JUST SO YOU KNOW

Our ranking only includes cities of 10,000 or more permanent residents.

We excluded bedroom communities such as Lake Country, Oak Bay and West Vancouver, which may offer a high quality of life but have relatively small job markets.

Langley and North Vancouver are represented on the ranking by both their city and district municipalities.

Although we use the term “city” throughout, our annual survey is technically a ranking of municipalities, as legally defined by the B.C. Local Government Act.

We work with research partner Environics Analytics because we believe it has the best data available—but even the best data has its limitations. To produce municipal-level population growth numbers, for example, Environics Analytics used regional-level estimates from Statistics Canada to make 2023 projections.

Job numbers and unemployment rates come from Statcan’s monthly Labour Force Survey and only present figures for B.C.’S eight economic regions and four largest census metropolitan areas for the first three quarters of 2023. Similarly, monthly housing starts figures provided by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. and quarterly residential sales figures from BC Assessment only reflect the year-to-date figures collected to the end of September. As such, those indicators won’t account for economic trends over the final quarter of 2023.

Annual rental vacancy rates provided by Canada Mortgage and Housing Corp. represent the “primary rental market” or private apartment unit market only. However, the primary rental market rates for five cities on our list were not reported due to unreliable or insufficient data. Therefore, estimates were derived for Sooke and Sidney from regional figures reported for the Capital Region; for Whistler from values provided for the Whistler Housing Authority’s stock of workforce rental housing; for Sechelt from an analysis of its regional peers; and for Pitt Meadows from broader area figures provided for Pitt Meadows maple Ridge.