Alberta builders started 54,900 homes in 2025, the most in at least 70 years. That single figure reframes the province’s housing story. While construction slowed across much of Canada, Alberta broke ground at a record pace, and the cities that led the surge are the same ones drawing the newest residents. The records set last year still shape what a buyer finds in 2026, and the reasons behind them explain where the market goes next.
A Record Year for Construction
The 2025 total reached about 54,900 starts, up roughly 15% from the year before and the highest count in provincial records going back seven decades. The scale is plain against the national picture. Housing starts across Canada rose 5.6% in 2025, a modest gain, while Alberta outpaced it by a wide margin. Most striking, a province with under 12% of Canada’s population accounted for close to a quarter of all the homes started in the country that year.
Records of this size do not come from a single strong quarter. Builders sustained the pace across the full year, working through labour and material constraints that had slowed projects elsewhere. The province had the land, the trades, and the buyers at the same time, a combination that rarely lasts for long. Few provinces have matched that mix in the past decade, and none did so at this scale in 2025.
Record Starts in Calgary and Edmonton
Both major cities posted their strongest years on record. The Edmonton metropolitan area saw starts climb from 18,384 in 2024 to 21,337 in 2025, a 16.1% increase and the largest annual growth the region has recorded. Calgary matched the pattern with its own record year. Rental construction in particular reached record highs in both cities, a response to fast population growth and the tight vacancy of a year earlier.
The wave of new rowhouses and apartments gives those buying homes in Calgary more choice than the tight market of a few years ago allowed. More supply tends to slow price growth, which is part of why Alberta stayed affordable even as demand climbed. A buyer in either city now sees more listings, longer decision windows, and less of the bidding pressure that defined the market in 2022 and 2023.
Multi-Unit and Missing-Middle Homes
Most of the record came from multiple-unit housing. Of Alberta’s 2025 housing starts, seven in 10 were rowhouses, apartments, and other multiple-unit dwellings rather than detached homes. In Calgary and Edmonton, close to 60% of new starts fell into the missing-middle category, the row houses, townhomes, and small multiplexes that fall between a single detached home and a high-rise.
This is the housing type that adds density without changing a neighbourhood’s character, and Alberta built more of it than anywhere else in the country. The economics push in the same direction. Land and labour cost about the same on a one-home lot or a four-unit lot, so a builder who puts several units on a single parcel spreads those fixed costs and reaches buyers priced out of detached houses. For a first-time buyer, a new townhome often costs less than an older detached home in the same area, with lower maintenance and better efficiency.
The Drivers Behind the Boom
Construction follows people, and Alberta gained them faster than any other province. The population grew by about 83,796 over the year to October 2025, a rate of 1.7%, and the province led the country in interprovincial migration for 12 straight quarters. Those new residents needed somewhere to live, and the existing housing stock could not meet the demand, so builders responded.
Policy helped at the margins. Faster permitting in some municipalities and fee adjustments aimed at multi-unit projects shortened timelines and improved the math on density. The result was a rare alignment of strong demand, available labour and land, and a regulatory climate that let projects move at speed. Higher borrowing costs through 2024 slowed builders in other provinces, but Alberta’s demand was strong enough to keep construction moving through them.
The 2026 Picture
The record pace did not last into the new year. Forecasts for the 2026 housing market point to cooling momentum, and the Prairie provinces posted some of the largest quarterly declines after their record run. The decline follows the record rather than erasing it. A market that built at full capacity for two years was always going to ease once the sharpest demand was met. Buyers should read the slowdown as a normalization, since the two record years pulled forward a great deal of construction and a quieter 2026 simply spaces out what remains in the pipeline.
For 2026, the practical effect is a larger, newer housing stock across Alberta than at any point before, even if the rate of new starts settles back toward normal. A slower year of construction on top of two record years still leaves the province with far more recent inventory than it had entering the boom. The cooling is a return to a sustainable pace, not a collapse in building. Mortgage rates and the speed at which new units sell will set the pace from here, rather than any shortage of willing builders.
Implications for Buyers
For a buyer, the building boom changed the math. Two years of record construction added inventory, especially in rowhouses and apartments, which kept Alberta prices well below Toronto and Vancouver. As major city housing cools in those centres, regions like Alberta keep drawing buyers priced out elsewhere. New homes come with current efficiency standards and warranty coverage, and the wider choice means less competition for any single listing than in the scarcity years.
There are practical steps worth taking. Compare the price per square foot of a new build against a resale home in the same area, since the new unit may cost less to run. Check the builder’s warranty registration and track record before signing. Inventory also varies by city and segment, so a buyer should track the specific market rather than the provincial headline, since Edmonton’s condo and townhome supply looks different from Calgary’s detached market.
The pace will slow in 2026, but the homes built during the record run remain, and they are the strongest sign that supply finally answered the province’s growth. A buyer entering the market now does so with more options than at almost any time in Alberta’s history.
