How the 'tax' on singles has people who live alone feeling the pinch

Jenn Dumaran is feeling a little stuck.

The 41-year-old marketing professional likes her pretty, light-filled apartment in Toronto's Greektown where she lives on her own, but at 595-square-feet, there really isn't room for her to add a dog to the mix. 

Since she was last apartment hunting in 2019, snagging this place for around $2,000 a month, rents have shot up. The average one-bedroom is now $2,458, according to a national report from rentals.ca in February. An apartment with a little more room and some backyard space for the adopted rescue mutt she dreams of would run her closer to $3,000 — and that's a hefty price tag for just one person.

"I really feel like I need to stay here because you can't find anything that is even within that price range for a one bedroom," Dumaran told The Cost of Living.

People who live alone have always had large costs to carry on their own. But the inflation Canadians have faced over the past year has meant nearly everything from groceries to gas to rent, or the rate of interest you pay on your mortgage and other debt, has gone up — and financial security has gone down.

Even people like Dumaran — who consider themselves fortunate to have decent jobs — are feeling the pinch, largely due to what some are calling "the singles tax."

It's the difference between what a single person pays for an apartment over the course of the year compared to what that same apartment would cost, per person, if it were shared by a couple.

According to that same rental report, the average one-bedroom apartment in Toronto was $2,458 as of February. At that rate, over the course of the year, a single person will pay nearly $30,000 to live there, instead of around $15,000 if they were sharing that space with a partner. Therefore the "singles tax" is almost $15,000.

In Vancouver, the average one-bedroom is $2,730, so the extra cost borne by a single person is $16,380. In Halifax, rents are a little more reasonable, but the singles tax still adds up to around $10,300.

And more people than ever are footing those high housing bills on their own. When the latest census was conducted in 2021, 4.4 million Canadians adults lived alone — or around 15 per cent — up from 1.7 million, or 7.1 per cent, in 1981.

And that figure doesn't capture all the people who are sole breadwinners, but living with children or other dependents.

Iglika Ivanova, a senior economist at the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives based in Vancouver, said there wasn't enough in Tuesday's federal budget to make a substantive difference to the precarious situation faced by people who live alone or who are sole breadwinners.

While the budget did include a rebranded version of the doubled GST credit seen last year, now called the grocery rebate, Ivanova said that to really move the needle, the government would have had to make significant new investment in affordable housing. 

"I think there's a missed opportunity to really help, because the grocery rebate is nice but really, if we don't get a handle on what's happening in the housing market, then we can't control those exorbitant rent increases in the new units, and people are not going to be doing well at all. We're going to have serious problems."