My Actual Monthly Budget Living in Toronto in 2026 (It’s Not What You’ve Read)

By Harold Phillips | March 2026

Every few months, a journalist or a Reddit thread publishes a "can you afford to live in Toronto?" piece and the number is always either terrifying or suspiciously manageable depending on what the author is trying to prove. My partner reads them and shows me the ones that make me look either irresponsible or delusional. Either way I lose. So I stopped reading them and started writing my own.

Here's what I actually spend in a month. Real numbers from a spreadsheet I've been keeping since 2021. Not a theoretical budget, not a lifestyle blog approximation. The number is higher than I expected when I first added it up, and it's higher now than it was three years ago. But it's not the apocalyptic figure the hot-take articles keep citing. It's just money going somewhere.

The Problem With Toronto Affordability Takes

There's a specific kind of content I've come to hate. It usually goes one of two ways.

The first version is the "I live in Toronto on $27,000 a year and here's how I do it" story, which always involves eating rice six days a week, two roommates in a Scarborough apartment, and framing financial precarity as a charming personality quirk.

The second version is the "$200,000 salary and I still can't afford a house" piece. Technically true, but doing a lot of work to make a six-figure income sound like victimhood.

Neither of these is where most people actually are. I'm somewhere in the middle: comfortably renting, taking the TTC, shopping at No Frills, not suffering, and I never see my life reflected in those pieces. So I started writing it down myself.

My Take

The thesis I've landed on after years of tracking this: Toronto is genuinely expensive, but the discourse around it is almost useless for people who aren't at either extreme. The real cost of living here depends almost entirely on whether you're splitting expenses with someone, and most of the hot takes conveniently skip that part.

I'll be real with you: I would not be living in Leslieville on my income alone. Not comfortably. A one-bedroom in this neighbourhood would run close to $2,500 in rent by myself, and that's before I've bought a single bag of lentils. Single renters in Toronto — especially under 35 — are dealing with a genuinely rough situation that couples and multi-person households don't fully experience. My numbers look manageable because there are two incomes in this apartment.

That's not a budgeting tip. It's a structural reality most Toronto affordability content glosses over.

The Actual Numbers

My partner and I rent a one-bedroom in Leslieville. We've been here since 2022. Our rent is $2,350 a month. Not a steal for this neighbourhood in 2026, but our landlord hasn't gone full AGI on us yet, which apparently counts as luck these days.

Here's what a typical month looks like for our household:

My share of shared expenses comes to roughly $1,900 a month. Add personal spending (clothes, whatever I'm researching for three weeks before I buy, the occasional Uber when the TTC has one of its moments) and I'm usually between $2,400 and $2,700 for the month.

Annualized, my personal spend is around $30,000 to $32,000. That's before RRSP contributions and TFSA deposits. After all of that, it's tight, but it works.

What I've Actually Done About It

The non-rent stuff is where I've put most of my energy, because it's the only category I can actually control.

Switching to Fizz saved me around $50 a month compared to Freedom Mobile, and Freedom was already cheaper than Rogers, Bell, or Telus by a significant margin. Switching to Oxio for home internet saved another $30 from whatever Bell was extracting previously. That's $80 a month, nearly $1,000 a year, from refusing to pay for a logo on a bill.

Groceries are No Frills and mostly meal-prepped. Dal, roasted vegetables, rice, a curry on Sundays. My partner is the better cook. Beans mostly eats better than we do, which is probably a comment on our priorities.

The eating-out line is where things slip. $280 a month sounds like a lot for someone who lectures himself about telecom fees, and it is. But I'm not cutting it. That's birthday dinners and bad weeks and the coffee I pick up on the way to the TTC because I left the house too late to make one. That number is real and it's staying.

The subscriptions audit I do every few months genuinely helps. I found $23 worth of monthly charges last autumn that I couldn't immediately identify. Cancelled two of them. The third turned out to be something my partner was actively using, which I heard about for a while.

The Other Side

The counterargument to "here's what I spend" pieces is that they're useless. Everyone's situation is different, rent can double overnight with an AGI application, one medical emergency or job loss and the whole thing unravels.

That's fair. These numbers only work under specific conditions: two stable incomes, good health, stable rent, no car, no kids. Change any of those variables and the math shifts fast. I'm not presenting my spreadsheet as a blueprint for anyone.

The other thing people say is "well, you should be buying, not renting." My partner and I have done that math more than once. I'm genuinely not sure we've modelled it correctly (real estate involves a lot of assumptions about appreciation rates and interest rates that I can't predict) but based on what I've worked out, buying in Toronto right now is not obviously better than renting at our income level. You have to gut the TFSA for a down payment, carry costs at current rates aren't trivial, and the opportunity cost of not investing the difference is real. Maybe I'm wrong. The "renting is throwing money away" crowd never seems to account for what you're throwing away to own.

I'll revisit that math every year. Haven't changed my mind yet.

Where This Leaves Us

I don't have a fix for Toronto's housing market. Nobody does, and I'm suspicious of anyone who says otherwise.

What I can say is that $30,000 a year in personal spending is my actual number. The cost of being a renter with a partner and a cat in this city in 2026. It's not a triumph of frugality. It's not a cautionary tale. It's just what comfortable looks like here. And comfortable, for me, means No Frills groceries, an MVNO phone plan, and not auditing every coffee.

The part that still gets me is rent. Not because $2,350 is objectively ruinous (it's not) but because it went up $175 last year and the year before that, and there's no reason to believe that stops. Every other line item in that budget I can chip away at. Rent is the variable I can't touch, and every year it takes a bigger percentage of the total.

That's the actual Toronto affordability story. Not the $200,000 victim narrative. Not the ramen-and-roommates hustle piece. Just: the rent is too high, the rest is manageable if you're not doing it alone, and most of what you read about this city is designed to make you feel either panicked or impressed.

Neither of those feelings is useful.

This is an opinion piece based on my personal experience. Your situation might be different, so do your own research.