Buy or rent in Mississauga?
Other cities: Toronto · Brampton · Markham
Two households start with the same money. One buys a $925k home with a 30-year mortgage. The other rents a similar home and invests every dollar it saves. After 30 years, who is richer?
Short answer: it's close, and the range of outcomes is wide. With typical assumptions the renter ends about 3% ahead, but only by investing the difference every month in low-cost funds. Allowing for real ups and downs, the owner comes out ahead in 50% of possible scenarios. Replaying the actual years since 1981 favoured renting, because stocks did unusually well.
Run your own numbers in the calculator →The two households
The owner
- Buys at $925,000, close to the average Mississauga price in Sept 2026 (all home types)
- Puts 20% down ($185k) plus about $17k in closing costs, including Ontario land transfer tax (no municipal land transfer tax outside Toronto)
- 30-year mortgage at 4.25%: about $3,620/mo
- Adds property tax (0.8% of market value, since property assessments still use 2016 values), maintenance (1%) and insurance, for about $5,130/mo in total
The renter
- Rents a comparable home for $3,500/mo, rising 3% a year
- Invests the $202k the owner spent up front
- Invests the monthly gap between owning and renting costs, about $1,600 at the start
- Fills a First Home Savings Account (FHSA), then the TFSA, then the RRSP, and reinvests the RRSP tax refund
If renting ever becomes more expensive than owning, the owner invests that difference instead, so both sides always spend the same amount on housing plus savings. Base assumptions: homes grow 3.5% a year (inflation of 2.5% plus 1 point), stocks return 7% before fees (inflation plus 4.5 points), and the mortgage renews at 4.25%.
Comparing after 30 years
By year 30 the owner's mortgage is paid off. To compare like with like, the renter then buys the same home at its new price, about $2.60M:
- Renter pays for it from the FHSA (tax-free for a first home), the TFSA and any taxable savings, plus land transfer tax and legal fees of about $52k. The RRSP stays invested for retirement and is counted after the 30% tax expected on later withdrawals.
- Owner simply keeps the home. There is no tax on the gain, because of the principal residence exemption.
Base case: the owner ends with $2.62M and the renter with $2.71M, about $1.25M and $1.29M in today's dollars. Owner ÷ renter is 0.97.
If both households instead sell everything and cash out, with the RRSP withdrawn in one year and taxed (about $18k), the owner ends with $2.49M and the renter with $2.75M (owner ÷ renter 0.91).
Who wins at each growth rate
We don't know future growth rates, so we ran the comparison for every combination of home price growth (1–6%) and stock return (4–9%). Each cell shows the owner's wealth divided by the renter's.
The tie line runs diagonally. Buying wins when stocks return less than about 2.5 to 4 percentage points a year more than home prices grow. The mortgage multiplies the home's gain, and the sale is tax-free, so homes don't need to beat stocks outright. They need to come close.
Allowing for real ups and downs
The numbers so far use the same growth rates every year. Real years swing: housing booms and busts, stock crashes, mortgage rates from 18% in 1981 to record lows in 2020–21. So we built 5,000 possible 30-year scenarios from the actual years 1981–2024. Each scenario strings together runs of consecutive real years, about 5 on average so booms and busts stay together, and each year keeps its home prices, rent, stocks, inflation and mortgage rates together. Each series is then shifted so its long-run average matches the base assumptions, so the middle of the range lines up with the base case.
The typical outcome barely moves from the base case, but the range is wide. In a bad 1-in-10 scenario either household can end with well under half of what the other has.
How often each outcome came up in history
To see which cells of heat map 1 history actually favoured, we replayed the years as they happened, without shifting the averages. We reshuffled the GTA's 1981–2025 record (TRREB average home prices across the region, and stocks as a 50/50 mix of the TSX and the S&P 500 in Canadian dollars) into 200,000 possible 30-year scenarios. Each cell shows the percentage of scenarios whose average home growth and stock return landed in it, so all the cells add up to 100%. Futures past the edges are counted in the edge cells.
The most common outcome is homes at about 6% and stocks at about 11%, close to the actual averages over 1981–2025 (6.1% and 10.8% a year). Stocks ran well ahead of homes over this period, so history favours renting more than our base case does.
Every real 30-year stretch since 1981
What if the next 30 years repeat an actual stretch of history, in order? We replayed each one with today's prices, rents and rules. Mortgage renewals use that year's 5-year rate, lowered by 1.9 points to match today's gap between banks' posted rates and what borrowers typically pay.
| Years | Homes /yr | Stocks /yr | Owner ÷ renter | Winner |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1981–2010 | 6.0% | 9.8% | 0.65 | Renter |
| 1982–2011 | 5.6% | 10.1% | 0.65 | Renter |
| 1983–2012 | 5.7% | 9.9% | 0.63 | Renter |
| 1984–2013 | 5.6% | 9.9% | 0.56 | Renter |
| 1985–2014 | 5.9% | 10.3% | 0.52 | Renter |
| 1986–2015 | 6.0% | 9.5% | 0.63 | Renter |
| 1987–2016 | 5.7% | 9.6% | 0.66 | Renter |
| 1988–2017 | 5.0% | 9.9% | 0.61 | Renter |
| 1989–2018 | 4.2% | 9.5% | 0.56 | Renter |
| 1990–2019 | 3.7% | 9.5% | 0.48 | Renter |
| 1991–2020 | 4.4% | 10.2% | 0.52 | Renter |
| 1992–2021 | 5.3% | 10.4% | 0.59 | Renter |
| 1993–2022 | 5.9% | 9.7% | 0.81 | Renter |
| 1994–2023 | 5.8% | 9.5% | 0.75 | Renter |
| 1995–2024 | 5.8% | 10.3% | 0.59 | Renter |
The renter came out ahead in all 15 stretches, because stocks beat home prices by a wide margin in every one of them. These stretches overlap heavily, so together they amount to only about one and a half independent 30-year periods: a useful check, not a forecast.
What could flip the answer
Starting from the base case (owner ÷ renter = 0.97), we changed one assumption at a time:
| Change | Owner ÷ renter |
|---|---|
| Equivalent home rents for $4,100, not $3,500 | 1.46 |
| Rent grows 4%/yr | 1.27 |
| Renter pays 1%/yr in fund fees | 1.25 |
| Stocks return 1 point less (6%/yr) | 1.25 |
| Renter invests only half the monthly gap | 1.24 |
| Homes grow 1 point faster (4.5%/yr) | 1.16 |
| Renter invests only 75% of the gap | 1.09 |
| Property tax 1.00% of market value, not 0.80% | 0.87 |
| Mortgage renews at 5.5% after year 5 | 0.84 |
| Maintenance 1.5%/yr | 0.77 |
| Rent is $2,900 | 0.71 |
| Home has a $700/mo condo or common fee | 0.69 |
The biggest risk to the renter's plan is behaviour, not markets. Investing a quarter less each month, or paying typical bank-fund fees of about 1% a year, is enough on its own to hand the win to the owner.
What this analysis can't tell you
- History ran hot for stocks. From 1981 to 2025, stocks returned about 10.8% a year and GTA homes about 6.1%, helped by interest rates falling from 18% to near 2%. That can't repeat from today's rates.
- 45 years is still a small sample. Reshuffling can't produce disasters worse than the ones in the data, such as the GTA's 1989–96 slide, when average prices fell by more than a quarter and took over a decade to recover.
- Approximate inputs. Price history is TRREB's GTA-wide average, mixing condos and houses and every city in the region; the rent history is Canada-wide; and TSX dividends are an average estimate. Rents are scaled from Toronto using TRREB’s Q2 2026 lease data; condo price per square foot and fees are rough estimates.
- Rules can change. The principal residence exemption, RRSP, FHSA and capital gains rules could all shift over 30 years. A large RRSP withdrawal after 65 can also trigger the OAS clawback.
- Real life is messier. People move, renovate, change jobs and spend windfalls. Most owners never sell, and few renters invest the full difference every month for decades.
Bottom line
On paper, renting and investing slightly beats buying in Mississauga at today's prices, rents and rates, by about 3% over 30 years. That holds only for a household that invests the full difference, month after month, in low-cost funds, and never sells in a crash. The range of outcomes is far wider than the gap between the two, and for most households the forced saving built into a mortgage probably matters more than whether home prices or stocks grow faster.