About CostToClose

CostToClose is a free, independent tool for working out what it actually costs to buy, sell, or own a home in Canada — the cash due on closing, the monthly payment, the taxes and fees that differ by province and city, and the questions that come up when a purchase gets complicated.

Who runs it

CostToClose is built and maintained by R. Tiwari, based in Newfoundland and Labrador, operating individually — no separate corporate entity has been formed for the site. It was built after going through the home-buying process and finding that the honest number — everything due on closing day, for a specific province and city — was surprisingly hard to get from any one place.

R. Tiwari is not a licensed mortgage broker, lawyer, notary, or financial advisor, and CostToClose does not provide advice. It provides calculations from published rules, with the sources shown, so you can check them yourself and take them to the professionals who will act for you.

How the numbers are produced

Every calculator on the site runs on one shared calculation engine. Land transfer taxes, registration fees, mortgage insurance premiums and their provincial sales tax, minimum down payments, the stress test, and the federal and provincial rebates are coded as rules with a source and a date. Fixed-rate mortgage payments use semi-annual compounding, as the Interest Act requires. Legal fees, inspections, insurance and property tax are defaults you can edit, and are labelled as estimates wherever they appear.

Every guide uses worked examples computed with that same engine, so the article and the calculator cannot disagree. The full list of rules, sources and dates is on the Sources and methodology page, and our checking process is described in the Editorial and accuracy policy.

How the site is funded

CostToClose is supported by display advertising through Google AdSense. Advertisers do not influence the content of any guide or the output of any calculator, and CostToClose has no referral arrangement with any lender, broker, brokerage, or real estate professional. We do not sell leads and we do not accept payment for placement or mention.

What we do not do

We do not store the numbers you enter. Calculations run in your browser; the "save" feature keeps your inputs in your own browser's storage, and share links encode the inputs in the link itself. We do not require an account. We do not publish or reproduce real estate board sales data, which is licensed; where a guide needs a price, it uses an illustrative figure and tells you so.

Contact

Questions, corrections, or a rule that has changed: hello@costtoclose.ca. Corrections are reviewed against the primary source and, if confirmed, applied to the engine and every affected page with an updated "last reviewed" date.