Up to $10,000 per home, paid back against receipts, for five listed safety items, on a suite built inside the main house, with an active building permit and the work started after the application date. Those were the terms of Calgary’s Secondary Suite Incentive Program.
The program is now closed to new applications. Anyone who applied after June 23, 2026 went onto a waitlist. Anyone who hasn’t applied can’t.
That leaves two kinds of homeowners with very different numbers in their renovation budgets, and a lot of people who heard “$10,000” two years ago and never read further.
Key facts
- The City of Calgary states that the Secondary Suite Incentive Program provided qualifying homeowners with up to $10,000 to build and register a secondary suite inside the main dwelling.
- The City of Calgary states that applications made after June 23, 2026 were added to a waitlist and that it is no longer accepting new applications.
- The City of Calgary caps eligible safety items at $1,500 for egress windows, $1,000 for interconnected smoke and carbon monoxide alarms, $1,000 for protected exiting, $4,000 for a smoke-tight barrier and $6,000 for split heat and separate air.
- The City of Calgary reports that the secondary suite registry grew from 13,000 suites when the program launched in 2024 to 27,000.
- The City of Calgary’s Secondary Suite Amnesty Program ends on December 31, 2026.
The $10,000 was a ceiling built from five smaller caps
The headline number was the maximum per home. What a homeowner could actually claim depended on which safety elements the suite was missing on the day the application went in.
Egress windows topped out at $1,500. Hardwired, interconnected smoke and carbon monoxide alarms at $1,000. Protected exiting at $1,000. A smoke-tight barrier at $4,000. Split heat and separate air, which not every suite needs, at $6,000. Added together, those caps come to $13,500 by Tribune arithmetic, which is why the City set the overall limit at $10,000.
The City’s own worked example shows how far below the ceiling a real claim can land. A homeowner needing an egress window, the alarms and a smoke-tight barrier was pre-approved for $6,500. Further top-ups existed for Energy Star windows and heating equipment, up to $1,900, and for accessible suites, up to $7,500.
Two homeowners, two different budgets
The first holds a pre-approval. That money still has conditions. It’s a reimbursement, paid after the work is done, every permit inspection is passed and the suite is registered. Receipts have to be dated on or after the application date, and the owner has to spend at least the pre-approved amount to collect all of it. A suite that takes the money can’t hold a short-term rental licence for two years.
The second applied after June 23. The City lists that application on a waitlist and says it is no longer accepting new ones. Its program page does not say the waitlist will be funded. A budget that counts that $10,000 as cash is counting money the City has not committed.
Timing matters for the first group too. The City’s page showed it working through receipts submitted on August 31, 2026, so even an approved claim can take weeks to come back.
What still saves money on a Calgary suite
The incentive is gone. The Secondary Suite Amnesty Program isn’t, until December 31, 2026. Owners who upgrade an existing suite through the amnesty avoid development permit charges and registration fees, and suites built before March 12, 2018 may qualify for reduced building code requirements.
Zoning moved in the same direction this year. Council made secondary suites a permitted use in every low-density district, effective August 4, as part of the changes that followed the rezoning repeal. The incentive itself drew on the City budget and the federal Housing Accelerator Fund. Owners weighing a suite against the cost of buying in Calgary now do that math without the grant.
The record so far: the City says the registry went from 13,000 suites in 2024 to 27,000 today. The next test lands on December 31, when the amnesty closes and every unregistered suite loses its fee waiver. Before that date, a homeowner with a file should get its status from the City in writing, and a homeowner without one should price the suite without the $10,000.
