According to the provincial government, Alberta led the country in housing starts in 2025.--NEWS FILE PHOTO
zmason@medicinehatnews.com
Alberta had a record-breaking year for housing starts in 2025, although the benefits of new supply will take some time to reach smaller cities like the Hat.
In a press conference Wednesday, Minister of Assisted Living and Social Services Jason Nixon celebrated a record-breaking year for housing growth in the province, while cautioning that exceptional growth is likely to slow in 2026 amid a climate of political uncertainty.
Nixon says 2025 saw Alberta begin construction on more than 50,000 housing starts, a 14 per cent increase from the previous provincial record, set in 2024.
He says Alberta built nearly a quarter of all housing starts in the country last year, despite comprising less than 12 per cent of Canada’s population. Alberta was also responsible for 80 per cent of the housing starts in the Prairies region.
The bulk of progress was in the rental sector, where Nixon says Alberta built nearly 20,000 purpose-built rental starts, the highest number in the history of the province and almost triple the number from a decade ago.
“Rent in Alberta declined nearly twice the national average last year, and today, the average asking rents in Alberta is about $400 a month lower than the national average,” said Nixon.
About 22,000 rental units are under construction or recently finalized across the province. Scott Fash, the CEO of BILD Alberta, says with the addition, rental supply will match, if not exceed, demand.
“It’s going to be great news for renters,” he said.
Still, he says he expects a strong resale market to persist, since the majority of 2025’s increases were in the rental area.
“We haven’t actually been building that much more resale than we have historically,” he said.
Officials said the majority of the gains described in Wednesday’s conference took place in the Calgary and Edmonton areas.
“A lot of this purpose-built rental takes 12 to 18 months to get online. So I think we’re still seeing a lag of that effect in a lot of our midsize cities where a lot of that product is now being built,” said Fash.
Fash says Red Deer, Lethbridge and Medicine Hat have seen major upticks in housing starts in the rental space over the past calendar year. He says it should take about 12 to 18 months for the results of that to begin to trickle down into local rent prices.
According to provincial data, Medicine Hat saw a 64 per cent increase in housing starts in 2025, with 317 starts compared to 2024’s 193.
Nixon says the province is also committed to ensuring access to below-market housing for low-income Albertans. He says the province is supporting more than 60,000 households across the province with affordable housing.
As of December, 476 households were still on the wait list for social and affordable housing in Medicine Hat, according to the Medicine Hat Community Housing Society, which administers housing programs using federal and provincial funding.
Officials say several factors contributed to the province-wide gains in housing, including update mortgage loan products from the Canadian Mortgage and Housing Corporation and the province’s pushback against demands to implement rent control.
Still, they said this year’s impressive housing numbers are likely to cool in 2026.
“We expect this to be a bit of a transition year in terms of starts, not expecting a record-breaking year. Definitely some moderation. A lot of unknowns, whether that be tariffs, whether that be population growth, we know that’s going to dampen slightly,’ said Fash.
Fash says housing experts are also awaiting with interest the impact of the federal GST rebate for first-time home buyers.
Janis Irwin, the NDP shadow minister for housing, said Wednesday’s housing starts update was welcome news. But she said $1 billion is outstanding for maintenance costs for affordable housing units across the province, and they say homelessness in Edmonton has tripled compared to pre-pandemic numbers.
Nixon says his government is investing a further $9 billion in creating 25,000 new affordable spaces by 2031.
