Best Places to Live in the GTA, and 6 With No GO Train

If you are choosing a GTA municipality on numbers rather than on a mood board, two hard measures are published for all 25 of them, and they pull in different directions. The 2026 residential property tax rate runs from 0.722889% in Markham to 1.575342% in Oshawa, so the same assessed value costs more than twice as much a year at one end as the other. The fastest scheduled GO trip to Union Station runs from 8 minutes to 68, and six municipalities have no such trip at all. We put both beside CMHC's average two-bedroom rent and the population change the 2021 Census recorded, for every one of the 25.

The 25 GTA municipalities, ranked

The score below uses the two measures we could fill in for every municipality: the tax rate and the GO trip. Each municipality is ranked on each measure, with tied municipalities sharing the average of the ranks they span. The rank then becomes a score of 100 at the top and 0 at the bottom. The two halves are weighted equally.

What that score leaves out is most of life. It says nothing about schools, crime, hospitals, child care, house prices, hydro, water, parks or the buses that run inside the town. It measures two things only: what a municipality charges per dollar of assessed value, and how fast GO can put you at Union in the morning. Toronto wins it on the GO half, and most people in Toronto ride the TTC rather than GO. Rent sits in the table but not in the score, because CMHC publishes no figure for eight of the 25 and a score can only compare rows measured the same way.

A low rate is not a low bill

The tax rate is a percentage of your assessed value, so it only becomes money once you attach a house to it. Take an assessment of $700,000 and run it through both ends of the table. In Markham, 700,000 x 0.722889% = $5,060.22 a year. In Oshawa, 700,000 x 1.575342% = $11,027.39. The difference is $11,027.39 minus $5,060.22, which is $5,967.17 every year on the same paper value.

The middle of the pack is Halton Hills at 1.003980%, the 13th of the 25 rates. On the same $700,000 that is 700,000 x 1.003980% = $7,027.86.

Now the catch. Assessed value is not market value. The Municipal Property Assessment Corporation still values every Ontario home at what it was worth on January 1, 2016, because the province has postponed the reassessment. A $700,000 assessment in Markham and a $700,000 assessment in Oshawa are two very different houses today. So a low rate does not promise you a low bill, and the towns with the lowest rates are usually the ones with the highest assessments behind them.

Three rates make up the total, and only one of them is set by the town you live in. Toronto is a single-tier city, so its 0.767311% is the City's 0.605295%, plus 0.009016% for the City Building Fund, plus the province's education rate of 0.153000%. Everywhere else there is a region in the middle.

That regional share is worth a look, because it is not the same across a region. York Region charges all nine of its towns 0.392412%. Durham charges 0.780760% in Pickering, Ajax, Clarington, Scugog, Uxbridge and Brock, 0.763146% in Oshawa and 0.761328% in Whitby. Peel is the widest split of all: 0.538760% in Mississauga, 0.562449% in Brampton and 0.346430% in Caledon, which is more than a third below Mississauga's. The education rate is 0.153000% in all 25.

Six places GO cannot get you downtown by nine

The commute figure is the fastest single GO trip, one seat and no transfer, that leaves a stop inside the municipality and reaches Union Station between 07:00 and 09:00 on an ordinary Wednesday.

Nineteen of the 25 have one. The median is 46 minutes. Toronto is quickest at 8 minutes, on the Lakeshore West train from Exhibition GO. Then Mississauga at 26 from Clarkson GO, Brampton at 29 from Bramalea GO, Vaughan at 30 from Rutherford GO and Oakville at 34. The slowest with a train is Whitchurch-Stouffville at 68 minutes from Stouffville GO.

Six have none: Caledon, Georgina, Clarington, Scugog, Uxbridge and Brock. None of the six has a GO train station. Scugog and Brock have no GO stop of any kind inside their boundary. Caledon has 39 GO bus stops, Clarington has 36 and Georgina has one, and not one of those buses runs through to Union. Uxbridge is the near miss: GO bus route 71 gives it four one-seat trips a day, the fastest 70 minutes, but the earliest of them reaches Union at 05:45, well before the window.

That is not the same as saying you cannot commute from those towns. GO's own route names show the usual answer, which is to drive to a station in the next municipality: route 70 runs Uxbridge to Mount Joy GO and route 38 runs Bolton to Malton GO. It does mean the municipality itself puts nobody on a single vehicle to Union in the morning, which is a real difference when you are comparing addresses.

Rent: three towns cost more than Toronto

CMHC surveys purpose-built rental buildings every October and publishes an average rent by bedroom count for each municipality. For October 2025 it publishes a two-bedroom average for 17 of the 25.

The dearest is not Toronto. Newmarket tops the list at $2,384, then Oakville at $2,309, then Aurora at $2,187, and only then Toronto at $2,055. The cheapest is Brock at $1,296, then Scugog at $1,452 and Halton Hills at $1,531. The median of the 17 is Richmond Hill at $1,827.

Moving from Toronto to Newmarket for a two-bedroom would cost you more, not less: $2,384 minus $2,055 = $329 a month, or $329 x 12 = $3,948 a year. That is worth sitting with, because "the suburbs are cheaper" is the assumption most people start from.

Read the reliability letters before you lean on any one row. CMHC grades every figure, and it marks Markham, Newmarket and Scugog c, which it defines as good rather than excellent. Clarington, Milton and Oakville carry b for very good. The other eleven, Toronto, Brampton, Mississauga, Richmond Hill, Aurora, Burlington, Halton Hills, Ajax, Whitby, Oshawa and Brock, carry an a for excellent.

For the other eight the answer is that nobody publishes one. CMHC prints two asterisks for Caledon, East Gwillimbury, Georgina, Pickering, Uxbridge, Vaughan and Whitchurch-Stouffville, which is its own marker for data suppressed to protect confidentiality or not statistically reliable. For King the portal simply returns "No data available." The reason shows up in CMHC's own count of the stock it surveys: Vaughan has 594 purpose-built rental row and apartment units in total and East Gwillimbury has 42, against 282,820 in Toronto. We left those cells empty rather than filling them with an estimate.

Who grew, and who did not

Growth is in the table but not in the score, because growing fast is neither good nor bad to live in. It does tell you whether a place is building.

East Gwillimbury grew 44.4 per cent between the 2016 and 2021 censuses, from 23,991 people to 34,637, the fastest in the GTA by a distance. Milton followed at 20.7 per cent, Caledon at 15.2, Aurora at 11.9 and King at 11.5.

Two municipalities got smaller. Mississauga lost 0.5 per cent, from 721,599 to 717,961, and Scugog lost 0.2 per cent, from 21,617 to 21,581. Toronto grew 2.3 per cent over the same five years, slower than 20 of the other 24.

How we worked it out

Four measures, four instruments, no survey and no opinion.

Rent is CMHC's Rental Market Survey for October 2025, read at census subdivision geography, which is the municipal boundary rather than a survey zone. The tax rate is the 2026 total residential rate from each municipality's own rate page, rate schedule or tax by-law, listed one by one below. Where a town publishes an urban and a rural rate, Burlington and Halton Hills, we used the urban one.

The commute comes from GO's own published schedule data, the GTFS feed valid from August 31 to November 27, 2026. For one ordinary weekday we timed every GO trip that reaches Union later in its own stop sequence than a stop inside the municipality, and kept the fastest arriving between 07:00 and 09:00. Each of GO's 891 stops was placed inside a municipality by testing its coordinates against Ontario's municipal boundary file, so no station was assigned by hand. We checked the result against GO's own Lakeshore East timetable, which prints the same times: DC Oshawa GO 07:03 to Union 08:07, Whitby 07:08, Ajax 07:16, Pickering 07:21.

Growth is Statistics Canada table 98-10-0002, population and dwelling counts by census subdivision from the 2021 Census.

Every rank is taken on the underlying figure, never a rounded one. That matters in the middle of the tax column, where King's by-law prints 0.009160087, or 0.9160087%, a whisker under East Gwillimbury's 0.916299%. Whitchurch-Stouffville and Halton Hills finish level on 52.1 and share 12th place.

The third column is copied from each document, which is why the format changes from row to row. Some councils publish a percentage, some a decimal and two publish dollars per $100,000 of assessment.