Halifax Housing Market Report

Halifax-Dartmouth's market was a balanced market in August 2026, though conditions have continued to soften from the tighter market of recent years. Inventory rose again year-over-year, sales slipped, and prices were down 1.8% on average, giving buyers more choice while keeping the market from tipping decisively into buyer's-market territory.

The composite benchmark price was $563,800 in August 2026, up 1.2% from July and up 1.5% year-over-year. The average sold price was $592,675, down 1.8% year-over-year, while the median was $539,900, down 3.1% year-over-year. Detached homes, the dominant segment, averaged $635,169, down 0.4% year-over-year, on 352 sales. Sales were down 7.5% year-over-year at 441 transactions, while active listings were up 18% year-over-year at 1,853. New listings were up 3.8% year-over-year at 663, adding options for buyers. At 4.2 months of supply, Halifax-Dartmouth sits within balanced market conditions, though supply has moved noticeably higher than August 2025's 3.3 months.

The benchmark price reflects the value of a typical home based on the MLS® HPI, while the average and median prices represent actual transactions. The average can be skewed by high-end sales, while the median is less sensitive to extremes.

Halifax counted about 200,000 private dwellings at the 2021 census, and the region has since been building at a pace that stands out nationally. Housing starts reached 6,676 units in 2025, up 42 percent in a year and led overwhelmingly by apartments, while the number of homes under construction hit a record 13,621 — one of the highest rates per person among comparable Canadian cities. That surge is finally reaching renters: the apartment vacancy rate edged up to 2.7 percent in 2025 from 2.1 percent a year earlier, still tight but no longer the near-empty market of recent years. With population growth cooling at the same moment, the long-running gap between new households and new homes looks set to narrow.

Halifax has been one of Canada's faster-growing cities, though what powers that growth has been shifting quickly. As of mid-2025, the most recent estimates available, the municipality had reached 517,115 residents and the wider metro area about 545,000. Growth ran roughly 1.5 to 1.6 percent in 2025, close to double the national pace but a marked cooldown from the 4.2 percent of the year before — and because the drivers are moving so fast, that figure is best read as the 2025 pace rather than a settled rate that still holds. Two things changed at once. The pandemic-era wave of Canadians moving east for cheaper housing largely faded, with net interprovincial migration into Halifax falling to under 1,000 people in 2025 from around 5,200 the year before. And federal limits on temporary residents turned international students into a net outflow, with enrolment down more than 14 percent. In 2025, international immigration, at over 7,400 net arrivals, accounted for almost all of the region's growth.

Underneath it sits an unusually stable economic base. Halifax is Atlantic Canada's largest city and its institutional hub, and a large share of its jobs are in health care, education, and government — the public sector has produced roughly a third of local job growth over the past decade. Around that core are the Port of Halifax, one of the country's major naval and defence establishments, a growing ocean-technology cluster, and universities led by Dalhousie and Saint Mary's. Employment passed 280,000 in 2025, and the unemployment rate averaged 5.6 percent that year — close to the national average — before edging up toward 6 percent in early 2026. That institutional mix gives the local economy less cyclical swing than more manufacturing-dependent regions carry.