Is Alberta Still Canada's Migration Magnet? (September 2026)

I get this question a lot, usually phrased a little differently each time: "Is everyone still moving here?" Sometimes it's a buyer worried they're about to get outbid by three people relocating from Ontario. Sometimes it's a seller wondering if the migration wave that pushed Calgary prices up in 2022 and 2023 is still running underneath the market. The honest answer, based on the numbers Statistics Canada put out this week, is: yes, but a lot less than it used to.

The new numbers

On September 23, StatCan pegged Alberta's population at 5,101,050 as of July 1, 2026 — up 1.5% from a year earlier. That's still the fastest growth rate of any province, well ahead of Canada's overall 0.5% pace. So the headline hasn't changed: Alberta is still gaining people faster than anywhere else in the country.

What has changed is the pace of the pace. Alberta added 76,419 people in the twelve months to July 2026. A year earlier, over the same kind of twelve-month stretch, it added 122,836. Two years before that, at the peak of the post-pandemic boom, it added 213,763 in a single year. This year's growth is roughly 38% smaller than last year's, and about a third of the 2024 peak. The magnet is still on. The pull is a lot weaker than it was.

Two different stories inside that one number

Population growth is really two separate flows, and right now they're moving in opposite directions, which is part of why the overall picture feels murkier than the headline suggests.

Interprovincial migration — Canadians relocating to Alberta from other provinces — is still doing what it's done for a few years running: Alberta drew in more people from other provinces than any other province did in the second quarter of 2026. That part of the story hasn't broken.

International migration is the piece that's flipped. Ottawa's tighter limits on non-permanent residents — study permits, work permits — are pushing departures up and new arrivals down, and that's a national trend, not a Calgary one. Permanent immigration to Canada fell to 368,224 for the year, the fourth straight annual decline, and non-permanent resident numbers dropped by more than 150,000. Alberta doesn't get to opt out of a federal policy shift just because its interprovincial numbers are holding up.

Put those two together and you get a province still gaining people overall, just with one engine running close to full and the other throttled back hard.

How weak is "weak," really?

Context matters, because Alberta's slowdown is happening against a much bigger national one. Canada as a whole added only 80,343 people between April and July 2026 — the slowest second-quarter growth since 2020. Against that backdrop, Alberta's 0.4% quarterly growth, versus 0.2% nationally, still looks pretty good. We're not falling behind the rest of the country. Every province's growth engine has cooled this year; ours just started from a higher gear.

Calgary specifically has been outperforming even within Alberta. Between July 2024 and July 2025, the Calgary census metro area grew 2.9% — one of the three fastest-growing metro areas in Canada — with permanent immigration doing most of the lifting, followed by interprovincial migration. That's last year's figure rather than this year's, and I'd expect the newer, cooler national immigration numbers to show up in Calgary's 2026 data too once it's published. But it tells you Calgary wasn't just riding the provincial wave — it was outrunning it.

Why this actually matters for your decision

This isn't just a demographics trivia question — it's baked directly into CREB's own forecast for how the rest of 2026 plays out. Chief economist Ann-Marie Lurie has been blunt about it: lower migration, combined with stable employment and interest rates, is expected to keep demand from changing much this year. And with roughly 26,000 units currently under construction across the city, weaker migration means slower absorption of that new supply — a big part of why apartment and row-house prices have been softer than detached and semi-detached homes this year. (I wrote about the condo side of that a couple of weeks ago, if you want the deeper dive.)

So if you're a buyer, this is one of the real reasons the bidding-war frenzy of a couple years ago has cooled for a lot of property types — you're simply not competing against as many newcomers as you were in 2023. If you're an investor, it's worth factoring into how fast you expect a unit to lease up, especially anything in the condo or row segment. And if you're selling, it means pricing to today's more balanced conditions matters more than it did when growth alone could paper over an aggressive list price.

My take

Alberta is still Canada's migration magnet. That part of the headline is true, and I don't think it's about to flip. But "still the strongest growth in the country" and "growing like it was in 2023" are two very different sentences, and a lot of the pricing assumptions still floating around town are anchored to the second one. If you're trying to figure out what slower, steadier growth means for your specific situation — buying, selling, or holding a rental — I'm happy to walk through the actual numbers for your property type and neighbourhood with you.