Which Province Has the Most Cabins?
Ask ten Canadians what they call their getaway place and you’ll hear cabin, cottage, camp, or simply “the lake.” No matter the lingo, the census knows them as “private dwellings not occupied by usual residents”—houses that sat empty on Census Day because their owners were elsewhere. It’s an imperfect but surprisingly handy proxy for counting seasonal properties.
Below is the 2021 score-card, built from Statistics Canada’s population-and-dwelling counts.¹ “Occupied” was subtracted from “total” to get the number of potential cabins, then divided by population to get a per-capita rate. Think of it as “how many weekend places exist for every thousand people who actually live there full-time.”
Provinces — ranked by cabins per 1,000 residents
| Rank | Province | Recreational dwellings (“cabins”)* | Cabins / 1,000 people |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Newfoundland & Labrador | 45,931 | 90.0 |
| 2 | Prince Edward Island | 10,364 | 67.2 |
| 3 | Saskatchewan | 64,144 | 56.6 |
| 4 | Nova Scotia | 47,779 | 49.3 |
| 5 | Manitoba | 53,474 | 39.8 |
| 6 | New Brunswick | 28,495 | 36.7 |
| 7 | Quebec | 301,129 | 35.4 |
| 8 | British Columbia | 169,860 | 34.0 |
| 9 | Alberta | 139,450 | 32.7 |
| 10 | Ontario | 438,049 | 30.8 |
Territories — ranked by cabins per 1,000 residents
| Rank | Territory | Recreational dwellings (“cabins”)* | Cabins / 1,000 people |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Yukon | ~4,100 | 101.9 |
| 2 | Northwest Territories | ~2,800 | 68.2 |
| 3 | Nunavut | ~1,050 | 28.5 |
*Counts are total private dwellings minus dwellings occupied by usual residents from the 2021 Census; the difference captures seasonal, second-home and otherwise vacant properties.
Who wins, and why?
- Prairie lake life. Saskatchewan’s claim that “everyone has a cabin at the lake” isn’t far off: at 56.6/1,000, it ranks third per capita despite a provincial population greater than 1 million, much larger compared to NL and PEI. Manitoba follows close behind.
- Most cabins (ahem, cottages) overall, least cabins per capita – Ontario. This is no surprise - nearly 4-in-10 of Canada’s seasonals are in cottage-country Ontario. With 14 million full-time residents, sheer population (and Muskoka real-estate prices) make the difference.
- Atlantic “camp” culture. Newfoundland & Labrador and PEI punch well above their weight: nearly 1 in 11 Newfoundlanders keeps a cabin somewhere up the bay.
- Urbanized provinces look low. Alberta, Ontario and (surprisingly) B.C. slide down the per-capita list because their big-city populations dilute the ratio - even though their absolute numbers are large.
A couple of grain-of-salt notes
- Seasonal ≠ vacant. The census can’t tell a true cottage from an Airbnb between tenants or a new condo that hasn’t welcomed its first owners yet. Still, rural resort areas dominate the map, so the over-count is modest outside big cities.
- Territories & small provinces bounce. With small populations, a few hundred dwellings swing the per-capita rate wildly from one census to the next.
Sources & method
- Statistics Canada, 2021 Census – “Census Profile” pages for Ontario, Québec, and British Columbia (variables: Total private dwellings & Private dwellings occupied by usual residents).
- Table 98-10-0001-01 – Population and dwelling counts: Canada, provinces and territories for the remaining jurisdictions and population denominators.
All calculations (subtractions & per-capita rates) are our own - blame us, not StatsCan, for any rounding quirks.
Grab your bug spray and beverage of choice. Wherever you are in Canada, you’re probably only a couple dozen cabins away from a neighbour sneaking the same long weekend as you.
Happy cabin living!
