01 — THE PROVINCES
A provincial scorecard
The same eight numbers for every province, so the national averages don't hide the enormous spread between them. Click a column to sort.
By the numbers: heat-pump adoption ranges from 50.3% of matched retrofits in New Brunswick and 45.3% in Quebec down to 3.4% in Alberta and 2.0% in Saskatchewan, with Ontario at 14.5%. Prince Edward Island (17.0%) sits outside the wider Atlantic pattern. What drives the spread is not established here.
program (retrofits, participation)
energy (saving, deep, pre-EUI)
fuel (heat pump, fuel switch)
Rates are pair-weighted across each province's postal areas. Participation = audited homes ÷ 2021 census dwellings (mixes ~20 years of audits over one dwelling snapshot — read it as relative, not absolute). For the % columns (Particip., Med. saving, Heat pump, Fuel switch, Deep), the bar fill is that percentage itself. Retrofits and Pre-EUI aren't percentages, so their bars are scaled within the column (its own max = full width) to compare provinces.
02 — THE TIMELINE
Twenty years of programs
Matched audits per year — the initial (pre-retrofit) audit and the completed (post-retrofit) audit that closes each pair. The two big waves map onto the two big federal programs.
By the numbers: completed retrofits peaked at 205,502 in 2010, during ecoENERGY Retrofit – Homes (2007–2012), and again at 150,798 in 2023 under the Canada Greener Homes Grant (2021–2024). 2025 recorded 72,870, about half the 2024 total, after the grant closed to new applicants on 31 March 2024. Programme dates and sources are listed under the chart.
Matched audits per year, with program eras
Initial audits by their year; completed retrofits by their follow-up audit year.
Initial (pre-retrofit) audits
Completed retrofits
What did each era build?
The 8 tracked measures, as a share of that era's matched retrofits — same question as the timeline above (which era), split by what kind of work happened. Each home is classified by its initial audit year, not its completion year, so a retrofit that started under a program but finished after it closed still counts toward that program.
03 — THE CLIMATE IMPACT
What the GHG savings are worth
The same modelled tCO₂e/yr saved as everywhere else on this page, summed rather than averaged, then priced two ways: what it would cost at the 2024 federal carbon-tax rate, and what ECCC's Social Cost of Carbon says the avoided damage is worth.
By the numbers: Loading…
National total
Net across every matched pair — homes whose modelled GHG rose are included, not dropped (see the caveat below).
By province
Average per matched home and total, by province — plus how much of each province's matched population this basis actually describes.
What that many tonnes looks like
The national total ( above), converted into everyday equivalents — factors ported from Ottawa Visuals' GHG Equivalency Calculator.
Emission factors: Ford F-150 256.6 gCO₂e/km · Honda Civic 149.6 gCO₂e/km · Hyundai Ioniq (AB) 139.8 gCO₂e/km · Hyundai Ioniq (ON) 6.2 gCO₂e/km · round trip distance St. John's–Vancouver 14,198 km · flight St. John's–Vancouver 75.72 tCO₂e · oil 2.3 tCO₂e/barrel · forest (Central Park, annual absorption) 1,686 tCO₂e · propane cylinder (BBQ) 0.0244 tCO₂e.
The same retrofits, in energy terms
Total household energy saved (kWh, modelled) — same matched-pair population as above, priced and converted separately from the GHG figures.
Peak demand: homes that were electrically heated
Design/peak heat-loss (HOT2000's own peak-heating-demand field), pre vs post, for matched pairs that were electrically heated before the retrofit.
04 — THE MAP
One country, thirteen ways
Every postal area (FSA) with at least 30 matched retrofits, coloured by the metric you pick — participation, savings, pre-retrofit stock, heat-pump adoption, each of the eight tracked measures, or the deep-retrofit rate. The leaderboards beside it re-rank live. Postal areas below the 30-retrofit threshold, the few condo-dominated downtown cores with no house audits, and — on participation only — areas whose 2021 census dwelling count is too small to divide by, are left grey.
By the numbers: the highest pre-retrofit intensities are in Winnipeg (R3B 475, R3A 446 kWh/m²/yr); the highest heat-pump adoption is in Quebec and coastal BC (G7T 96.9%, V0V 90.5%); the lowest participation is in downtown Toronto (M5V 0.2%, M4Y 0.3%), where most dwellings are condo units that do not receive house audits.
Loading the map…
Leaderboard
Top 10
Bottom 10
Minimum 30 matched retrofits per postal area. Hover a row to find it on the map; click through to open that postal area in the Retrofit Explorer.
05 — WHAT WORKS
What makes a retrofit succeed
Built on the 1,326,144 pairs that logged at least one real measure — the zero-measure re-audits are set aside.
By the numbers: among homes that did exactly one measure, a heat pump returned a 25.5% median saving (141,677 homes) and a heating-system change 20.1%, against 7.9% for air sealing alone, 6.6% for roof insulation and 6.1% for windows. Median saving rises with each added measure, from 16.2% at one to 68.9% at all eight.
The most common upgrade bundles
Median energy saving by measure combination — bars in amber contain a heat pump. Ordered by saving.
includes a heat pump
no heat pump
Number beside each bar = pairs in that exact bundle. Modelled EnerGuide saving, not metered.
Depth pays — but few go deep
Median saving rises cleanly with how many of the eight tracked measures a home did. The line shows how many homes actually did that many.
Median energy saving
Share of homes
Read with care: more measures mechanically means more modelled savings, so this relationship is partly built-in. It is still the honest headline — and most homes (about 64%) did only one or two measures.
05c · The profile of a big saver i
Top-decile savers (≥ 40.6% saved) versus everyone else — measure prevalence and starting conditions.
Top-decile savers
All other retrofits
The recipe is consistent: an older, worse-performing home (built ~1960, high starting EUI) that did more measures, switched fuel and added a heat pump. Starting-EUI headroom + fuel switch + heat pump.
06 — HEAT PUMPS
The geography of heat pumps
Where the roughly 328,000 heat pumps in this dataset went in, and what got installed.
By the numbers: heat-pump adoption spans a 25× range across provinces, from 50.3% in New Brunswick to 2.0% in Saskatchewan. The same spread reappears inside the income and dwelling-value breakdowns below, because those quintiles differ in provincial composition.
Heat-pump adoption by province
Share of matched retrofits that added a heat pump.
The most-installed models nationally
Brand → outdoor unit → AHRI certificate, by install count. Click a row to expand it — one outdoor unit is certified under several AHRI reference numbers (different indoor coil pairings, refrigerant lines, or test revisions can each certify differently, including on cold-climate status), so every certificate is broken out rather than merged into one figure.
Counts across all matched pairs with an AHRI number that resolved to a brand + model. CC = cold-climate rated. Links open the AHRI Directory listing.
07 — COLD-CLIMATE EQUIPMENT
What the installed heat pumps can actually do at 5 °F
Every AHRI-certified unit that appears in this data, plotted by cold-climate efficiency and capacity retention, then screened against the specifications of the US DOE Cold Climate Heat Pump (CCHP) Technology Challenge.
By the numbers: of 15,148 certified models covering 439,975 ERS install appearances, 4 certificate rows — 3 distinct models, 8 appearances (0.00%) — clear every checkable Challenge criterion. Three of the four sit exactly on the COP threshold. This is not a critique of the installed base: Challenge-qualifying products only began reaching market in 2024–25, and these are historical ERS audit records.
COP at 5 °F vs. capacity maintenance
Every AHRI-certified unit with a recorded COP at 5 °F, capacity maintenance and rated capacity @47 °F. Bubble area ∝ ERS install appearances; colour = nominal capacity band.
Screened against the DOE Cold Climate Heat Pump Challenge specifications
Table II-3 of the Challenge specifications, checked against AHRI certificate ratings — a screen against published ratings, not a determination that any unit met the Challenge's own H11/H1N verification test.
08 — MISSED OPPORTUNITY
Where programs should look next
A composite score combining the worst starting stock with the lowest uptake — the postal areas with the most to gain that have barely participated.
By the numbers: the highest-scoring postal areas are in the older cores of Winnipeg (R3B, R3C, R3A), Saint John (E2L), Edmonton (T5G, T5B) and Regina (S4P). Click any row to see the four factor percentiles behind its score.
Top 20 opportunity postal areas i
Higher score = worse stock + lower participation. Minimum 30 matched retrofits.
Set your priorities
Default weighting
Each factor is weighted Off / Low / Medium / High; the shares below are normalised to 100% so scores stay comparable. Turning everything off restores the default. The link button copies a URL that reopens this exact weighting.
Each of the four inputs is converted to its percentile rank across every eligible postal area, so all four land on a common 0–1 scale before weighting. The weights are a judgement call, not an estimate from data — they encode "worst stock first, least-served next". A score of 92 means the area sits near the top of the country on all four at once; it is a ranking against other areas, not a measurement of anything physical. Change the weights and the ranking changes.
| # | FSA | Prov | Score | Pre-EUI | Pre-GHG | Pre-1980 | Particip. |
|---|
Screening tool, not a verdict. Pre-EUI is a modelled estimate, not metered use. Participation is suppressed where the 2021 dwelling count cannot carry it, so areas whose postal boundaries changed are excluded rather than scored, and the remaining participation figures still mix ~20 years of audits against one snapshot. Treat this as a prioritisation heuristic for where to look, not a judgement on any area or home.
09 — WHO PARTICIPATES
Who takes part
Postal areas sorted into five equal groups by neighbourhood median household income, lowest to highest.
By the numbers: participation rises with neighbourhood income, from 11.6% in the lowest quintile to 16.4% in the highest. Heat-pump rate runs the other way (34.7% down to 19.0%), and median saving is close to flat (22.1% to 19.8%). These are area averages; see the caveat below before reading them as household behaviour.
By neighbourhood income quintile
Q1 = lowest-income neighbourhoods, Q5 = highest. Participation, heat-pump rate and typical saving.
These are area averages, not household measurements. A quintile describes the postal area a home sits in, not the income of the household that retrofitted it. The lower-income quintiles here contain a higher share of Atlantic and Quebec postal areas, which also have the highest heat-pump rates province-wide, so the income gradient and the provincial gradient cannot be separated in this data. Read the chart as a description of areas; it does not support a claim about what lower-income households do.
By dwelling value quintile
The secondary axis: postal areas grouped by median dwelling value instead of income.
The same composition applies here: the lowest dwelling-value quintile contains a higher share of Atlantic and Quebec postal areas, so its heat-pump rate cannot be attributed to dwelling value on this evidence.
10 — ONE HOUSE AT A TIME
What deep retrofits actually hit
Everything above is a modelled average across 1.45 million ERS audits, most of which did one or two measures. Retrofit Canada's case-study library is the opposite kind of dataset: 41 individual homeowner/contractor write-ups of Canadian home retrofits, each with a real before/after breakdown — envelope R-values, airtightness, energy use intensity, GHG. It's not a random sample of retrofits; it's a self-submitted showcase of deep and net-zero projects, so read every range below as "what the best-documented projects achieved," not "what's typical."
By the numbers: Loading…
Filter by building type
Everything below reacts to this filter. All types are residential — see the note at the bottom for what's already excluded (commercial/institutional buildings, one non-Canadian project).
Ranges, by how far the home got
Median (min–max) for every numeric field with enough coverage to be worth showing. n = how many of the selected cases reported that field — most fields aren't filled in on every case, so read a thin column as a thin sample, not a thin result.
"After" values only (post-retrofit), except energy/carbon savings which are already a before→after delta. Effective thermal resistance (R-value) and airtightness (ACH50) come straight from each project's own energy model, the same way ERS's HOT2000 fields do elsewhere on this page — not a metered measurement.
Project summary
Click a column to sort. Click a row to open that case study on retrofitcanada.com.
Envelope R-values, pre → post
Each line is one project's reported effective thermal resistance for that assembly, left axis before the retrofit, right axis after. Colour is that project's overall annual energy saving — steeper climbs don't necessarily mean a bigger saving on their own, since a home's total saving also depends on airtightness, mechanicals and fuel switching.
Envelope values by project
The data behind the chart above, in table form. Limited to projects reporting at least one envelope R-value.
Case studies via Retrofit Canada, shared under their site's open-content terms (view/download/share freely, including commercially, with credit). Figures above are as reported on retrofitcanada.com and use each project's own energy-modelling methodology — not the ERS pipeline used elsewhere on this page, so don't average them together. Retrofit Canada's library holds 48 case studies in total; 7 are left out here — 6 commercial/institutional buildings (feasibility studies for a bus depot, seniors' centre, water utility building, community centre and municipal operations building) and 1 non-Canadian project (Portland, OR) — since they aren't comparable to a house or in scope for a Canadian-homes page. Scraped 2026-08-25; the library only grows via their submission form, so this is a snapshot, not a live feed.