City of Greater Sudbury staff tabled a budget document tonight which carries a 5.7-per-cent tax levy hike in 2026 and a 5.9-per-cent jump in 2027.
For a residential property assessed at $230,000, this means a $219 tax bill jump in 2026 and an additional $240 hike in 2027.
Update at 10 a.m. Nov. 5, 2025: Since this story was initially published, readers have criticized the use of a $230,000 example property as representing the average residential impact. People appear to be conflating assessed value with market value, whose average is around $500,000 in Greater Sudbury. The latest assessment year of 2016 is still at play with the Municipal Property Assessment Corporation. A city spokesperson confirmed on Wednesday that the median assessed value of a single-family detached home in Greater Sudbury is currently $240,000, so the $230,000 example property does, in fact, roughly represent the median household.
These numbers were shared as part of a presentation to city council members on Tuesday evening which highlighted the city’s recently tabled 2026-27 base budget.
The full budget document is available by clicking here.
The base budget follows city council direction, but is still very much a budget of city staff. The city’s elected officials are slated to debate the budget beginning Dec. 2. The end result of these deliberations will yield the final tax levy increase.
Deliberations will include whether to approve more than 29 business cases whose total 2026 expenditure of $4.9 million, if all 29 were approved, would jack the tax levy up by another 1.3 per cent.
(This excludes six outstanding business cases yet to be drafted. A one-per-cent tax levy increase is equal to $3.7 million.)
The 2026 property tax policy, which calculates how the tax levy burden is distributed amongst property classes and determines how individual properties’ tax levies will change, is scheduled to be approved by May 2026.
Sudbury.com will be digging deeper into the 2026-27 proposed budget in future stories, but for now, Tuesday’s meeting and a presentation by city Finance director Margaret Karpenko offered a high-level view of how it came to be.
Next year’s tax levy increase includes a 0.9-per-cent increase in municipal operations and 1.8-per-cent hike in capital expenditures, including a special capital levy increase of 1.5 per cent to help tackle the city’s infrastructure spending gap.
This only brings next year’s proposed tax levy increase to 2.7 per cent.
The additional three-per-cent on top of that, which brings it up to 5.7 per cent, comes as a result of budget increases for external agencies, including Greater Sudbury Police Service, Greater Sudbury Library Service, Public Health Sudbury and Districts and Conservation Sudbury.
As with past years, Greater Sudbury Police Service makes up the vast majority of external agency budget increases. Last month, police board members unanimously approved a 12.66-per-cent budget hike for 2026. This brings next year’s police operating budget to approximately $94 million, with the service eating up 26 per cent of next year’s municipal levy revenue of $402 million (numbers don’t line up percentage-wise due to total municipal revenue of $859 million in 2026 also coming from such things as provincial grants and user fees).
While the police budget jumped by 12.66 per cent (which requires a 12.2-per-cent municipal levy increase request due to other revenue streams) to bring it to a municipal ask of $93.7 million, Conservation Sudbury’s budget increase was 4.9 per cent (to $1.4 million), the library jump was 4.9 per cent (to $10.6 million) and the public health jump was 5 per cent (to $10 million).
These service partners will present their budgets to city council members on Nov. 12 and 25.
Next year’s tax levy hike was almost even greater than the 5.7 per cent proposed in the draft budget, Karpenko told city council members during Tuesday’s meeting.
“We’ve had some nice news over the last couple of weeks,” she said, citing a jump in provincial funding through the Ontario Municipal Partnership Fund of $3.2 million and an overall benefits cost reduction of $2.7 million.
This, Karpenko said, helped produce a municipal operations budget increase of 0.9 per cent for 2026, which is below the rate of inflation.
The city also cut $500,000 from its projected winter control (snow plowing/clearing) budget. Their policy is to set the city’s winter control budget at the average of their five-year actual expenditures, which they cut by $500,000 to help reduce the tax levy.
By reducing the budget by $500,000, they’re increasing financial risk, since any overexpenditure by the end of the year is drawn from city reserves.
Although money has been pulled from winter control budgets to help lessen the tax burden in past years, Karpenko clarified that this year’s cut does not compound with past years’ cuts, and is strictly a $500,000 cut from the five-year actual expenditure.
During Tuesday’s meeting, Ward 5 Coun. Mike Parent cited recent public survey results as evidence that people are worried about their household finances.
While the survey of 412 residents flagged roads as the city’s most important service, they also cited the cost of living and property taxes as No 1 and No. 3, respectively, in their list of “the most important issues facing the city at present,” bookending infrastructure/transportation at No. 2.
There was a tax levy increase of 4.6 per cent in 2023, followed by 5.9 per cent and 4.8 per cent in subsequent years. With the city starting out with a 5.7 per cent hike in 2026, Parent said tax increases have compounded in recent years to create a significant household expense.
This, he said, is “a bit of a reminder to ourselves that this is a big issue for members of our community," and means city council needs to make sure this year’s tax levy changes are “as least impactful as possible.”
Tyler Clarke covers city hall and political affairs for Sudbury.com.