Where Vancouver’s property-tax bills add up
Compare the geography of property-tax bills, people and public places. Changing the denominator changes the story.
The full amounts on the City’s published tax notices, including other taxing authorities, utilities and other charges. These are amounts billed. They are not a measure of payments received or the money Vancouver keeps.
The municipal portion / Confirmed citywide
What goes to Vancouver?
2026 general-purpose municipal levy
Vancouver’s enacted By-law 14681 sets the levy at $1,224,250,000. This is the municipal property-tax amount we want to trace across neighbourhoods.
The neighbourhood split is still missing. The public property file combines the municipal charge with other authorities and fees. It omits the property classes, adjusted taxable values and relief components needed to separate them reliably. The map’s dollar measures below therefore remain full notices.
How we would calculate the municipal map
For each property account, sum its taxable value in each class multiplied by that class’s municipal rate, divided by 1,000, after averaging, exemptions, development-potential relief and port caps. Better still, use the municipal charge already calculated by the City. Match those amounts to local areas and reconcile the sum to the same-date municipal roll.
The residential rate is $1.93406 per $1,000 of taxable value; the ordinary business rate is $7.09436. Applying one percentage to every full notice would erase those differences. Read the method notes.
Figure 1 / Explore
Find your neighbourhood
Choose an area on the map or use the list. Switch measures to see what changes.
Darker areas have larger values. Positive values use up to five quantile groups; tied values stay together. Zero and unavailable ratios have separate colours. ≈ marks a measure using estimated 2021 population. Facilities are counted by location, not service catchment. Population and facility methods.
Downtown is out in front
Downtown’s published notices add up to $467.5 million. That’s 3.3 times Kitsilano’s $140.6 million, the next-largest neighbourhood total. The West End follows at $132.2 million.
The concentration is striking. Downtown occupies 3.9% of the area in these neighbourhood boundaries and accounts for 19.7% of the mapped dollar total. That gives us a place to start asking how Vancouver’s buildings and land uses contribute to its tax base.
A map of totals also gives large neighbourhoods more room to accumulate bills. Dividing by area helps us make a different comparison.
Figure 2 / Compare
The neighbourhood ranking
Bars begin at zero. Select a row to highlight that neighbourhood on the map. Open total-dollar figure · Open per-hectare figure
The West End moves up
Downtown still leads per hectare, at roughly $1,000,066. The West End is second at $585,824, followed by Mount Pleasant and Fairview. Kitsilano moves from second in total dollars to fifth per hectare, at $221,013.
The West End’s total is a little smaller than Kitsilano’s, but it covers much less area. Its published bills add up to about 2.7 times as much per hectare. The two views answer different questions: where the largest total sits, and how concentrated it is.
Neighbourhood boundaries matter here. Parks, roads and other spaces stay in the denominator. This is a comparison of whole neighbourhoods, not a measurement of the return from each developable lot.
Big totals can come with smaller individual bills
The median Downtown notice is $2,661. In Shaughnessy it is $19,840, even though Shaughnessy’s total is much smaller at $70.7 million.
Downtown has 43,136 records in this comparison; Shaughnessy has 2,833. Many smaller notices can add up to a large total, alongside larger bills. A tax record can represent a strata unit, a rental building or another property, so this is not a comparison of household tax bills.
Figure 3 / A different view
What does the middle notice look like?
Median published notice, four selected neighbourhoods · 2026 · CAD
Count people, and the ranking changes again
Shaughnessy leads when full notices are divided by estimated 2021 population: about $8,448 per resident, compared with $6,687 Downtown and $2,781 in the West End. These are 2026 bills divided by a five-year-old population baseline, not the amount an average resident pays.
The contrast is useful. Dollars per hectare describe how concentrated the bills are on the map. Dollars per resident compare those totals with the number of people living there. Businesses, rental buildings and non-resident owners contribute to the numerator too, so this cannot establish residents’ tax burdens.
Figure 4 / People
Land and people give different answers
One library can mean very different things
The West End and West Point Grey each have one library branch. Their estimated 2021 populations are about 47,500 and 13,200, respectively. That works out to 0.21 branches per 10,000 residents in the West End and 0.76 in West Point Grey.
That is a reason to investigate capacity and access, not a finding that one area is over-served. Central Library serves the entire city. A large centre with a pool is different from a smaller facility, and people cross neighbourhood boundaries every day.
The map now compares libraries and recreation community centres by count, by square kilometre and by 10,000 estimated residents. Carnegie, Gathering Place and Evelyne Saller appear separately as social-service centres. The library network excludes Oakridge’s long-term closure; Collingwood’s brief painting closure is flagged in its neighbourhood panel.
Figure 5 / Public places
Compare provision with population
The next question is what the City keeps
These results make a useful case for looking beyond the price of an individual house. Downtown and the West End concentrate a substantial share of the published tax bills into a small part of Vancouver. Large individual notices elsewhere can coexist with much smaller totals per hectare.
To explain how much of that difference comes from housing density, commercial property or tax policy, we need the municipal levy broken out by property class. Vancouver applies different rates to different classes, and assessed market value is not always the value used for taxation. Zoning alone cannot supply that missing breakdown.
We also need service costs before making a claim that one neighbourhood subsidises another. People use parks, streets and services across neighbourhood boundaries, and some bills here include money collected for other governments. The useful follow-up is to trace those parts separately and see how much of this pattern remains.
The strongest next comparisons would be municipal dollars per hectare, municipal dollars per resident, and the share of residents within a 10-minute walk of a library or centre. Opening hours and usable floor area per 1,000 residents would make the amenity comparisons more informative. A walking-access measure needs a routable street network, entrances and current facility locations.
The explorer includes full-notice dollars per library or centre as optional ratios. They do not show how much a neighbourhood receives in services. Dividing a large tax total by one facility cannot tell us that facility’s budget, and an area with no facility has an undefined ratio rather than zero.
The numbers behind the map
Download CSV ↓View all 22 neighbourhoods
| Neighbourhood | Selected measure | Municipal levy | Full notices | 2021 residents ≈ | Libraries | Community centres | Social centres |
|---|
Population and facility methods
Population comes from Statistics Canada’s 2021 census, delivered with geography through Esri Canada’s published census layer. The 1,019 selected dissemination areas reconcile to 662,248 Vancouver residents plus 1,646 residents of Musqueam 2, which lies within the City’s Dunbar-Southlands local-area boundary. Musqueam 2 is a separate census subdivision.
We distribute each census area’s population in proportion to its overlap with the 22 neighbourhoods, normalising those shares to preserve totals. These are Side Street estimates, not official neighbourhood counts. A boundary exception assigns all 1,105 residents of census area 59153586, which includes Stanley Park, to its small West End overlap; that assignment needs block-level confirmation. Assigning each whole census area to its largest neighbourhood overlap changes individual neighbourhood totals by up to 3.9%. This sensitivity check is not a confidence interval and does not measure population growth since 2021.
The library and community-centre open-data inventories date from 2020. We checked the named facilities against the current VPL directory, service alerts and City centre directory. Updated addresses remain in the same local areas. Outreach Services is not counted as a public library branch; Oakridge is excluded during its long-term closure. Collingwood remains in the network during its Oct. 12–22 painting closure.
The two facility types remain separate, even when they share a building. We distinguish 24 recreation community centres from three social-service centres. A zero means no counted site inside the boundary, not no access to service. No facility in a tax-per-facility ratio produces N/A. Read the metric definitions and reporting limits.
Sources and method
This map was inspired by the TeploMaps Edmonton neighbourhood-tax map supplied by a reader. The Vancouver calculations and graphics use City open data, Statistics Canada census data and current facility directories.
- Property tax report: report year and assessment year must both be 2026. We checked for duplicate assessment accounts using neighbourhood code plus folio. The source’s
tax_levyfield contains the full notice, including other authorities and charges. We do not multiply market assessments by a tax rate. - Property parcel polygons: we match each record’s land coordinate to the parcel tax coordinate, then locate its centre within a local-area boundary. Multiple centres must agree on the same neighbourhood; uncertain matches remain unallocated.
- Area is calculated from the complete neighbourhood polygon in UTM zone 10N (EPSG:26910). Dollars per hectare means mapped notice totals divided by this gross area. Shares use the total assigned to the 22 neighbourhoods.
- 223,562 of 223,600 eligible records are mapped, covering 99.99% of their dollar value. The 38 unmatched records total $241,058. We retain 1,655 $0 notices as published. No eligible notice values are missing.
- 5,321 records lack the 2026 assessment-year tag and are excluded, including $3,353.36 in published charges. Raw sums agree with the City API’s assessment-year aggregate; mapped and unmatched amounts reconcile exactly, to the cent.
For the municipal-only follow-up, the relevant sources are the City’s property-class tax rates and land assessment averaging rules. The public export does not provide the class-level net taxable values and general-purpose levy required to reconstruct each account reliably.
Snapshot: Oct. 15, 2026. Tax source last updated Oct. 12, 2026. Calculations and graphics prepared with AI assistance. Contains information licensed under the Open Government Licence – Vancouver. Download aggregate data and audit.