| 2019 | $150,000 | 25 |
| 2020 | $200,000 | 39 |
| 2021 | $300,000 | 67 |
| 2022 | $300,000 | 64 |
| 2023 | $250,000 | 137 |
| 2024 | $200,000 | 214 |
| 2025 | $230,000 | 403 |
| 2026 (to 29 Aug) | $250,000 | 293 |
The median declared construction cost has sat between $200,000 and $300,000 for most of the period. Declared cost is what the applicant states on the permit, not the final build cost, and the early years have too few permits to read much into. Do not set these figures against the declared values on our Vancouver page. Vancouver fixes that number at $250 a square foot of floor area to calculate permit fees, so the two columns measure different things.
04 — Methodology
Source: the City of Toronto Open Data portal, Building Permits datasets (Cleared Permits and Active Permits), extracted 29 August 2026. Both datasets were combined so that permits still working through the system are counted alongside closed ones.
Definition: records where the structure type is Laneway / Rear Yard Suite and the work is a new suite of that type, which excludes the associated plumbing, HVAC and revision permits attached to the same projects. That gives 2,899 records. Permits marked cancelled are removed, and permits applied for but not yet issued fall out of the by-year counts, leaving 2,286 issued permits.
Not shown: geography. The dataset identifies location by ward grid code rather than neighbourhood name, so a breakdown would list codes rather than places people recognise.
Contains public sector information licensed under the Open Government Licence, Toronto. Our tables and summaries are free to reuse with a credit link. Tell us if a number looks wrong and we will re-check it.
Thinking about a suite on your Toronto lot?
We build them in the factory and set them on site. First step is checking what your lot allows, free.