For most of the last century, the single biggest thing forcing the shape of a small Toronto building was the parking minimum. Every unit needed a space, and every space ate land, floor area, and money. On February 3, 2022, that requirement went away for most new development. If you are building a duplex, triplex, or fourplex in Toronto today, the by-law no longer makes you put in a single parking space. That one change quietly rewrote the multiplex math.
TL;DR
- Toronto City Council removed most minimum parking requirements on December 15, 2021 (item PH29.3); the change took effect February 3, 2022. Source: toronto.ca.
- Since then, a duplex, triplex, or fourplex requires zero parking spaces as-of-right.
- Removing the minimum frees the land and floor area a ramp, drive aisle, or pad would have consumed — so more of the lot goes to living space.
- This is a city-wide rule, not a downtown-only one. It applies in transit-rich Old Toronto and in lower-density wards alike.
- Accessible and bicycle parking rules still apply and were updated February 5, 2025 (effective March 31, 2025).
- This sits on top of Toronto’s city-wide fourplex by-law (up to 4 units, adopted May 2023).
What actually changed in 2022
Before the reform, Toronto’s zoning by-law set a minimum number of parking spaces per dwelling unit. A four-unit building could be forced to provide several spaces, each one a slab of land you could not use for anything else. The Council decision on December 15, 2021 removed most of those minimums across the city. It did not cap parking — you can still build it if you want it — it just stopped requiring it. The full record is on the City’s parking requirements review page.
The City’s own considerations for building multiplexes states it plainly: as of February 3, 2022, duplex, triplex, and fourplex forms require no parking.
Why a parking space costs more than a parking space
A required space is never just the footprint of a car. To make it usable you need a driveway or drive aisle to reach it, turning room, and often a curb cut. On a narrow Old Toronto lot — the deep, skinny lots that back onto laneways — a drive aisle can swallow a quarter of the buildable width. That width is exactly where you would otherwise put a unit, a stair, or a wider main floor.
Toronto’s multiplex envelope already gives builders room. The City’s multiplex considerations page notes that the maximum FSI (“d” value) does not apply to multiplexes, though lot-coverage limits and setbacks still do. Drop the parking requirement on top of that, and the constraint that used to decide your unit count — can I fit the cars? — disappears. Now the question is the one that should have mattered all along: how many good units fit the envelope?
The transit context
Toronto did not remove parking minimums in a vacuum. The lots best suited to fourplex conversions — Leslieville, Riverdale, the Junction, Danforth–Pape, the Annex — sit on the subway and streetcar network. A household near Line 2 or a streetcar route may not own a car at all. Forcing a developer to build a space that the eventual tenant will not use was a pure waste: it raised the cost of the unit and lowered the number of units, with no benefit to the renter.
The province later reinforced the direction. Bill 23, which received Royal Assent on November 28, 2022, barred municipalities from requiring more than one parking space per unit on as-of-right three-unit projects. Source: ero.ontario.ca. Toronto had already gone further by removing the minimum entirely.
The one exception: accessible parking
“No required parking” is not quite “no parking rules.” Accessible-parking and visitor-parking provisions were retained, and the City updated its accessible and bicycle parking rules on February 5, 2025, in force March 31, 2025. If your project type triggers an accessible-space requirement, you still provide it. For a typical small as-of-right multiplex on a building permit, the practical takeaway holds: you are not forced to build general parking. Confirm your specific case against the current zoning by-law before you finalize a layout.
What this means for the pro forma
The arithmetic is simple. Land you do not pave is land you can build on. Floor area you do not give to a drive aisle is floor area you can rent. For a builder running the numbers on a Toronto fourplex, removing the parking minimum does two things at once: it lowers hard cost (no slab, no ramp, no curb cut) and it raises the rentable area on the same lot. That is the rare reform that improves both sides of the ledger.
If you are weighing Toronto against another Ontario market, the parking treatment is one of the lines worth comparing directly — see Toronto vs Ottawa.
For the full picture on Toronto’s multiplex rules, start with the Toronto Multiplex hub.
