StatsCan data shows average net worth passed $1M, but median is $530k. With 45% of wealth in housing, the bottom 80% are exposed to correction. The top 1% keep most assets in stocks.
Alpha Score of 39 reflects weak overall profile with moderate momentum, weak value, weak quality. Based on 3 of 4 signals — score is capped at 90 until remaining data ingests.
Statistics Canada reported this week that the average net worth of Canadian households passed $1 million for the first time in early 2026. The headline number, however, masks a distribution that leaves most households far behind the average and heavily exposed to the housing market.
The median net worth – the point at which half of households have more and half have less – is $530,000. Wealth concentration is extreme. The top 10% of households by net worth hold half the country's wealth and have at least $2 million. The top 1% require a net worth of $7.5 million, and those 1,700 families in the top 0.01% own 5% of all assets. At the other end, 40% of Canadian households have a net worth of $300,000 or less and hold just 1% of national wealth.
The middle class – the 40% of households with between $300,000 and $1.3 million – account for 25% of total wealth. That means 80% of Canadian households, with net worth below $1.3 million, own just over a quarter of the country's all assets. The remaining 20% own three-quarters.
The composition of wealth matters. Real estate now accounts for 45% of total household net worth, down from 54% just after the pandemic. The drop reflects the housing correction that has trimmed detached home prices in Toronto by roughly 27% since the start of 2022. Mortgages, meanwhile, do not shrink with prices. The combination of high leverage and a single asset class leaves the bottom 80% of Canadians vulnerable. That group holds about half of its net worth in a single house, often with debt. The top 1% keep only 15% of net worth in real estate and about 70% in financial assets such as stocks, bonds and funds.
Those financial assets have performed well. The TSX composite index has gained 215% from its March 2020 pandemic low and has returned 66% since the start of 2022. Over the same period, a detached Toronto home shed about 27%. The divergence helps explain why wealthy Canadians have stayed wealthy while average households have seen net worth erode along with property values.
Garth Turner, a Raymond James Financial Advisor and author of the Greater Fool blog, highlighted the data in a post Tuesday. "The bottom 80% of Canadians have a little over 50% of their wealth in a house. One asset. One address. One town. With debt," he wrote. Wealthy households, by contrast, are diversified and liquid.
For Raymond James Financial (RJF), the trends carry implications for the advisory business. An Alpha Score of 39 out of 100 places the stock in the "Mixed" category, with a sector classification of Financial Services. The concentration of Canadian wealth in real estate and the persistent underperformance of housing relative to equities suggest that the shift toward financial assets could accelerate, particularly if the housing correction deepens. Turner's own analysis points to the same conclusion: the average household's overinvestment in a single leveraged asset is a structural vulnerability that the wealthy have avoided.
The data from Statistics Canada covers the first quarter of 2026. Further detail on household balance sheets is expected in the agency's next quarterly release.
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