Why Did Winnipeg Property Taxes Increase in 2026?

Owners of apartment buildings and other multi-residential properties in Manitoba saw their 2025 property taxes jump by roughly 25 percent, not from a mill rate hike, but from the quiet removal of a rebate that had shielded them for years. That single change, easy to miss in a budget document full of smaller percentages, likely fed directly into the rent increases showing up across Winnipeg’s rental market over the past year, since a landlord absorbing a 25 percent property tax jump rarely absorbs it alone. Understanding Winnipeg and Manitoba’s recent tax changes means looking past the one headline number each year and into what actually drove it.

Direct answer: Winnipeg’s municipal property tax rose 3.5 percent for 2026, following a larger 5.95 percent increase in 2025, while Manitoba froze income tax bracket indexation starting in 2025 and expanded the provincial sales tax to cover cloud computing services starting January 1, 2026. Each change traces back to a specific budget decision with its own stated reasoning, not a single unified “cost of living” explanation.

Property Taxes: The 3.5% Increase, and Exactly Where It Goes

Winnipeg City Council approved a 3.5 percent property tax increase for 2026, and the city’s own breakdown splits that number with unusual precision: 1.00 percentage point goes specifically toward renewing local and regional streets, lanes, sidewalks, and bridges, along with road safety, pedestrian and cycling programs, and tree preservation tied to road renewal. The remaining 2.50 points fund the general tax-supported operating budget, which folds in 0.33 points previously earmarked for a separate Transit Infrastructure Reserve, now redirected to cover Transit operating costs directly. On a home assessed at $371,000, that 3.5 percent increase works out to roughly $75 more for the year.

This wasn’t a new decision made in isolation. City officials describe the 3.5 percent figure as a return to the rate set in the original multi-year budget approved back in 2024, after 2025 came in noticeably higher than that plan called for.

The Real Story Behind 2025’s Bigger Jump

2025’s property tax increase landed at 5.95 percent, nearly double what 2026 brought, and it wasn’t a routine adjustment. Mayor Scott Gillingham called it a difficult decision at the time, and at least one economics professor described the hike as the bare minimum needed to address the city’s underlying revenue pressures. That extra revenue went toward specific, named shortfalls: a $5 million increase to the snow-clearing budget, backfilling a gap in expected Winnipeg Transit fare revenue, and covering Workers Compensation Board costs tied to Winnipeg Fire Paramedic Service injury claims. On that same $371,000 assessed home, 2025’s increase added $121 to the bill, considerably more than 2026’s $75, which is part of why 2026 reads as a relative return to normal rather than a fresh escalation.

The Rebate Removal That Hit Apartment Buildings Hard

This is the change most homeowners never noticed because it didn’t touch them at all. Manitoba’s 2025 Budget eliminated the Education Tax Rebate that had previously offset a share of school taxes on non-residential and multi-residential properties. For commercial and industrial properties, removing the 10 percent rebate added roughly 6.5 percent to 2025 property taxes before accounting for any separate assessment or mill rate changes. Multi-residential properties, apartment buildings and similar rental housing, had been receiving a much larger 50 percent rebate, and losing it entirely pushed their 2025 property tax up by approximately 25 percent. For anyone who’s wondered why rents across Winnipeg’s rental market climbed as sharply as they did over the past year, a landlord’s property tax bill jumping by a quarter in a single year is a real, direct, and rarely discussed part of that picture.

School Divisions Are Raising Rates Faster Than the City

Winnipeg’s eight school divisions don’t set their budgets in coordination with City Hall, and their 2026 increases show it. School divisions raised their budget requirements funded through property tax by between 5.1 and 11.7 percent for 2026, a considerably wider and generally steeper range than the City’s own 3.5 percent municipal increase. This matches the division-by-division mill rate increases already in effect for 2026, and it’s a reminder that a Winnipeg property tax bill is really two separate decisions layered together, one from the City and one from whichever school division a specific address happens to fall into, moving at entirely different paces.

Income Taxes: The Freeze That’s Not a Cut

Manitoba’s Finance Minister presented the province’s 2025 Budget on March 20, 2025, projecting a $794 million deficit for the 2025-26 fiscal year, a number that would later prove optimistic once the nearly-completed 2024-25 year came in at a $1.239 billion deficit instead. Against that backdrop, the budget froze indexation of the Basic Personal Amount and income tax bracket thresholds, keeping both at 2024 levels rather than adjusting them upward for inflation as had been standard practice. The province’s own budget document was specific about the cost to taxpayers: the maximum impact on someone earning over $100,000 in taxable income would be $87.25 for the 2025 tax year, while most taxpayers would see an impact of $32 or less. Small individually, but real, and notable because it reversed a practice the province had followed consistently since 2017, prompting at least one tax commentary to describe it directly as the return of bracket creep after a broken promise from the year before.

Sales Tax: A New Category Gets Taxed

Effective January 1, 2026, Manitoba’s Retail Sales Tax expanded to cover cloud computing services in a way it hadn’t before, including subscriptions to software, data storage, and remote computer processing. Before this change, RST generally only applied to software physically downloaded onto a server located in Manitoba, meaning a growing share of everyday digital spending, cloud-based subscriptions accessed remotely from anywhere, had been sitting outside the tax base entirely. The province frames this as closing a gap rather than raising a rate, since the existing 7 percent RST rate itself didn’t change, only what counts as taxable under it. Not every 2026 sales tax change moved in the same direction, though: Manitoba also expanded the RST exemption for additional food and beverage items sold at grocery stores, a genuine tax relief measure sitting alongside the cloud computing expansion in the same budget cycle.

The Credits Working in the Other Direction

It’s worth balancing the increases against what’s actually gone down or improved. The Homeowners Affordability Tax Credit has climbed each year in a row, from $1,500 in 2025 to $1,600 in 2026, with the government signaling it plans to raise the maximum further to $1,700 for 2027. The Renters Affordability Tax Credit rose from $575 to $625 for the 2026 tax year over the same stretch. On the business side, the threshold at which employers become subject to the Health and Post Secondary Education Tax Levy rose to $2.5 million in annual payroll starting January 1, 2026, up from $2.25 million, exempting more small businesses from that levy entirely. None of these fully offset the increases covered above for every household or business, but they’re real, moving in the opposite direction, and worth knowing about specifically because tax coverage tends to focus disproportionately on what’s going up.

What This Means Looking Ahead

Manitoba’s government has already signaled some of what’s coming: the Homeowners Affordability Tax Credit’s planned rise to $1,700 in 2027 is public information now, not a surprise for next year’s budget cycle. Winnipeg’s 2026 municipal property tax increase returning to the original multi-year budget plan suggests City Hall intends to hold closer to that lower, planned trajectory going forward rather than repeating 2025’s steeper jump, though that depends on the same kind of unplanned pressures, snow-clearing costs, transit shortfalls, WCB claims, that pushed 2025 higher than originally scheduled in the first place. None of this is guaranteed to hold, budgets get revised as fiscal conditions shift, which is exactly why checking the current property tax calculator and income tax guide each year beats assuming last year’s numbers, or even a previously announced future rate, will hold exactly as planned.

Common Questions About Winnipeg’s Recent Tax Changes

Why did my rent go up so much if my own property taxes as a tenant didn’t change? Tenants don’t receive a property tax bill directly, but landlords do, and the 2025 removal of the multi-residential Education Tax Rebate added roughly 25 percent to many apartment buildings’ property tax bills in a single year. That kind of increase commonly gets passed through to tenants over time via rent increases, even though it never appears on a renter’s own tax documents.

Is the income tax bracket freeze permanent? Not necessarily. It was announced specifically for 2025 and subsequent years as of the 2025 Budget, but a future provincial budget could resume indexation, extend the freeze further, or change course entirely. Nothing about it is written in as a permanent, unchangeable policy.

Does the cloud computing sales tax change affect personal streaming subscriptions too? Software, data storage, and remote computing subscriptions broadly fall under the expanded RST rules starting 2026, which can include consumer subscription services depending on how a specific service is structured and billed. The full breakdown of what counts as taxable under Manitoba’s sales tax rules covers this in more depth.

The number that makes headlines each budget season, 3.5 percent, 5.95 percent, whatever the year brings, is rarely the whole story. Behind it sits a specific set of decisions, a rebate removed here, a credit increased there, a tax base widened somewhere else, and understanding which of those actually applies to your own situation matters more than tracking the single percentage everyone talks about each December.