BC Annual Rent Cap

The BC Residential Tenancy Branch (RTB) publishes a maximum allowable annual rent increase for each calendar year, the year before it applies. The 2026 cap is 2.3% and the 2027 cap is 2.2%. It tracks inflation but is held below it deliberately, to keep rent increases from compounding faster than wages. It applies only to existing tenancies — vacancy-reset rents (when a unit is re-leased to a new tenant) are uncapped.

Recent caps: 3.5% in 2024, 3.0% in 2025, 2.3% in 2026, 2.2% in 2027. The timing of the announcement moves. The 2027 figure was published on 27 August 2026, where earlier years had landed in November, so a notice written late in a year can be working off a number already superseded for the year it takes effect in.

If you have been served a rent increase and want to know whether it holds, there are four things to check and any one of them can void it. It has to be on the approved form, RTB-7 or RTB-7A, rather than a letter or an email. It has to give at least three full months of notice, so an increase taking effect on May 1 has to be served by January 31. It cannot come less than twelve months after the last one. And the amount cannot exceed the cap for the year the increase takes effect, which is not necessarily the year the notice was written.

A rental increase above the cap is simply unenforceable. You are not obliged to pay the excess, and you can dispute the notice through the Residential Tenancy Branch. Three narrow situations sit outside the cap: a landlord can apply to the Branch for an additional increase, which is granted rarely and needs documentation; the rent resets to market when a tenancy ends and a new tenant moves in, because the cap follows the tenancy rather than the unit; and some categories the Residential Tenancy Act does not cover at all, such as hotels and most transient accommodation, are outside it entirely.