Here’s How Much You Can Earn Renting out Your Basement in the GTA

Renting out the basement of a Greater Toronto Area house can potentially net owners tens of thousands of dollars and help offset higher carrying costs associated with single-family homes.

By Josh Sherman | 4 minute read

Prospective homebuyers should do their due diligence before making plans to rent out part of their homes.

If you’re a single-family home owner in the Greater Toronto Area with a basement apartment to rent out, you could be earning anywhere from approximately $1,700 to $2,400 extra per month, depending on location, a new study from digital real estate platform Wahi suggests.

“While Toronto condo buyers have been benefitting from significantly and continually lower prices as the market corrects, single-family prices have remained firmer,” says Wahi Economist Ryan McLaughlin. “Fortunately, for single-family home buyers facing higher barriers to entry, there is the option of purchasing a property with a secondary suite — something we’ve seen elevated interest in during recent years,” he continues. 

In fact, Wahi’s 2025 What Homeseekers Want survey found that one-in-five Ontarians identified a separate entrance — often a key feature for renting out a portion of a home — as an important attribute for a home they’d move into.

To gauge more recent rental-income potential for house hunters, Wahi analyzed median asking rents for one- and two-bedroom lease listings from 2025 for detached and semi-detached homes in communities throughout the GTA. In some cases, the listing may be for a first- or second-floor rental, but the majority that Wahi’s data team reviewed were basements.

Data was sourced from Information Technology Systems Ontario (ITSO) and the Toronto Regional Real Estate Board (TRREB). Communities with fewer than 120 samples were excluded from calculations. Overall, 29 communities — including the GTA municipalities surrounding the City of Toronto as well as the city’s six former boroughs — were analyzed.

Wahi cannot guarantee that all rentals listed are legal apartments. Prospective homebuyers should do their due diligence before making plans to rent out part of their homes.

Unsurprisingly, four of the five communities with the highest median rents were found within the City of Toronto, led by Old Toronto ($2,400 per month). Following East York ($2,272.50), York $2,195), and Etobicoke ($2,150) was the municipality of Oakville ($2,000) — the only community with a monthly apartment rent of at least $2,000 located outside the City of Toronto. In annualized terms, rental incomes ranged from $28,800, in Old Toronto, to $240,000, in Brampton.

While the highest rental returns were found in Toronto and Oakville, these communities also had some of the highest up-front costs. For example, no other market had a higher median sale price than Oakville for a single-family home with an apartment ($1,610,000). Richmond Hill and Old Toronto rounded out the three communities where the median price was $1.5 million or more. 

Clearly, there’s more for homebuyers to consider than the highest potential monthly rental income. So, for each GTA community, Wahi also looked at annualized rental yields (the median monthly asking rent, multiplied by 12) as a percentage of the local median home price.

While Oshawa’s median monthly rent of $1,800 was the fourth-lowest in the GTA, the city also had the lowest median sale price in the region by more than $150,000.

Therefore, added together, 12 months of the median rent represented the highest share of the median sale price at (2.9%) of any GTA community. That was higher than Toronto’s York community (2.5%), which was a somewhat distant second.

Wahi’s latest analysis follows a similar study conducted using data from a 12-month period ending in June 2024.